Deciphering the Ending of ‘MobLand’: Harry’s Fate Revealed and Gang War Outcome Discussed

MobLand went out with a bang. Several bangs, actually. And a slssshh, or whatever sound a knife makes when it’s plunged into Tom Hardy’s chest. 

(It should be noted that the following assumes you have watched the Season 1 finale of MobLand. If you haven’t, it’s best to avoid further reading to prevent spoilers.)

The conclusion of MobLand‘s dynamic inaugural season is filled with notable occurrences. It marks the resolution of the Harrigan-Stevenson gang conflict, the demise of a significant villain, the emergence of a fresh antagonist, the ascent of a new leader, and the unfortunate event where Tom Hardy’s character, Harry Da Souza, a mob troubleshooter, unintentionally receives a stab wound to the chest by his wife, Jan (portrayed by Joanne Froggatt), during a heated exchange. Harry’s enigmatic grin following the stabbing serves as the season finale’s cliffhanger moment.

Is this a smile from a man facing his demise? What lies ahead for the Harrigan family, including their chief figures, the Irish gangster Conrad Harrigan (played by Paddy Considine) and his wife Maeve (enacted by Helen Mirren), the power source behind the throne? How is the familial hierarchy structured? Here is an overview of the post-season finale standing of the characters as MobLand potentially paves the way for a Season 2.

A lot! Let’s take it character by character, Harrigan by bloody Harrigan, shall we?

To quote Jerry Seinfeld doing the kind of cockney accent you might hear on this very show, not bloody likely! But it’s technically an open question, one that depends on how you read that smile. Is that the grin of a man who knows his time is up, or who’s happy his wife missed all his vital organs? If I were a betting man, my money would be on Tom Hardy’s character staying alive for the foreseeable future on a show this popular.

His buddies the Harrigans had better hope he lives, too: Harry’s their best and most loyal soldier. He wins their war agains the Stevensons almost single-handedly.

Working with his close friend Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine), Harry shakes down the rat within the Harrigan organization: O’Hara (Lisa Dwan), the family attorney. But he leaves her alive, which sends her scurrying back to her paymaster, enemy mob boss Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell). 

Correctly guessing that O’Hara’s attempt to get back in the family’s good graces is a ruse, Harry and Kev arrange traps for virtually all of Harrigan’s men, leaving bodies behind in both London and the countryside. Left largely unguarded, Richie and O’Hara are easy prey for Kev and Harry, who kills them both himself, ending the war.

Yeah, that about does it for the Harrigans’ public enemy number one.

He gets in arguments with two formidable blonde women that look to have major repercussions in his life moving forward. First, he rejects an offer by the mysterious American power player, Kat MacAllister (Janet McTeer), to help her destroy the Harrigans and take over London’s underworld, even though he owes her big time. She’s pissed.

Getting to that! Harry also has it out with his increasingly estranged wife, Jan. Well, really, she has it out with him, while he stands there with that Tom Hardy look on his face. Jan is understandably tired of being married to a man who kills people for a living, on behalf of a family he’s more loyal to than he is to her, forcing her and their daughter, Gina (Teddie Allen), to spend the bulk of the season fleeing for their lives. When Jan lashes out with her arms, she doesn’t realize she’s still holding the cutting knife she was using to prepare dinner, and the blade sinks into Harry’s chest, setting up the season’s open ending. 

Kev’s the Harrigan who’s on the throne when the smoke clears. Declaring himself the new king, he demands loyalty from his wife, Bella (Laura Pulver), who’s long had a twisted romantic relationship with his father. (It’s been heavily implied she had an affair with Harry as well, though Kevin doesn’t know about that one. I’m sure not gonna tell him!)

But Kev and Bella reconcile after divulging the dark secrets of their sexual abuse as children. Kev was raped by a prison guard he tracked down and killed the episode before. Bella’s abuser was her father, an aristocrat and politician she just took down with a successful sting operation. (This is the big scheme she’s been working on all season, to Harry’s chagrin.)

The smartest Harrigan, as well as the coolest under pressure, Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon) has weathered witnessing the chainsaw massacre of her half-brother Brendan (Daniel Betts) to emerge as a major player in the family. Her one problem: Maeve hates her guts.

You mean his half-brother.

Yes! Though he was raised as Kev’s son, Eddie (Anson Boon), the obnoxious young creep whose murder of one of the Stevensons triggered the whole mess, now knows he’s the biological son of Conrad, a result of his relationship with Bella. (It’s all very Freudian.) Delusions of grandeur are what Eddie’s all about, and he clearly looks at himself as leadership material. 

Well, we’ve got Maeve to thank for Eddie, the family’s problem child. According to both Kev and Bella, Maeve getting her hooks in the kid is what turned him into a monster. (There have been hints throughout the season, all but confirmed by Bella, that Maeve has sexually abused Eddie.) She spends the episode behind bars for a crime she didn’t commit, and she’s probably not going to like being left in the clink while her son claims her husband’s crown. Of course, she’s been making most of the family’s real moves all season long.

He’s in jail too, but not for long. Harry and Kev (eventually) turn over a recording that proves he and Maeve were framed, leading to his release in front of a cheering audience of his fellow inmates. But Kev has already told him in no uncertain terms that he ain’t running the show no more. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who’ll take that lying down.

Played by the great Toby Jones, Tattersall is the season’s big chaos agent other than Maeve. He’s a retired cop so hardcore in his pursuit of gangsters like the Harrigans that he’s basically become a gangster himself, from forming an alliance with Richie Stevenson to having his own undercover agent, Alice (Emily Barber), executed to cover his tracks. But he backed the wrong horse in the big war, and now he’s back at square one. I’m hoping that if there’s a Season 2, he’s as much of a big bad as McTeer’s ugly American, Kat MacAllister.

On the surface, MobLand is a rollicking British gangster thriller, featuring stylish and attractive people doing terrible things in fun and bloody ways. Beneath the surface, that’s mostly what it is as well. But the final episode reveals some real hidden depths. 

We’ve been looking at the Harrigans as a Godfather-style family power struggle, and that’s certainly part of their dynamic. But all along, they’ve also been a demonstration of the cycle of violence and abuse, with Kev, Bella, and Eddie all victimized by parents or authority figures. No wonder they’re all such messes, even if the result is mostly good dirty fun to watch. 

And no wonder Jan wants out. She’s seen enough of what life is like for the Harrigans to never want anything like that for her daughter, Gina — though that’s going to be tough, now that she’s in a relationship with Eddie. Harry’s refusal to see that he’s not just a regular hard-working dad, that his countless crimes always follow him home one way or another, is ultimately what gets him accidentally stabbed.

Alternately: The meaning of MobLand is that it’s fun to watch Tom Hardy play a gangster. 

So far there’s been no official word from Paramount+ about the future of the show. But by the meager metrics available to determine how well a streaming show is doing, the gangster drama is doing gangbusters numbers. I’m no Harry Da Souza, but my keen and street-smart mind tells me we’ll be seeing much more of the Harrigans in the future.