TL;DR: Richie is dead, Maeve and Conrad are jailed, Eddie is roaming free, Kat has beef with Harry, Tattersall is terrifying, and Jan accidentally stabbed her husband. Basically, MobLand season 1 ended by throwing every grenade it owned into season 2 and pulling all the pins.

Trying to remember everything that happened in MobLand season 1 is a bit like reconstructing a pub fight from security footage. Somebody definitely started it, several people made everything worse, Tom Hardy spent most of the night cleaning it up, and by closing time there was blood absolutely everywhere.

That’s probably the easiest way to prepare for season 2.

Guy Ritchie’s gangster series introduced us to the Harrigans, a criminal family headed by Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and Maeve (Helen Mirren), two people who could make Sunday lunch feel like a hostile takeover. Their fixer Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy) spends most of his existence preventing the family’s terrible decisions from becoming terminal ones. Sometimes he succeeds. Sometimes somebody gets murdered. Frequently both things happen before dinner.

So rather than replaying all ten episodes like we’re filing evidence for Scotland Yard, here’s what actually matters going into MobLand season 2.

Eddie Harrigan basically presses the big red button

Every crime family needs that one relative nobody should allow near important decisions. The Harrigans have Eddie.

Eddie (Anson Boon) murders Tommy Stevenson, son of rival gangster Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell), and transforms criminal tension into a proper gang war. It’s the kind of decision that makes you wonder whether the Harrigans have ever considered implementing parental controls.

The Stevenson family understandably wants blood. The Harrigans aren’t exactly famous for conflict resolution. Harry gets stuck in the middle trying to keep the empire standing while everyone else appears determined to speedrun mutually assured destruction.

Eventually Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine) kills Richie, bringing the war to an end in the most MobLand way imaginable: not with peace, but with one side running out of boss.

The victory comes with a painful price for Harry. Kiko, one of his trusted men, is killed during the conflict. Harry spends much of season 1 behaving like the only person who has actually read the instruction manual for organised crime, but Kiko’s death proves even he can’t plan around every bullet.

Harry can clean up messes.

He can’t make people bulletproof.

Maeve Harrigan could probably run a criminal empire from the Moon

By the end of the season, Conrad and Maeve Harrigan are in prison.

Problem solved!

Except this is Conrad and Maeve we’re talking about, so obviously not.

Conrad doesn’t exactly appear crushed by incarceration, while Maeve continues doing what Maeve does best: plotting. Prison might restrict her movement, but expecting it to stop her scheming feels like expecting Darth Sidious to abandon galactic domination because somebody confiscated his lightsaber.

Helen Mirren makes Maeve particularly dangerous because she doesn’t need to shout to dominate a situation. There is always the sense that she’s already thinking three moves beyond everyone else, even when those moves involve sacrificing people supposedly closest to her.

Season 1 makes that ruthlessness painfully obvious. Her eldest son Brendan dies brutally, yet Maeve’s response reinforces just how differently she processes family and power. In the Harrigan household, blood may be thicker than water, but apparently ambition is thicker than both.

Putting Maeve behind bars doesn’t remove her from the board.

It just gives her more time to think.

Which might actually be worse.

The Harrigan family tree needs an exorcist

Then we have one of the season’s messiest revelations: Eddie isn’t Kevin’s biological son.

Conrad is his father.

Yes. Conrad.

Eddie’s supposed grandfather.

Somewhere, a family-tree website just crashed.

It’s exactly the kind of grotesque secret that suits MobLand, where family loyalty usually comes with several asterisks and occasionally a body bag. It also changes the dynamics surrounding Eddie, who was already the human equivalent of leaving a flamethrower next to an open petrol can.

And somehow his season gets worse.

Eddie nearly strangles his mother Bella (Lara Pulver) to death before eventually being released back into society. That means season 2 begins with one of the show’s most unpredictable characters wandering around without the Stevenson war occupying everybody’s attention.

There are Marvel villains with better impulse control than this man.

The worrying thing isn’t simply what Eddie might do next. It’s who will have to deal with the consequences when he inevitably does it.

We all know the answer.

Poor Harry.

Harry defeats one enemy and accidentally unlocks three more

Harry and Kevin successfully eliminate the Stevenson threat, which should theoretically make their lives easier.

That’s adorable.

Harry now has Kat McAllister (Janet McTeer) to worry about. He previously asked Kat for help against Richie, and she delivered. Then Kat offered Harry another deal: join her and help destroy the Harrigans.

