The conversation that takes place in the cold open of MobLand’s season finale is the most important in the show’s history, even if one of the two participants is a dead man. It falls to Paddy Considine, as Kevin Harrigan, to make it work — a Shakespearean soliloquy in the form of a one-sided dialogue with the rapist prison guard he murdered last episode, whose corpse is by now cold and gray. Near tears the entire time, especially when he says he “didn’t really have much left in the way of pride” after leaving prison, Kev explains how he fell into a sad life, raising his own half-brother as his son with a woman he knew to be involved with his father. 

Raising Eddie as his own despite his misgivings, he nonetheless failed to keep him from the clutches of his own mother, Maeve, who ruined the kid. A woman who “makes monsters” for her own protection, Kev “explains” to his victim, Maeve is about to learn that her overlooked son Kevin is the biggest monster of all. Does this mean he’s going to take down the family, or take it over? The remainder of this fine finale depends on the answer to this question, raised by Considine’s commandingly ambiguous performance. 

And when the shooting’s over, the smoke has cleared, and Kevin Harrigan is standing on top of the heap, with Harry Da Souza by his side, and both their rat lawyer O’Hara and their arch-enemy Richie Stevenson in the ground below them? Kev has a heart-to-heart with his wife, Bella. By now we’ve learned that her big season-long scheme involving her dad wasn’t corruption but its opposite — a sting, set up with her help as payback for a childhood full of sexual assault and abuse. Bella strongly implies that despite their best efforts as survivors themselves, though at the time neither had come to terms with this, they were unable to protect “their” son Eddie from suffering similar abuse at Maeve’s hands when he was 12 or 13. 

Just like that, a rock’em sock’em saga of generational gang warfare amid rival families turns into a grim, bloody, but thoughtful and movingly acted portrayal of the cycle of abuse, which exists in the homes of both gangsters and peers of the realm. I did not see this coming for one minute, but man is it deftly done.

Ditto the denouement for Harry. In many ways this episode is his apotheosis: At Kevin’s side, he outfoxes everyone and comes out on top, wiping out Stevenson and all his soldiers in one fell swoop, firing the killshots on Richie and O’Hara himself. He also tells the allegedly fearsome Kat MacAllister where to stick it when she threatens his family if she refuses to help her take down the Harrigans herself, as Tom Hardy deadpans his way through laser-precise twists and turns of dialogue by writers Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth. 

But his wife Jan has his number. After spending several weeks basically doing nothing but being evacuated from one place to another, most recently a place that blew up and left a carpet of dead bodies behind, her husband comes home, tells her he’s just killed the guy who was after them so now everything’s okay, and she’s supposed to go back to playing house? “And you just stand there with that fucking look on your face?!” she screams — and for real, he’s got that fucking look on his face, that Tom Hardy “I’m very tough and very wise but also very confused” special. Accidentally stabbing him in the chest with a cutting knife can’t do the kind of damage that last bit did if you ask me, though I suppose only the stabbing makes sense for a cliffhanger ending. 

The second season this episode tees up has a great deal of potential. Both the editing of the episode and Kat’s direct words indicate that Seraphina, acclaimed by all who meet her as an absolute rock, has her eyes on Kevin’s seat at the big desk. So does Eddie, who now knows his true parentage thanks to Maeve and has already choked Bella for her role in covering it up. And so does Conrad, who leaves jail (eventually — they’ve got a recording proving he was framed for murders he, for once, didn’t commit) to the roaring acclaim of his fellow inmates and has no intention of retiring quietly to the Cotswolds. I can see plenty of MobLand shenanigans emerging from this arrangement, even before we factor in rival actors like Kat or her Mexican ally Jaime. 

There’s also an instructive political lesson to be learned from this episode if you know where to look. The traitorous attorney, O’Hara, banks on Richie Stevenson’s triumph, betting her life on it. It’s a bad bet, because as Harry points out, she’s not as smart as she thought she was, and you never know what the future holds. Sometimes it’s better not to sell your soul to the devil for short-term gains, because you usually wind up with neither your soul nor the gains. Anyway it’s funny this is airing on Paramout+, eh, Shari?

But in terms of it success as a show, MobLand pulls off the most important caper of all: It gets deeper as it goes. There’s no way I expected this show to be such a sharp interrogator of Tom Hardy’s charms as an actor, or such an empathetic (if still inarguably gangster) look at how abuse can affect the course of people’s life and feeds into/emerges from other forms of violence, state-directed and otherwise. I honestly thought it’d be Tom Hardy mixing it up with callow young London ganglords and maybe shagging some birds, I dunno. Instead it proved it had a brain without ever losing its balls. 

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.