Series premieres, even of very very good shows, often suffer from what I call “pilot-itis.” It’s a tendency to go a bit big and broad in hopes of catching and capturing the audience’s attention. Right from its resumption mid-cliffhanger, with Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow preparing to face off against Sugar Goodson in the boxing ring, A Thousand Blows shakes free of the “newcomers in the big city” clichés that marked its opening act.
With poetry-of-the-gutters dialogue that owes a lot to David Milch’s Deadwood — Sugar even presides over the square from his perch on a balcony, lest you thought writer-creator Steven Knight was trying to hide his influences — this episode follows the fallout of Sugar and Hezekiah’s big fight. It’s a nasty three-round sprint filmed in lurid detail, with little of the back-to-the-camera punch-hiding or fast editing the first episode used to dull the impact of Alec and Treacle’s bout. It goes back and forth, a styles clash pitting Hezekiah’s speed against Sugar’s strength. And Hezekiah comes out on top…or would have, if the ring staff didn’t interfere on Sugar’s behalf, costing Hezekiah the match.
Though he’s denied the big prize, Hezekiah does earn a little money for lasting three rounds. Unfortunately, he also earns the undying enmity of Sugar. I’d pegged this guy to be Hezekiah’s future mentor, but he’s more like his evil doppelgänger. Both men saw their fathers murdered as children, Sugar’s in a street fight, Hezekiah’s in a massacre by British soldiers. Both men came up fighting to survive, with Sugar defending his younger brother Treacle from bullies to boot.
Sugar hates to lose, and knows he was beaten, which is why he calls for a rematch: He can’t stand the blow to his ego, nor his loss of standing in the eyes of the neighborhood, which hails Hezekiah as “the hero of the common man.” But more than that, Sugar hates to lose to a man he recognizes as being just like him. In his mind, even a town as big as London ain’t big enough for the both of them.
“It’s like looking into a mirror,” Sugar snarls at Hezekiah as they negotiate their terms, despite the fact that Hezekiah is a Jamaican a couple decades younger and a solid foot taller. It’s kind of a laugh line, but actor Stephen Graham delivers it with such gravity and conviction, and Malachi Kirby sells it right back, that when Sugar says “There can’t be two of us,” you believe it.
Equally impressive is the dynamic between Sugar and Treacle. Graham and James Nelson-Joyce create a compelling dynamic here: The older brother who looked out for Treacle now needs looking-out for himself, and Treacle struggles in vain to get him to realize it. (He tries to pay Hezekiah to throw the fight, which Hezekiah immediately reports to Sugar in the episode’s funniest moment.) That Sugar plans to kill Hezekiah in the ring is something the boxing titan spells out at every opportunity; that Hezekiah can and will kill Sugar if he has the chance is something only Treacle, not Sugar, noticed in the man’s eyes during that fight. This is going to be a battle to the death no matter who wins.
Unless Mary Carr has something to say about it. The Queen of the Elephants, impressed by Hezekiah’s skills and self-confidence, asks him to join her big plan to rob the Queen of England. Though it’s unclear what his role will be, at least one male member of the crew will pose as part of the visiting Chinese trade delegation to whom Her Majesty will be handing over the loot they plan to lift. The Elephants procure the silk needed for the disguise during a daring broad-daylight smash-and-grab raid of a posh West End retailer, earning the allegiance of a besotted shopgirl, Alice Diamond (Darci Shaw), in the process. (Her bold remark about having a birthmark on her thigh in the shape of a stiletto grabs Mary’s attention for sure.)
The order for the garment is placed with the Elephants’ official tailor, a leftist agitator named Saul Woolfe (Eddie Toll) with whom Mary’s second-in-command, Eliza Moody (Hannah Walters), is secretly in love. Mary disapproves of Woolfe’s politics: “We are ordinary decent criminals,” she reminds the smitten Eliza.
Mary feels no such tenderness toward her own late lover, Sharkey, who gets run down in the street by a carriage while drunk in front of Mr. Lao’s horrified eyes. Mary barely even glimpses at the body before making her pitch to the equally horrified Hezekiah; she dismisses him as not a friend, merely “a cock with complications.”
To Hezekiah, London is little more than a city of cheats. His boxing match was rigged against him. His buddy Alec’s new boss, a eccentric distiller named Jack Mac (Gary Lewis), is selling rotgut passed off as Jamaican rum. You’d think Mary, who was committing larceny by pretending to be pregnant the first time Hezekiah saw her, would fall into this category too, but her no-nonsense disposition — not to mention the obvious chemistry between them — leads him to trust her.
That’s how she can get close enough to him to take his hand in hers…and break his fingers. They’ll heal in time for the robbery, she says, but not in time to throw his life away against Sugar, either by dying in the ring or getting murdered afterwards if he wins.
Mary knows Sugar well, it seems. He shoots her enough meaningful glances during the fight, and is preoccupied enough by her association with Hezekiah, to indicate his feelings are deeper, or darker, than those of a mere business relationship. For her part, Mary is as intent on seeing Sugar leave the deadly world of bareknuckle boxing behind as his brother Treacle is, joining the younger man in advising Sugar to put on boxing gloves and join the swanky, respectable world of championship prizefighting. In response, Sugar takes the gloves she stole for him and hurls them into the same river she and Hezekiah dumped Sharkey’s body into, fed by a literal river of blood flowing down from the slaughterhouse below. It’s a hell of a visual.
There are quite a few of those in this episode. The haunting moments before the massacre in Jamaica are distinguished by the bright, almost washed-out afternoon light of a hot day in the Caribbean and the green vegetation all around, a sight completely absent from the sections of London we’ve visited. The lighting in Hezekiah and Alec’s basement “apartment” is soft and impressionistic. The painterly picture of Mary sitting and waiting in the tunnel mouth, watching the river traffic go by, is one of my favorite shots of the year.
One last thing, and something tells me this is gonna be a love-it-or-hate-it situation, but the music of A Thousand Blows stands out nearly as much as any of its actors or images. Composers Federico Jusid and Adrian Foulkes have created a sort of deranged tarantella as sung by drunken imps as the show’s theme — or maybe the way to describe it is “It’s like an early Danny Elfman score, Scrooged let’s say, if Danny Elfman grew up on a whaling ship.” Its recurrence amps up the anxiety level during the show’s tenser moments; it may drive you a little nuts, but that’s the point.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.