Harry declined.

In normal life, turning down a business proposal might earn you an awkward LinkedIn message. In MobLand, it potentially earns you a new mortal enemy.

Kat is dangerous precisely because she isn’t another Richie Stevenson. Season 2 doesn’t need to simply repeat the gang-war formula with different names attached. Kat represents another type of threat to Harry because she understands what he is capable of and actively wanted him on her side.

Harry effectively told a very powerful person, “Thanks, but I’ll stick with the homicidal family I currently work for.”

There is absolutely no way that’s coming back to haunt him.

None whatsoever.

Toby Jones is quietly terrifying, because apparently MobLand needed another psychopath

As if the Harrigans, Eddie and Kat weren’t enough, there’s also Colin Tattersall.

Toby Jones brings an entirely different flavour of menace to the series. Tattersall has influence reaching into both the criminal world and law enforcement, making him considerably harder to deal with than somebody whose entire strategy is simply “send more gangsters.”

Then the finale shows exactly what kind of man we’re dealing with when Tattersall kills the innocent Alice Barnes.

That’s what makes him such an interesting wildcard going into season 2. Harry understands traditional criminals. He knows their rules, their weaknesses and usually what they want.

Someone capable of operating across supposedly opposing institutions is a much nastier puzzle.

Harry is excellent at chess.

Unfortunately, half the people around him appear to be playing Mortal Kombat.

Kevin finally has power, and that definitely won’t cause family drama

With Richie dead and Conrad and Maeve imprisoned, Kevin suddenly has considerably more breathing room within the Harrigan organisation.

That might be good.

It might also be catastrophic.

Kevin spent season 1 living beneath enormously powerful personalities, particularly his parents. Removing them from immediate control creates an opportunity for him to become something more than another piece in the Harrigan machine.

But power inside this family never arrives without complications.

Conrad and Maeve aren’t gone. Eddie remains a liability. Harry has enemies accumulating like side quests. And the Harrigan organisation has just survived a war that undoubtedly changed who trusts whom.

Season 2 therefore has a juicy question waiting underneath all the gangster fireworks: what happens when the children finally get access to the controls?

Judging by this family?

Probably nothing OSHA-approved.

And then Harry goes home and gets stabbed by his wife

Harry survives gangsters, murders, betrayals and the general experience of working for the Harrigans.

Then he goes home.

Rookie mistake.

His relationship with Jan (Joanne Froggatt) has been deteriorating under the weight of Harry’s criminal life, and things finally become spectacularly messy in the season 1 finale. During an argument, Jan pushes Harry while holding a knife.

She accidentally stabs him in the chest.

Imagine surviving a gang war only to get taken out by an argument with your wife.

It’s darkly funny in exactly the way MobLand can be, but underneath the absurdity is one of season 2’s most important emotional threads. Harry spends his professional life containing violence, yet that violence has infected his home anyway.

His real problem isn’t the knife.

It’s that Harry’s two worlds are no longer separate.

The fixer who can solve practically everybody else’s problems suddenly has one he can’t dispose of in the boot of a car.

Verdict

The important thing to remember before MobLand season 2 is that nobody really won season 1.

The Harrigans defeated the Stevensons, sure, but look at the scoreboard. Conrad and Maeve are imprisoned. Eddie is free and increasingly dangerous. Kevin suddenly has more power. Kat has a reason to come after Harry. Tattersall is still lurking around. Harry has lost Kiko, accumulated new enemies and ended the season with his wife accidentally putting a knife into his chest.

That’s not victory.

That’s surviving the tutorial.

And that’s why season 2 has such a fun setup. MobLand no longer needs the Stevensons to keep things moving because the Harrigans themselves contain enough combustible material to power several seasons. Add Kat and Tattersall to the equation and Harry is essentially walking into a boss fight with three health bars and a broken controller.

The character I’m most interested in remains Harry. Tom Hardy’s permanently exhausted fixer is surrounded by people who create disasters while treating him like the human “undo” button. Season 1 gradually proves that even Harry has limits, and season 2 has plenty of opportunities to push him beyond them.

If you remember nothing else before pressing play, remember this: Richie Stevenson is dead, the Harrigans are fractured, Maeve is still plotting, Eddie should absolutely not be left unsupervised, and Harry really needs better health insurance.

Welcome back to MobLand.