The Gentlemen Recap: Fight Night

And just like that, we’re back on track. Not that The Gentlemen took a severe dip in quality in its third and fourth installments, which were good for plenty of fun crime high jinks. It’s just that once you introduce Hitler’s testicle into the equation, things may have gotten a bit too fanciful, even for a show that’s like a Narcos parody set in Downton Abbey.

But with episodes five and six, The Gentlemen comes down to earth, and resumes the breakneck pace of its first two installments. They introduce major new players who look to stay involved for the duration rather than villain-of-the-week types. They feature a startling revelation that completely upends the relationship between Eddie and Susie we’d known. They get surprisingly serious about the human consequences of their telegenic gangsterism. And they remain a ton of fun.

Episode five is a simple problem in search of a solution — and the solution presents itself as a problem, too, at first. Eddie and Susie are running into problems with their distributor on the continent, an arrogant Belgian named Florian de Groot (Kristofer “Tormund Giantsbane” Hivju), who’s demanding more money to deal with tighter import regulations post-Brexit. At least that’s his cover story — he’s working with, or for, the same mystery man as the honeypot operator who stung Jimmy (with whom Jimmy remains secretly in contact). Susie’s lightly incarcerated father, Bobby, is beginning to suspect a hand behind all their recent problems, in fact.

Nearer to home, a group of Irish Travellers led by the gangsterish JP Ward (Laurence O’Fuarain) nicks a pair of generators from the weed farm, but not for nefarious reasons. Their last gennies have been confiscated by the authorities, as is custom for this much-persecuted minority, and they’re just trying to keep their caravans warm for the kids.

Of course, the fact that Eddie and Susie are operating a weed farm with said generators did cross JP’s mind at one point or another. And given his family’s experience smuggling people and things across borders (“That’s just a tired fucking cliché!” complains one of the Wards, though in their case it happens to be true), Susie and the Duke partner with them as the farm’s new distributors. Everybody wins.

Until 4 million pounds go missing, and Eddie can’t restrain his posh prejudices against Travellers. He wrongfully accuses JP, who takes offense and leaves, shutting down distribution once again. But with Susie’s help, cooler heads prevail, and they quickly deduce it’s a frame job by de Groot, using someone as an inside man.

That someone is, unfortunately, Keith (Mason Antonio Fardowe), one of Susie’s two most devoted henchmen, alongside his partner Blanket (Logan Dean). Keith gets the Tessio treatment and is marched into the woods and shot by JP with Eddie as a witness. But before he dies, Keith reveals the truth about Jethro, the poor kid Eddie tried to save after he witnessed the murder in the first episode: Susie had him killed. The Glass family never lets anyone go, he says, a statement backed up by Bobby’s own words elsewhere in the episode.

With their trust shattered (unbeknownst to Susie, that is), episode five sees Eddie taking extreme measures to extricate his family from their business relationship with the Glasses. If this means selling the estate to Stanley Johnston with a T, an even bigger gangster … well, consider it insurance. Eddie’s former flame, Princess Roseanne (Gaïa Weiss), brokers the sit-down.

Eddie and Susie are beginning to find themselves at direct odds, too. In an attempt to stall, Susie says she doesn’t consider Eddie’s end of the deal fulfilled until the extra money they agreed to is not just earned but laundered. Unfortunately, her brother Jack goes and fucks the wife of their bombastic, Korean corn dog-loving money launderer Chucky (Guz Khan), threatening the operation.

Eddie seeks other arrangements on his own, in the form of Henry Collins (Max Beesley), the debonair fight promoter handling Jack’s next match-up. Collins can clean the cash and quickly, though he wants to be the sole launderer for the entire Glass operation, not just the one farm at one time.

Eddie’s frayed nerves take care of the rest. When he shows up to give the money to Chucky after all — the mercurial guy feels bad about making a big deal of the Jack thing and agrees to clean the cash for free to make up for it — the launderer unknowingly reveals that Susie has been lying to Eddie about the speed with which the job can be done. Outraged and sick of hearing about Korean corn dogs to boot, he beats the crap out of Chucky’s henchman and takes the money to Collins.

Which would appear to be a mistake. It’s true that Eddie no longer likes or trusts Susie, a murderer who, in the end, comes out and admits she intends to keep the Halstead family under the Glass boot forever. But I can’t imagine him being that happy to find out that Collins is an out-and-out gangster who fixed Jack’s fight, sending him unprepared into the lion’s den of a real killer just to send his sister and father a message. If they don’t surrender their operation now, in toto, it’s war. Jack is hospitalized, and Eddie and Susie sit and fume.

There are a couple of important developments in the wider Halstead family to note as well. We learn that Eddie’s mom and their groundskeeper, Jeff, once had an affair — you’d been picking up the vibe between them, too, right? — and Eddie and Freddy’s kid sister is secretly the result.

Freddy, meanwhile, has developed some kind of magical marijuana-cocaine hybrid with Jimmy. Addicted to both drugs and the action, he’s frustrated when Eddie refuses to arrange a meeting with the Glasses to discuss the product, doubly so when Eddie continues to insist on getting out of the weed business completely. Freddy goes so far as to corner Susie at the fight and not so subtly hint that she should kill Eddie and leave himself, a more amenable business partner, in charge. Susie may not like Eddie anymore, but to her credit, she likes the idea of a guy willing to murder his own brother even less and tells Freddy so.

Just going through the plot of the two episodes again, I’m struck by the frankly lovely balance between serious business and gangster shenanigans. In the latter category, you have all the new crooks introduced in this pair of episodes: decent but rightfully defensive JP and his powerful home-brewed poitín; garrulous Chucky, who’s so emotional about his work Susie describes him as an artistic type; and the bespectacled Henry Collins, who flips from smooth to sinister with complete believability. You can buy that the Glass family somehow never saw this guy coming until it was too late.

Which leads to the serious stuff. We see Jack’s brutal beating largely through the lambent, teary eyes of Susie. We’re shown the crestfallen reactions of both Eddie and Blanket to the killing of Keith, a guy they knew and liked. Best of all, the cruel and needless murder of Jethro, rather than a throwaway bit of shading for Susie, turns out to be the fulcrum on which the whole thing pivots. I always appreciate when crime shows remember to pay their moral debts.

Because the plot’s been so engrossing and the characters so entertaining, I’ve been giving short shrift to the formal elements of the show, which help it immeasurably. Handwritten text frequently appears atop the action to explain complicated schemes or enumerate competing proposals; in episode five, text reading “incomprehensible Traveller mumbling” and “incomprehensible posh mumbling” during the sitdown between JP and Eddie made me laugh out loud.

Big scene transitions, typically ones that move along a given episode’s caper storyline, are innovatively handled. Rather than one clean cut, perhaps with some overlying dialogue or sound to smooth the switchover, cuts are made back and forth between then and now, past and present, for a minute or so on each side of a given location switch. (Imagine a much more fluid version of what Dennis Hopper tried to do with his scene transitions in Easy Rider, and you’re almost there.) It’s a neat trick, one that really makes you feel the pull of the events unfolding.

Director Eran Creevy and writer Stuart Carolan really killed it on this pair, further cementing The Gentleman’s status as a crime show worthy of the year’s bumper crop of similar series. Let’s hope this season closes just as strongly.