‘A Thousand Blows’ Season 2 Review – Erin Doherty Upstages Even Stephen Graham

I’m personally of the opinion that Stephen Graham is the most underrated actor in the world, so the fact that it’s Erin Doherty who stands out in A Thousand Blows Season 2, despite him doing great work of his own in it, is quite a feat. And you’d think at first blush that it was Graham who was more suited to the seedier sides of Victorian London’s East End, but it’s Doherty’s upwardly mobile Cockney pickpocket and gangland queen, Mary Carr, who gives Steven Knight’s bruising action thriller a real centre.

And the show, a Hulu original returning with surprisingly little fanfare after its first run was well received critically and with audiences, is more bruising than ever in this second round. Although perhaps “bruised”, past tense, would be a better word. While the framework remains the same – Jamaican boxer Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby) and dangerous, unstable veteran Sugar Goodson (Graham) sit in the middle of the capital’s fighting scene while criminal factions, including the real-life, all-female Forty Elephants, tussle for dominance in and around it – the events of the first season have upset the dynamics. All the commentary and themes are still there, with much ado about colonialism, racism, gender dynamics, and class, but which side everyone’s on is no longer quite so clear.

Given the first season’s finale, this isn’t exactly surprising, since it found all three of the main characters at their lowest ebb. Hezekiah had killed his latest opponent, New York champion Buster Williams, in the ring. Sugar had beaten his own brother, Edward “Treacle” Goodson (James Nelson-Joyce), half to death. And Mary had ostracised herself from the Elephants by letting her ambition run away unchecked, and from Hezekiah, with whom she had a burgeoning romantic connection, by concealing what she knew about his best friend Alec’s death.

Season 2 of A Thousand Blows picks up in the wake of this. Sugar, wracked with guilt and worthlessness, is now a drunk, having to be scraped off the cobbles by Hezekiah, of all people, who is being forced to fight in unlicensed barge bouts in front of crowds who berate him for being a savage and try to mug him when he wins. Mary, perhaps worst of all, is being forced to do the bidding of Indigo Jeremy (Robert Glenister), who keeps her and her mother Jane (Susan Lynch) in check with endless threats and, at least in Mary’s case, greasy sexual overtures. Whereas once these characters were all the kings and queens of their respective turf, squaring off against each other, here they’re all down-and-outs united by their shared ruin.

This makes the opening of this follow-up season much better than in Season 1, which had a lot of exposition to be doling out. Here, everyone’s already on the same page, more or less, united against a common enemy who might just as easily be the Jeremy clan as London itself, which seemed content to let all of them slip through its cracks. There’s a redemptive quality to everything, with Sugar trying to get sober and atone for what he did to Treacle, Mary trying to get back into the good graces of the Elephants and secure control of the underworld with the help of a charismatic American mesmerist, and Hezekiah searching for purpose. Revenge isn’t really working out for him, so he redirects his energy into reluctantly training a member of the British aristocracy before thinking once again about his own boxing career.

Looming over all this is a pang of sadness and trauma and irreversible damage, which manifests in multiple ways, from Treacle’s altered demeanour in light of his head injuries, to Mary’s relationship with her mother. Sugar’s alcoholism is treated with appropriate seriousness, not just a peccadillo he easily “gets over” to symbolise his redemption, and Hezekiah’s internal turmoil and inability to feel any sense of belonging are deeply felt. His rage over what happened to him and his family in Jamaica, and the cavalier disrespect with which he’s treated in London, is one of the ways in which this show is about something much more than burly men punching each other in the face.

There is, admittedly, still a fair bit of that. A Thousand Blows is still very much an action-thriller first and foremost, and since our leading trio have annoyed a fair few people at all levels of East End society, there’s a lot of fighting to be done, plenty of it literal. But the stakes aren’t as clear, which is not as much of a criticism as it might seem. The objectives have simply shifted now; they’re more complex, more personal, more interior, more befitting characters who have had a season of development and find themselves at a crossroads. Season 2 is darker, but also more thoughtful, arguably more interesting, and well worth a return to the cobbles to check out what’s what.