‘A Thousand Blows’ Season Finale Recap (Episode 6): Love T.K.O.
If you’ve got a decent memory, “previously on” catch-up montages can be comfortably skipped. That’s especially true of a show that’s dumped all six episodes of its first season at once. But I’m glad I caught the “previously on” for this episode, and here’s why. Toward the end of this opening recap montage, we see a shot of Mary Carr crying by herself after receiving a knife indicating the Elephant Boys and their leader, Indigo Jeremy (Robert Glenister), have killed her lover Hezekiah Moscow. But the shot is mismatched, because by that point the recap has already shown us Mary discovering that Hezekiah is still alive, and that his brother (“brother”? they really don’t make this clear) Alec was the person who was killed. So why show us her crying for the fake victim, after first showing us the moment she learns of the real one?
Because, as it turns out, she knew the truth all along.Mary, apparently, arranged for Indigo Jeremy’s assassins to take out the wrong man in order to spare the life of the man she really cared about. Her awful mother Jane delivers this information to Sugar Goodson, who passes it along to Hezekiah as one of his last acts as a bartender at the Blue Coat Boy Inn, which he’s left to his (miraculously) still-living brother Treacle. When Hezekiah finds out, of course, he’s horrified, and wants nothing more to do with Mary. From the moment he first laid eyes on her, pretending to be pregnant so her compatriots could rob people, until now, he feels all he’s ever seen her do is lie.
Mary’s voice cracks and shatters as she screams “I lie! I lie!”, trying to confirm his judgment so as to allay his fears about her feelings for him, but there’s no point. He tells her she’s dead to him, to get away from him, and she does so, leaving him alone in the world.
It’s a pretty terrific closing salvo for A Thousand Blows’ first season. (Based on the teaser that follows the “To be continued…” title card, the second has already largely been shot.) It places the emphasis right where it’s been and belonged the whole time: on Erin Doherty’s work as Mary Carr, once (and future?) Queen of the Forty Elephants. Doherty has spent the entire season challenged to hold down her end of the screen against guys who literally trained to beat people up to play their roles. She has to answer their physical charisma with the kind that can only come out of your voice, your eyes, the set of your jaw. She clears the bar without so much as brushing it with the hem of her dress. It’s early yet, but this is one of my favorite performances of the year.
Maybe that’s why this revelation is the moment that lingers with me as the episode’s most violent, not Hezekiah’s accidental killing in the ring of the American boxing champion, Buster Williams (Nathan Hubble). Mary whisks Hezekiah out of the West End Boxing Club just before the crowd turns into a lynch mob. (Their escape is a bit improbable — everyone just seems to forget who they’re mad at in favor of simply being mad — but oh well.) Because of the death, the match is ruled void; when Mary tries to tell him she’s still the winner in her book, he’s stunned she can care at a time when a man has been killed. This is what we call a red flag.
With a mob potentially after Hezekiah at any time, and her mother Jane and ganglord Indigo Jeremy breathing down her neck, Mary wants to flee to New York, where she says a man she knows can hook them up. But it’s around this point that Sugar tells Hezekiah what he knows, putting the kibosh on the plan, the relationship, the whole shebang.
Indeed, it’s astonishing how atomized everyone has become by the end of this episode. Sugar and Treacle aren’t talking. Sugar and Mary aren’t talking. Mary and Hezekiah aren’t talking. Alec is dead. At least Mary and Alice, the only Elephant to stick by her side the whole time (though Eliza and the rest come back around), managed to spring Lao from prison and send him off to Liverpool for a third lease on life; that’s about the only lingering act of kindness in the whole episode.
I’d be harder on this if it weren’t apparent we’ll be getting more. You need a New Hope ending before an Empire Strikes Back ending — or at the very least you need an ending like the first Rocky, where even defeat feels like a victory. Here, defeat just feels like defeat. But how Hezekiah and Mary and Alice and the Goodson brothers reinvent themselves from here is, therefore, wide open.
Like its clear inspiration Deadwood, A Thousand Blows is ultimately about community, whether that’s the East End, the West End, or the criminal element racing around them both. An ebb tide hits everyone hard, but a rising tide can lift all boats, if only everyone is open enough to see it. Even if they’re all right back where they started now, doesn’t that simply mean they’ve got nowhere to go but up?
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.
