Summary
MobLand opens up in Episode 7 by introducing some dangerous international players that make the Harrigans look like small fry. Meanwhile, Tom Hardy’s one-man-army heroics lend a surge of excitement.
Until now, MobLand has been a tale of two families who each possess a relatively even share of London’s criminal underworld, but Episode 7, “The Crossroads”, introduces much bigger fish to that relatively tiny pond. For the first time the Harrigans as a collective are put on the back foot, left begging and pleading for mercy from Richie Stevenson and his international allies, none of whom seem appropriately worried about Conrad and company. It’s only thanks to Harry going off-books and pulling in favours from an even bigger player that the short-term crisis is averted, and even then “averted” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Just ask Brendan – or at least what’s left of him.
Elsewhere, Jan seems determined to get herself killed, Eddie shows a softer side – or maybe he’s just better at being a psycho than we realized – and Maeve finally gets a taste of her own medicine. That latter moment is worth the price of admission on its own. Though again, probably not if you’re a Brendan fan.
I’m kidding – nobody’s a Brendan fan.
It’s unsurprising how satisfying it is to see Maeve end up with some egg on her face. Her secretive call to Richie to organize Seraphina’s assassination backfires immediately in “The Crossroads”, when it becomes clear out of the gate that Richie kidnapped Brendan along with her. As insurance, he claims, but perhaps as a power play most of all. He even hangs up on Maeve when she starts complaining. Fair play.
With this development and several others preceding it – including Harry getting picked up by the police and Archie’s body being discovered – it’s now obvious to everyone that there’s a rat in the Harrigan family. The bad news is that Jan being totally unaware that her new best friend’s a copper makes it look like her. Conrad already has a bee in his bonnet with Jan after she spurned his advances, and she’s increasingly sick of Harry uprooting their lives to dump them on riverboats, but to be fair, she has no idea that she’s fraternizing with the enemy (or how much danger doing so might put her family in.)
Maeve, shrewd as ever, spots an opportunity to gaslight Conrad into suspecting Harry. But even this backfires, because she claims Richie sent her a text telling her he had Seraphina and Brendan, and Conrad asks to see it, which is a development she presumably never considered. Perhaps there was a day when he’d have blindly swallowed anything she said without the need for evidence. But those days are obviously gone.
Harry’s one-man-army heroics are very much the spine of MobLand Episode 7, and it’s a lot of fun to see him off the leash, even if it raises some logical questions about how likely one man is to be able to shut down an international criminal syndicate in a single afternoon (not to mention how many bullets are in the magazine of an average AK-47). But I’m not a stickler for that kind of thing. Tom Hardy ownage is worth its weight in gold.
Geoff Bell in MobLand | Image via Paramount+
Besides, the point of these scenes isn’t strictly to show off how cool and resourceful Harry is, but to expand the MobLand mythology by introducing much bigger fish than the Harrigans. After taking out the Moroccans who were responsible for the raid at the end of the previous episode, Harry learns that Seraphina and Brendan have been handed off to the Mexicans at Richie’s instruction. And the guy in charge of the Mexicans is Lopez, the son of the man who, as discussed in the previous episode, Conrad Harrigan racially abused thirty years prior.
What this means is that the Harrigans have zero pull with the Mexican cartel. In fact, the Mexicans relish the opportunity to get one over on Conrad. This means that Seraphina’s promises to facilitate twice what Richie is paying Lopez, plus five million in cash, plus an apology, fall on deaf ears. Lopez is more interested in making his point by hacking Brendan to bits with a chainsaw on a live-stream, which he does in full view of Richie, Conrad, Maeve, and Kevin.
But Harry to the rescue again. Since he can’t get to the Amsterdam airfield where this is happening in enough time to save the day, he instead makes what we are to assume is some kind of personal sacrifice by finally calling Donnie back. Donnie has a direct line to Kat McAllister, Janet McTeer’s American mob boss who takes the call on a private plane and purrs that Harry now owes her a favour for calling Lopez off before he could take the power tools to Seraphina. Something tells me that the kind of favour she wants won’t do Harry much good.
And Another Thing…
A couple of other details in MobLand Episode 7 that wouldn’t fit into the recap proper:
- Kevin manages to get the location of the care home where that old prison officer is currently residing. Flashbacks once again reiterate that the old geezer was the primary perpetrator in Kevin being sexually assaulted, which nobody else, including Harry, seems to know about. It looks like revenge is due.
- Eddie spends “The Crossroads” with Gina, with whom he’s uncharacteristically honest, open, and even a little charming. But Gina having worked hard on her psychology exam wasn’t for naught after all, since she can see that he’s employing a technique called “mirroring” – in other words, saying what she wants to hear so he can relate to her and get her into bed. Interestingly, it isn’t entirely clear whether he was doing that or just being unusually honest about his feelings, but it doesn’t matter much either way since they end up in bed together anyway.
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