By the end of The Gentlemen Season 2, Eddie Horniman (Theo James) has been shot at, beaten almost to death, double-crossed, buried alive, widowed immediately after his wedding, and pushed into a murderous quest for vengeance. And, due to several unexpected twists, it’s his older brother, Freddy (Daniel Ings), who ends the season holding a severed head.
It’s been quite a journey for a gentleman who, a year earlier, just wanted criminals to get off his family estate.
Season 2 begins with Eddie scaling up his empire alongside Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) and using his inherited title to climb the British establishment. But, as lead writer and executive producer Matthew Read puts it, Eddie’s ambition raises an increasingly pressing and disturbing question: “Does he want too much? Will he lose his soul in his quest to ascend and become stronger?”
By the end of Season 2, that question is a bit less theoretical. Read on for the shocking, stylish, and tragic road to that blood-soaked finale.
The finale opens with Eddie looking for the person who ordered the attack on Halstead Manor and the attempted kidnapping of his baby nephew, Tarquin. There’s one potentially useful lead: Bravo One, one of the mercenaries from the raid, who survived.
Unfortunately, Eddie isn’t conducting a fair interrogation. While torturing Bravo One, he repeatedly suggests that Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) must have ordered the attack. The terrified mercenary gives in and confirms what Eddie already believes. Eddie then recruits Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto) to arrange Bobby’s murder inside prison.
Later, Eddie learns something that blows up his theory: Uncle Stan (Giancarlo Esposito) reveals that he sold Eddie’s debt to Bobby on the day Eddie married Bella (Benedetta Porcaroli). The revelation makes Eddie realize that his former boss wasn’t the mastermind behind the attacks after all.
There’s just yet another inconvenient twist: Marco’s hit man is already on his way.
Eddie and Susie race to the prison, where Eddie helps save Bobby from the assassin in the banya, although Bobby finishes off the hit man himself with a shiv. But calling off the hit only goes so far. Eddie reminds Bobby: “Just to be clear, you don’t own me.”
With Bobby eliminated as a suspect, Eddie and Susie work their way up the chain until it leads them to Gospel John (Pearce Quigley), the Bible-quoting criminal who sought revenge on Freddy in Season 1 for killing his brother and has since forged a twisted bond with Freddy. It turns out Gospel John has been manipulating Freddy, whose resentment over losing the Halstead inheritance has been festering since Season 1.
Freddy ultimately admits that he knew what Gospel John was planning and helped him. Eddie beats his brother and pulls a gun — but doesn’t shoot. Instead, a van door slides open to reveal Gospel John bound inside alongside a chainsaw.
“Someone’s gotta die, Freddy,” Eddie tells him.
He orders Freddy into the van. As Eddie stands outside the closed door, suddenly there's the unmistakable sound of a chainsaw. When the doors slide open moments later, Freddy emerges drenched in blood. Eddie tells him, “Good boy, Freddy.” Freddy then lifts up Gospel John’s severed head as Eddie lights a cigar.
That is the last image we’re left with at the end of Season 2. And according to Read, the big question isn’t necessarily what the experience has done to Freddy. It’s what it tells us about Eddie. “I would hope that the question is more about what Eddie becomes, that he would do something as strange as this,” Read says. “Has he gone mad or is he moving towards a place where he could be this ruthless leader who is capable of extraordinary things?” Read leans toward the latter.
By the end of the season, Eddie’s bonds to the Glass empire could not be more fragile.
Eddie’s relationship with Bobby implodes over the proposed decriminalization of marijuana. Bobby wants the bill killed to protect the existing Glass operation; Eddie secretly sees legalization as a massive opportunity. His plan is to invest in a legal cannabis business while feeding illegally produced Glass marijuana into the legitimate market, allowing them to undercut competitors and, as Eddie optimistically puts it, become “the Starbucks of weed.”
When Eddie defies Bobby, the consequences are immediate and fatal. Lord Hawthorne (Hugh Bonneville), Eddie’s political connection in the House of Lords, dies after a fall from a window. The legislation collapses, and Bobby makes Eddie pay for his rebellion. Bobby’s men nearly beat Eddie to death and dump him in a shallow grave. To escape, he’s forced to claw his way back to civilization. James threw himself into Eddie’s physical breakdown. “I didn’t just want to see Eddie as cool as a cucumber all the time,” James says. “I wanted him to be fucked up.”
