TL;DR: MobLand wraps its first season with a vengeance-fueled, emotionally raw finale that proves this show was never really about the guns or the gangsters—it was about the generations of rot that create them. Between Paddy Considine’s quietly brilliant performance, Helen Mirren’s villainous matriarchal turn, and Tom Hardy’s simmering menace, “The Beast in Me” delivers a brutal family reckoning.

This Ain’t Ritchie’s Playground Anymore

Look, if you’re tuning into MobLand expecting Guy Ritchie’s brand of cheeky gangsters and pub brawls with ironic needle drops, you’re barking up the wrong East End alley. What MobLand ultimately becomes by its finale is something more dangerous, more intimate, and frankly, more perverse. Ronan Bennett, channeling the ghost of Top Boy and the family trauma of a Tennessee Williams play with guns, transforms what could’ve been a British gangster pastiche into an operatic character study in blood and betrayal.

“The Beast in Me” is where it all detonates. And trust me, it’s less a shootout and more a controlled demolition of every Harrigan family myth we’ve swallowed up to now.

Kevin Harrigan: From Punchline to Protagonist

For most of MobLand‘s first season, Kevin (played with a heartbreaking restraint by Paddy Considine) has been the guy everyone ignored. A middle-aged man haunted by the trauma of prison, dismissed by his domineering mother, and emotionally pistol-whipped by his mythic gangster father. He seemed like background noise in a world too loud for him.

But this episode? Kevin walks out of it the quiet center of a hurricane. The scene where he confronts Conrad, played by a suddenly terrifying Pierce Brosnan, through prison glass, is easily one of the most harrowing father-son reckonings TV has seen in years. You feel every ounce of Kevin’s pain, every cracked piece of a man trying to rebuild himself with jagged glass.

And when the moment comes—when Kevin tells his abuser father, “I’m done pretending I respect you”?

Yeah. That’s not just closure. That’s war

Mirren’s Maeve: Motherhood as Psychological Warfare

Let me be clear: Helen Mirren deserves an Emmy nomination just for the way she tilts her head while manipulating Eddie through the prison glass. Maeve Harrigan is less a woman than a black hole in designer shawls. She’s manipulative, poisonous, and worse—she’s good at it. Her scenes with Anson Boon’s Eddie are terrifying in their intimacy. She doesn’t just pull strings; she rewires the puppet.

And when she reveals Eddie’s true parentage, twisting the knife with grandmotherly love? That’s some Shakespearean-level family annihilation. Maeve doesn’t just create monsters; she grooms them. Her prison cell might as well be a throne.

Tom Hardy, Janet McTeer, and the Battle of the Beasts

Harry Da Souza has been the muscle, the quiet blade, the conflicted knight in this blood-drenched court. Tom Hardy, working with less dialogue than anyone else, acts with his body, his silences, his stare. When he finally decides to push back against Kat McAllister (Janet McTeer, who is having an absolute blast chewing through her scenes), you can feel the tectonic plates shift.

Their confrontation is less a negotiation and more a spiritual divorce. And you know what? Kat deserves her own damn spinoff. Imagine a transatlantic gangster noir with her as the anti-hero. Yes, please.

A Blood-Drenched Catharsis

What MobLand gets so right in its finale is that it refuses to end with a bang just for spectacle. Sure, there’s violence—brutal, efficient, and earned—but the real devastation is emotional. Kevin gets his moment, but at a cost. Eddie is forged into something unrecognizable. Harry is left bleeding both literally and metaphorically. And Maeve? She’s still pulling the strings, somehow.

“The Beast in Me” isn’t just a title. It’s a thesis. It suggests that the true legacy of crime isn’t money or territory—it’s the monsters we make to survive it.

Final Verdict:

MobLand‘s Season 1 finale is a brutal ballet of betrayal and bloodlines, proving it has ambitions beyond its genre. It occasionally overreaches, and not every subplot lands with equal impact, but when it’s good, it’s soul-piercing. A family drama wrapped in a gangster epic, topped with the performances of career-best actors. This beast has bite.