Summary
MobLand changes the rules of the game in Episode 9, suggesting that perhaps Harry has been holding more cards than anyone realized.
The games are very much afoot in MobLand, and it’s beginning to seem like Harry holds many more cards than he has let on. That’s certainly the implication of Episode 9, fittingly titled “Beggars Banquet”, which is where he makes his move, even if it isn’t entirely clear just yet what exactly that move is, who it’s against, and who – beyond him, Jan, and Gina – stands to benefit.
The previous episode, which you’ll recall ended with Richie Stevenson gunning down Fisk and Mukasa and forming a partnership with Colin Tattersall, made it clear that Harry knew who was betraying the Harrigans. Freddie told him right before he took an exceedingly long drop from the roof of a parking garage. Our assumption was that Harry was covering the rat’s tracks so he could fix the situation privately. But maybe, on some level, he was covering his own tracks so he could make his play.
If nothing else, he’s choosing the right time. In case it wasn’t obvious before Richie got back into bed with the police, the Harrigans are done for. Their only link to London’s fentanyl trade was killed in the premiere, Brendan was hacked to bits by the Mexicans in Episode 7, Maeve has been going behind Conrad’s back to pull strings because she believes he has lost it, Conrad knows what she has been up to, and it seems like Eddie is Conrad’s son, not his grandson, meaning he’s likely Kevin’s brother. It’s all quite a mess.
Any efforts to repair that mess are beginning to feel like a waste of time, though it doesn’t help how much sabotage seems to be going on. Maeve and Conrad, it’s becoming clear, can’t resist their worst impulses. Maeve threatens Gina into leaving Eddie alone under threat of eating her eyes if she looks at him, throwing in some unsavoury stuff about Jan for good measure, she lays into Seraphina at the dinner table, and at one point she breaks a bottle and holds the jagged end in Conrad’s direction, ready to settle their differences in blood if needs be. And Conrad, to his credit, can’t keep his mouth shut when he attends a sit-down with Jaime Lopez. His apologies about being terribly racist to his father don’t hold much water when he angrily calls Jaime “poncho” as he leaves.
But you can see why Conrad’s annoyed. Jaime refuses to address him directly and instead directs everything to Harry, setting the cat amongst the pigeons by saying: “No wonder Kat wants you. And no wonder you want to leave.” This sentiment, which is later echoed by Richie, isn’t coming from nowhere, even if it doesn’t seem to be coming from anything that Harry has said outright (at least not in earshot of the audience).
If only Conrad knew what else was going on behind his back. For instance, Bella is determined to facilitate a meeting between her politically-connected father and the sleazy Frenchman Antoine, who it turns out represents some kind of Syrian arms dealer. But this arrangement has been a bust from the start, which is why Harry had to lean on him earlier in the season. As if proving the point that Bella is in way over her head, we see that Antoine is wearing a secret camera in his tie. Bella, however, does not.
Tom Hardy in MobLand | Image via Paramount+
Kevin is also off gallivanting instead of attending dinner, but to be fair to him, his personal revenge crusade is a little less self-serving. Paddy Considine is probably the acting MVP of MobLand Episode 9, since he finally gets the opportunity to face not only the prison guard who repeatedly sexually abused him over the two-year period he spent in Newgate, but also the trauma he has been keeping a lid on ever since. Kevin poses as a taxi driver to take Rusby home from the nursing home to his late sister’s house in Plaistow, confronts him in the kitchen, and listens to Rusby’s claims of not being able to remember much of his time as a gaoler and of apparently having found God. Considine plays the full gamut of emotion here, from steely determination to childlike blubbering vulnerability, exceptionally well. Unsurprisingly, he shoots Rusby in the head.
Ordinarily, this would be the kind of thing that Harry had to clean up, but chances are he’ll have his hands full. The centrepiece of “Beggars Banquet” is the dinner that Conrad suspiciously invited Jan’s “friend” “Alice” to. Alice’s real name is Nicole, which Tattersall knows. He also knows that she twice accepted cash bribes to plant evidence, so she can be strong-armed into attending the dinner she knows is a setup. The idea is for her to plant evidence that implicates Conrad and Maeve in the murders of Fisk and Mukasa. There’s a team of coppers around the corner just waiting to go in.
Nobody seems to have accounted for quite how much dysfunction there is among the Harrigan clan, or indeed how many steps ahead Harry might be. When Nicky takes the opportunity to sneak off to do her evidence-planting thing, Harry confronts her, and she tells him that there’s a tactical unit ready to break through the door in a couple of minutes. Harry makes the surprising move of telling her to leave and saying nothing else to anyone. When the police burst in, he’s nowhere to be seen. As Conrad and Maeve are taken away in cuffs and belt out Twenty Men From Dublin Town, an old Irish revolutionary anthem, he and Gina are watching out of the window.
There are enough clues scattered around – Freddie’s fate, Jaime’s line about Harry wanting out, Kat’s intimations that she and Harry were usurping Conrad – to suggest that Harry has been counting on this moment. For the time being, he’s at the head of the table. But staying there will mean a final power play, getting rid of the Stevensons and anyone else – like the remaining Harrigans – who would stand in his way. The finale can’t come soon enough.
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