As he made abundantly clear in the two-hour premiere of Gangs Of London, Sean Wallace (Joe Cole) is prepared to burn down the city to find his father Finn’s (Colm Meaney) killer. He doesn’t care about the Wallace family’s longstanding relationships with various other criminal enterprises—certainly not while he suspects one of their members of his dad’s murder. And he really doesn’t care about the young men who unwittingly killed one of the most influential men in London’s underworld. Poor Ioan (Darren Evans) already met his grisly fate, courtesy of the giant meat cleaver-wielding man. But Darren Edwards (Aled ap Steffan) is safe, for now. His father Kinney (Mark Lewis Jones), who leads this group of Welsh Travelers, is desperate to make sure Darren stays that way. But their plans and hopes mean nothing to Sean. As we see in this exclusive clip, the Wallace scion wants his revenge.
Just as the Wallace family’s business partners cluck-clucked in last week’s gathering, Kinney tells Sean he’s “bringing too much attention on us all with this bloodshed.” Darren and Ioan thought they’d been hired to kill a serial child abuser; so eager were they to make their own lives away from their fathers, that they sat in wait for who turned out to be Finn Wallace. Then it was too late. But there are clearly other rungs in this ladder, as Kinney tells Sean: “Whoever ordered that hit is more dangerous than the fella who pulled the trigger.” But Sean isn’t to be reasoned with. He’s got the power and the reach to find Darren; even Alex (Paapa Essiedu) tells Kinney he’s got no hope.
Their tense meeting speaks to one of Gangs Of London’s central themes: the equally fraught relationships between father and son. Kinney has no illusions about who Darren is, but he still wants to protect him. Sean’s relationship with Finn is even more complicated, though we haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of it yet. We’ll see how this shakes out in “Episode Three,” which airs Sunday, April 18 at 10 p.m. ET on AMC. But if you have AMC+, you can stream all of season one at any time.
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You didn’t even mention the Big Twist in episode 2! While it is a very good crime drama, you also might want to mention that it’s as bloody and violent as a Tarantino movie just so the squeamish don’t get sick.
Want to watch a really good series about the seedier side of London? Industry. It’s great and gets better, and opens a real window on a real world. Gangs of London, on the other hand, starts self-important and violent and then gets even more so. After a while the action scenes look and feel like a computer game. Before I bailed, after a couple of episodes, I spotted one joke (a nasty joke at that). And there’s no humour! Grim self-important men going around killing each other. Ugh.