So in the finale, when the evidence seems to point to Bobby, Eddie is eager to believe it. But once he realizes his mistake, he rushes to stop the assassination he set in motion.
That doesn’t mean Eddie is suddenly Bobby’s obedient foot soldier again. Bobby may have bought Eddie’s debt, but Eddie has completely changed the terms of their relationship. Earlier in the finale, Eddie tells Susie that if he does return, it will be on his own terms.
The conspiracy leads back to Gospel John and Freddy.
That choice was not inevitable. Read says the writers considered a “whole rogue’s gallery” of enemies Eddie had accumulated, including people connected to previous victims. But having the threat come from Eddie’s own family made it all that much more personal.
“We thought that bringing it back closer to home would be a more shocking and impactful kind of revelation,” Read says. The tensions between Eddie and Freddy have existed since the very beginning of the series, making Freddy’s involvement more devastating than the emergence of another outside enemy.
Earlier in Season 2, Gospel John meets Freddy in rehab and presents himself as a spiritual brother who understands what has been stolen from him. Gospel John takes that resentment and gives it a religious fervor, comparing Eddie and Freddy’s title succession to Jacob and Esau. By the time Freddy realizes what he has become involved in, Bella is dead, and his family has been attacked.
The writers needed to give Eddie something to lose. At first, Eddie and Bella make sense as a strategic pairing. Both are aristocrats who can move between old money and organized crime, and Bella becomes increasingly useful to Eddie’s Italian operation after the death of her husband, Cico (Michele Morrone).
At first, the relationship bears some resemblance to an old-school business venture. “The marriage is a way to combine families like they did centuries ago,” James says. But the tie becomes more than a strategic move: “In reality, he does fall in love with her.”
Bella brings out a version of Eddie that no one else does. After barely surviving Bobby’s punishment, Eddie proposes by telling Bella that she was with him throughout the ordeal that nearly killed him: “You were on that journey. Every step of the way.” Bella accepts.
Then, just hours after they marry at Lake Maggiore, Bella takes off in a seaplane to race Eddie, who prefers to take the car, to Switzerland. (Yeah, Bella truly might be his soulmate). As she circles overhead to show off for Eddie, blowing him a kiss, the plane explodes in front of him. The timing is brutal … for a purpose.
“We thought it was really useful to see Eddie as somebody who could be broken, who was vulnerable,” Read says. Season 2 first breaks Eddie physically, then takes Bella from him. “To see the journey of how Eddie would respond to such a terrible thing happening to him,” Read says, opened up the drama of the season’s final stretch.
James believes Bella’s death destroys more than Eddie’s marriage. “She’s awakened this possibility of a good life outside of death and destruction,” the actor says, “so when she's quickly wiped off the face of the planet, his whole sense of self and life is completely deconstructed.”
Eddie wants revenge on both men — and getting (more) blood on his own hands by killing Gospel John himself wouldn’t accomplish that.
By forcing Freddy to carry out the killing, Eddie gets vengeance against Gospel John while also breaking Gospel John’s hold over Freddy. As James puts it, Eddie “almost psychologically castrates his brother whilst enacting a horrific revenge on the perpetrator of his wife’s death.”
Read sees even more twisted logic at play. In Eddie’s mind, forcing Freddy to take responsibility for what he helped set in motion is a “step towards redemption.”
“It’s make or break,” Read says. Freddy has spent much of his life taking on various identities — wild child, victim, and now born-again Christian. Eddie’s violent test forces him to stop hiding behind any of those personas and take responsibility for his actions. Read calls what Eddie does “a ruthless form of therapy and justice.”
Of course, the person administering this therapy is a grieving widower with a captive man and a chainsaw. “The justice he finds is quite warped and strange because he has not processed his grief yet,” says Read.
James says, “I do think he’s gone from, in the beginning of Season 1, [being] a good person just trying to help his family out, just trying to get these criminals out from his dad’s old crumbling estate and keep the lights on, to [becoming] someone who has the ability to enact deep and savage violence.”
James points to The Godfather Part II as a useful reference point for thinking about Eddie: it’s the story of a man increasingly capable of using his intelligence to defeat his enemies while losing some part of himself in the process. “How much of himself does he lose whilst getting revenge on everyone that’s hurt him?” James asks.
Given Eddie and Susie’s chemistry, introducing Bella into the story could have produced a conventional romantic rivalry. Scodelario was adamant that it shouldn’t — and luckily, it was never the intention, even though later, of course, Eddie and Bella get married.
