Warning: This article contains spoilers for MobLand Season 1, Episode 9

This article contains mentions of sexual assault.

The penultimate episode of MobLand season 1, episode 9, "Beggars Banquet", faces the fact that we’ve run out of time in this series. We’ve been holed up in the Cotswolds forever in MobLand, and though the rule seems to be that everyone stays hunkered, characters can come and go as they please. Sure, Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) may bray, but evil eyes and unrealized threats seem to be the only ramification for disobeying a man consistently described as the devil.

But that’s how it goes in MobLand. Characters leave and return to the Cotswolds when they like, just as the storylines rise in importance in one episode, only to disappear again. There’s been so little actual forward momentum; it’s episode 9, and Conrad is only just now broaching his fentanyl idea with the Mexicans. Fentanyl kicked off the series in the pilot. Season 1 could end in any number of ways, none of which are likely to give satisfying answers if the climaxes in "Beggars Banquet" are a bellwether.

Kevin's Childhood Trauma Storyline Is Mishandled

Plotlines Don't Feel Connected To One Another

It’s not worth going over every storyline by this point in MobLand. No single one seems to be more important than the other, and though they all intersect, they're not actually tied together in any way. Richie’s (Geoff Bell) deal with the police feels completely independent of Harry’s (Tom Hardy) deal with Kat (Janet McTeer), though, ostensibly, they should be linked. Some plots are even further afield. Bella’s (Lara Pulver) plot with her father and Syrian arms dealers, for example.

Kevin’s (Paddy Considine) quest for vengeance regarding his sexual assault, which MobLand insists on showing repeatedly in upsetting detail, is out of a completely different show. This companion story has given Kevin more to do than anyone else in MobLand, and Considine has risen to the more complex arc. But the way this story is mishandled is a foul sign of what’s to come in the finale.

Kevin confronts the man who raped him in prison, but the scene is so clumsily handled that I can’t even be sure this lovely London gentleman was definitively Kevin’s ab. It’s a wildly confusing scene, both in plotting and in tone. Kevin ends up shooting the elderly man, but it’s almost played as a dark joke. I can’t believe this is the end of such a traumatic saga for Kevin, though how they will find time to circle back to it in any meaningful way with just one episode remaining seems impossible.

There Are Never Any Lasting Ramifications In MobLand

Tom Hardy Is Kept Out Of The Most Important Scene Of The Episode

The end of "Beggars Banquet" is no better. This dinner scene is what MobLand has been trying to be all season long. It’s supposed to be tense and morbidly funny in equal measure, but the characters simply aren’t strong enough to that. Tom Hardy would be able to lead a scene like the one they’re going for, but Harry is seated at the end of the table and barely opens his mouth. He’s not even in many of the shots. Instead, we focus on Maeve (Helen Mirren), Conrad, Jan (Joanne Froggatt), and their guest-of-honor, Alice (Emily Barber).

MobLand episodes release on Paramount+ on Sundays at 12am PT.

Jan is cowed, so she’s quiet, and Alice, who’s been a preternaturally gifted undercover agent since we met her, struggles to keep her masquerade after just one probing question thrown her way. So we’re left with Maeve and Conrad, two characters I feel more certain are woefully miscast. They scream, they fight, they smash bottles, they make jokes that aren’t funny; it’s an uncomfortable dinner, and not in the way MobLand intended.

To cap everything off, after Maeve and Conrad are arrested, they make up just as fast as they put knives and bottles at each other’s throats. It’s a microcosm of the series. Nothing that happens has any bearing on what comes next. Threats and promises are forgotten. The only thing that matters in MobLand is that we get to the next scene before we have to reckon with what just happened.