MobLand Finale Recap: The Harrigan Rat, Revealed! Plus: Grade The Episode
MobLand started its inaugural season with a question: Who's ratting on the Harrigans? And it closes Season 1 by answering that question — as well as another, more insidious one — in an episode that neatly sets up a potential Season 2.
Who lives? Who dies? Who grabs power? Who winds up with a kitchen knife in the chest? Read on for the highlights of the finale.
THE TRUTH ABOUT EDDIE | When the episode opens, Kevin is talking to Rusby as though the older man is still alive and not dead with his blood spattered all over the kitchen. Kev bares his soul in a way that makes me worried for him — well, more worried for him — as he talks about exactly how messed up the Harrigan family is.
"My son is my brother. My wife is my dad's sloppy seconds," he says matter-of-factly. "So yeah, I knew about Bella. But Eddie, no one told me. To be fair, I didn't want to know. But you know what? I knew that as well. I could feel it. You just can." He explains that he tried to be normal after he got out of jail, but that he was unable to protect Eddie from Maeve. "She worked on him, just like she worked on me," he says, blaming his mother and her actions for the family dynamic. "She makes monsters to protect her," he explains, and he's the biggest monster "because in this world, my world, only the biggest monster survives."
Soon after, Harry shows up with a two-man clean-up crew to do what he does best: make the problem go away.
HARRIGANS BEHIND BARS | While Maeve and Conrad are fingerprinted and have their mugshots taken (God, Maeve is a monster herself, but I love her defiant face when the flash goes off), the non-arrested Harrigans, Gina and Jan are taken to another location while Harry meets with O'Hara. She knows why he's there before he even starts questioning her, because she's the rat in the Harrigan organization.
"I give Richie information," she admits. Harry calmly questions her about whether she has Richie's trust (she does) and whether she told him about Archie and/or Antwerp (she didn't). Then he lets her go, which shocks her.
Not long after, Kevin goes to the prison to tell Conrad what he's learned: "Archie wasn't a rat. O'Hara was." Then, in coded terms, he tells his father that he killed "someone who hurt me" but then realized "I was in the wrong room, with the wrong man." Kev starts to get teary as he wonders who made Conrad and Maeve the way they are. "I know who f—ked me up, because I'm looking at him," Kev says. Conrad yells at him for "whinging and whining about your past life." Kevin counters by telling his father that Eddie is his problem (if he ever gets out) and that all the Harrigan name "is going to mean something again. I'm going to see to that." Conrad wraps the conversation by being incredibly disgusting about Bella's nether regions. "When you walk out of here, you're walking into a different world. My world," Kevin warns. "And in that world, Conrad, people pay for everything. Everything."
MAEVE'S PLAN CONTINUES | Maeve summons Eddie to the prison via burner phone. While he's gone, Gina and Bella talk about how Eddie used to be happy and relatively normal, but something happened when he was 12 or 13: "Maeve." Now, she doesn't think there's any hope for him.
At the prison, Maeve tells her grandson that Harry and Seraphina are staging a coup, so he's got to kill them both to establish a new world order in which "you are the king, and I am the queen." To Eddie's credit, he clearly thinks she's insane. Then she drops the truth of his parentage on him.
Back at the safehouse, Eddie immediately confronts Bella with what he's learned. She hugs him and apologizes, telling him, "You're my boy, and I love you." While they're embracing, he uses the proximity to try to choke her to death. Only the serendipitous arrival of Kiko, who pulls Eddie off his mother, saves her life.
THE FINAL SHOWDOWN | Tattersall pays Nicola for her work, nabbing the Harrigan DNA used to frame Conrad and Maeve, but then notes that even just the two of them knowing about the fraud is "one too many." As he gets out of the car, another man chloroforms Nicola and then drives away with her, while Tattersall calls Richie and lets him know the job is done.
Harry asks O'Hara to do what he says. Next we know, she's meeting with Richie to let him know that Harry is onto her and that he wants her to set up a meeting with Richie at her office. So she does... but she says exactly the same thing to him that she says to Richie, so who even knows to whom she's telling the truth? Then she lets him know about the safe house where the Harrigans are hiding out.
Some of Richie's men lay in wait at O'Hara's office, while others storm the safehouse... to find it empty. At the same moment, Paul presses the button on a remote and detonates a bomb in O'Hara's office, killing his men there. At the pub, Richie is confused and irate. "You asked me who was smarter, you or Harry," O'Hara says. "I lied." A grenade at the safehouse takes out the Stevenson thugs there, though one gets off a shot that kills Kiko before Zosia finishes the man off.
Harry and Kevin arrive at the pub, make short work of Richie's guards, then bust into the back office where he and O'Hara are. Richie tries to use the lawyer as a human shield, but Kevin and Harry shoot her and then shoot the old man. "The Harrigans say hello," Kevin announces before firing the fatal bullet into Richie's eyeball. O'Hara is gasping on the floor; Harry shoots her again, killing her.
Maeve gets a text announcing "The war is won," then she calls Conrad. "What if it was a test?" she posits as they chat on their burners. She posits that the whole time, she's been testing everyone to see who has the "juice" to be worthy of the Harrigan name. "And that, Conrad, is why you love me." He agrees that he does. "Good," she says. "Now that's sorted, how the f—k do we get out of here?"
Turns out, Harry and Kevin have a recording of Nicola admitting the evidence tampering, which should be enough to get Conrad and Maeve out of the slammer.
WHAT'S NEXT? | Kat makes contact with Seraphina, tells her she'd like to meet to talk about the future. "Yeah, I'd like that," Seraphina says. Kat later meets with Harry and pretends not to remember Seraphina's name — interesting — before making him another job offer: "I need to know what is the quickest and most efficient way of taking them all out and scooping up the marbles, and nobody knows how to do that better than you." He politely declines. She makes it clear that she's going to take the family out, and if he doesn't help her, "you become my enemy. So make a call." He cites his friendship with Kevin and turns her down again. She then subtly threatens Jan and Gina, which makes him mad: Without saying as much, he tells her to go eff herself. "Big mistake," she says. "We will see," he replies on his way out.
Kevin confronts Bella about how, when Maeve and Conrad get out, it's going to be a new world — and is she with him or what? She says that she knows what happened to him as a teen, because she's pieced it together from what he says when he's asleep. And, as it turns out, they have that terrible experience in common. "My father raped me for years," she says, the share confidence seeming to bond them. "I'm with you," she promises.
Harry finds Jan to let her know they can go home again, but she's not having it. She's chopping carrots in the Harrigans' kitchen as her anger grows, and when she cuts herself and Harry tries to help, she lashes out at him... not realizing that the knife is still in her hand. It lands in his chest. "Well, now you have my complete attention," he says, the blade protruding from his pec.
As the hour ends, we watch Conrad revel in the celebrity he's apparently amassed in prison.
Now it's your turn. Grade the episode and the season as a whole via the poll below, then hit the comments with your thoughts!