“We’re not going to do a love triangle. It’s 2026. We’re not doing that anymore,” Scodelario recalls saying.
Susie establishes the hierarchy when Bella first joins their operation, but once Bella proves herself, Susie comes to regard her as an equal and admires her strength. Susie understands early on that Bella is interested in Eddie — and, if anything, Susie seems to be entertained watching things develop between them.
That doesn’t mean Susie isn’t affected by Eddie’s relationship with Bella. According to Scodelario, one of the rare times when her character’s armor cracks is when Lord Hawthorne delivers a devastating assessment that Susie has a black heart and will always be alone. “I felt all of that for Susie in that moment,” says Scodelario. “She is a juggler. She is the most intelligent person in the room, but she is also deeply unsettled. I think her experiences with Eddie, her seeing his volatility, what he’s becoming, realizing that he’s growing close to Bella — it all gets a bit too much. I think it’s the first true moment of overwhelm that we ever see in her.”
In some ways, they’re more entangled than ever — and perhaps more dangerous for each other than ever.
The contradiction has followed them all season. They understand one another almost instinctively and continually show up for each other, even as their ambitions make it harder for either to remain the other’s subordinate.
Read says that despite everything thrown between them, “their affection and connection always comes through.” After Eddie and Susie survive the events of the season together, he believes they’re “probably closer than ever at the end of Season 2.”
But Susie’s individual evolution is well underway. While Bobby is mapping out the next phase of the Glass empire, Susie has quietly established a relationship with Carlos Vargas (Cosimo Fusco). While Bobby thinks he’s running one unified organization, Susie is beginning to build something that belongs to her.
“By the very end, she realizes that she can’t be under her father’s name anymore, that she needs to branch out on her own, and that she can’t rely on Eddie to be her partner anymore,” says Scodelario.
Bella’s murder seems to point The Gentlemen toward an immediate Eddie revenge story. Instead, Episode 7 takes the season on a detour and turns Geoff Seacombe (Vinnie Jones) into the hero of a home-invasion thriller when armed mercenaries descend on Halstead Manor to kidnap Tarquin.
That swerve was intentional. Read says the creative team wanted to “wrong” the audience after Bella’s death — and everyone knew Vinnie Jones could carry the episode.
“I think that Vinnie Jones is a weapon and we always felt at a certain stage we want to pull a pin on Vin,” says Read, “and we knew that he’s done so many great action movies, he’s got such incredible charisma, but we very intentionally held him back until someone tries to kidnap his grandson.”
For Jones, all that violence comes from the same place as Geoff’s quieter scenes: complete loyalty and devotion. “He put his life on the line for that baby,” Jones says of Tarquin. “They could have cut [Geoff] into 50 pieces. He would’vee still won that war for that baby.”
Season 2 deliberately leaves a little room for mystery.
The Bannik — the strange sauna spirit that Bobby believes can see the future — began with Read researching steam rooms while writing Bobby’s prison scenes and coming across references to bathhouse spirits of Slavic folklore. Once Read wrote the entity into one of Bobby’s speeches, he says Ritchie wanted to go one step further and actually put the Bannik in the series.
By the finale, the mystical aura of the Bannik has become much harder to dismiss as just a weird delusion of Bobby’s. Eddie, meanwhile, has experienced his own brush with the unexplained through the London Stone, while Uncle Stan repeatedly frames Eddie’s rise in spiritual and historical terms.
Read explains that the evolution of mysticism in the series is intentional: “The more you look into a character, the more layers you find and the more frequencies these characters can tune into, and we didn’t want to be limited by the sort of stories we felt we could tell.”
Everyone is expanding — but maybe not together.
Bobby ends the season envisioning a Glass empire that absorbs Marco’s operation and spreads across continental Europe and beyond. Eddie has survived his rebellion against Bobby and appears poised to return to the operation, but explicitly refuses to do anyone else’s bidding. Susie is quietly creating relationships and supply lines that belong to her rather than to Bobby. Freddy has survived Eddie’s judgment, although it remains to be seen what version of Freddy will manifest after he emerges from the blood-soaked van.
Perhaps the biggest question that lingers after the finale has to do with Eddie's soul: Everything that transpires in Season 2 gives him, or almost gives him, everything he thought he wanted — power, independence, love — and then makes him pay for it. He ends the season more formidable than ever, but with a capacity for brutality that Season 1’s Eddie might not recognize.
The Gentlemen Season 2 is now streaming, only on Netflix.
