The killer behind the attack on Duke Eddie Horniman’s family was hiding in plain sight all season. Netflix’s The Gentlemen wraps its second season with a finale titled “Head Of The Family,” and the answer to who targeted Bella, Tarquin and the rest of the Halstead Manor family turns out to be Eddie’s own older brother, Freddy Horniman.
The Wrong Suspects
Going into the episode, plenty of names looked guilty. Bobby Glass seemed too obvious to be the real guilty party. Marco Moretti’s helper Angelica had the scheming instincts for it. Moretti himself topped the list of likely suspects, especially given that Bobby had missed a warning about him from the Bannik all the way back in episode one.
None of them did it. Freddy did — and almost got away with it, because nobody was watching him closely enough.
Eddie nearly makes a fatal mistake before he gets there. Acting on bad information forced out of a held man, played by Peter Ferdinando, by Eddie and Geoff attaching a car battery to his bare skin, he prepares to arrive at Bobby’s door in a fury. Susie Glass stops him just in time, meeting him in the fields outside Halstead Manor while Eddie’s armed friend Andy, played by Cassidy Little, keeps her in his sights.
Su-Su Makes Her Case
Before Susie leaves for that meeting, her man Jimmy tells her:
“The Duke will always have time for you, Su-Su, trust.”
He’s right. Eddie gives her the time to explain herself, and she insists, voice breaking, that Bobby did not arrange the attack on his family.
What finally convinces Eddie isn’t emotion. It’s money. He learns that Bobby bought out his hundred million pound debt from Mr. Johnston on the day of Eddie’s wedding — a bet on Eddie’s future that makes no sense if Bobby wanted him dead.
Johnston confirms the theory himself, framing it in his usual terms: the three temptations Christ faced from Satan in the desert. His message to Eddie is that this is the last test standing between him and becoming, in Johnston’s words, the King of Kings.
Sabrina’s Phone Call
With Bobby cleared, Eddie turns to finding who actually did this, filled with brutal fantasies of open warfare in London. Susie warns Bobby to keep his distance from Eddie, calling him too dangerous to rely on, but Bobby insists they need each other.
It’s Sabrina who hands Eddie the answer, without meaning to. She mentions an odd call she got that day from Freddy, phoning from a recovery center, saying he had had a disturbing dream and wanted to make sure everybody was safe. The timing damns him: that call came right after the held man tried to text his employer and got a crude reply, proof the mission had already gone wrong — despite the man’s lie to Eddie and Geoff that he had hit every mark.
The full scheme comes into focus once Eddie starts working out the threads:
- Freddy partnered with Liverpool crime boss John the Gospel, who blames Eddie for his brother’s death.
- The plan was to remove Eddie, give Tarquin, still an infant, away, and make Freddy the sole Duke of Halstead.
- Freddy himself killed John’s brother, a fact no one on screen ever brings up.
The Airport Warehouse
Eddie and Susie move first against John the Gospel, luring him into a meeting with the Peruvian boss Vargas inside an airport warehouse. Vargas owes them for exposing an informer in his own operation, and he repays the debt by helping clear out John’s entire group of men. John himself is taken alive.
Then Eddie goes to see his brother.
He arrives at the recovery center with Susie’s men, who arrive in a black van holding a bound and silenced John the Gospel — and a saw. Eddie beats Freddy badly but stops short of killing him, honoring a promise to their mother. Instead he forces Freddy to do the killing himself, making him cut John apart with the saw. The killing happens unseen, heard rather than watched, which the episode uses to disturbing effect.
When the van door finally opens, Freddy steps out holding John’s severed head. He looks like a man who has lost something he can’t get back.
A New King
The move is the clearest sign yet of who Eddie has become. By sparing Freddy while forcing him into a savage act he was never built for, Eddie plays both judge and forgiving brother at once — exactly the balance Johnston has been describing all along as the mark of his King of Kings. Eddie also makes it plain to Bobby that the hundred million pound debt buys him no authority over Eddie any longer.
For the second straight season, The Gentlemen closes on Eddie at his coldest, a long way from the man once haunted by the fate of the poor clerk. The script, from Guy Ritchie and Matthew Read, and direction by Eran Creevy, had plenty of directions to take the finale — triumph, tragedy, or something harder to make sense of. It picked the crowning of a king who built his throne on his own brother’s ruin.
Source: decider.com
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