The Gentlemen episode 2 recap: Tackle Tommy Woo Woo
In The Gentlemen episode 2 Eddie and Freddy are racing to clean-up after the death of a dangerous drug dealer
The Gentlemen episode 2 recap contains spoilers... After the death of Tommy Dixon, Eddie and Freddy are worried that his brother, a god-fearing cocaine baron nicknamed The Gospel, will come looking for revenge. Elsewhere, Eddie learns more about Stanley Johnston and the ruthless nature of the industry he's entered.
The episode begins in the immediate aftermath of Tommy Dixon’s shooting, as his young accomplice Jethro legs it fearing he’ll be next on the chopping block. Eddie, Freddy and Geoff the groundskeeper eventually track him down, but not before he manages to send a message to someone from his organization. Freddy then throws his phone into the lake. “Let them come Eddie!” he says.
Elsewhere, Tommy Dixon’s brother ‘The Gospel’ — a gangster so named due to his devout religiosity — finds out his sibling has gone missing. It turns out Jethro’s text did get through, although it was slightly "ambiguous".
Susie tells Jimmy (the head of the weed lab) to look after Jethro while she and Eddie debate what’s to be done about him. It turns out that while Tommy is a small fish, his brother is a serious player and knows ‘Jesus and his dad’, two powerful gangsters who’ve made him one of the biggest cocaine dealers in the North West.
Susie calls a man named Felix to deal with Tommy’s body and he chops it up to bury in the woods, before tidying up a blood-spattered Gainsborough. Eddie then presents his vision of how they could spare Jethro’s life and frame him as Tommy’s murderer, but Felix says this is naive in the extreme. We can’t say we disagree with him given the world Eddie is now operating in.
Nevertheless, Susie gives him 24 hours to try and put his plan into practice. The scheme involves filming Freddy’s dance on Tommy’s phone, sticking it in his pocket, staging the body in the boot of his car and then telling The Gospel that he and Jethro fell out while Jethro was counting the cash. Jethro will then be packed off to the other side of the world.
Basically, Freddy still has to dance like a chicken.
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'It poisoned him...'
They’ve barely wrapped all that up when Eddie’s mother walks in with news that he’s received a hand-delivered invitation from Stanley Johnston (with a T). Susie is keen to meet her narcotics rival and offers to come along with him, yet Eddie’s mother, Lady Sabrina, clearly has her suspicions about his new acquaintance.
Later on she says she’s always known about the cannabis farm and that while his father tolerated it, “it poisoned him”. Eddie tells her that once the Freddy situation is dealt with, he intends to remove his family from the Glass gang’s clutches.
Yet they soon have more pertinent problems to worry about, because Tommy’s brother John ‘The Gospel’ Dixon is paying them a visit. Eddie tells him his brother was paid and then left the house, but The Gospel is concerned by the cryptic text he received from Jethro before he disappeared. It reads.. “Tackle Tommy Woo Woo”. That’s predictive texting for you.
Eddie also tells them about the "disagreement" between Tommy and Jethro, yet it’s clear they’re not buying it. In a moment of cliff-edge drama, Freddy confesses to taking a life… the one belonging to Monty the cat, but for it looks like they’re off the hook.
'They live in the zoo, we live in the jungle...'
Eddie sets off to Jethro’s flat to get his passport, but is interrupted when a large henchman from the Dixon crew comes in and a brutal fight ensues. The young Duke does very well to hold his own against this bulky monster, but eventually manages to kill him, despite receiving a bullet wound in the guts. Luckily he’s still got Felix’s number.
That evening at Stanley Johnston’s soiree, Susie tells him their host is a meth dealer and unlike her line of narcotics, his comes with a “very violent price-tag." Johnston then introduces Eddie to Princess Roseanne, who’s eleventh in line to the Belgian throne, but of course the pair already know each other.
After hearing Susie is ‘an antique dealer’, Johnston gives her a little test, which she passes, before taking her outside to talk shop. “They live in the zoo, while we live in the jungle,” he tells her, before offering her Winston Churchill’s watch as a sweetener. “Watches are for retirement, your timing’s off,” she says.
Meanwhile, Princess Roseanne — who’s clearly had a thing for Eddie since their youth -—bandages up his bullet wound. “Call me,” she says as she leaves the room. Eddie then updates Susie on his new plan, which is to make it look like this latest death was Jethro’s work too.
When The Gospel finds Tommy’s car by a dock on the Thames, it looks like he’s holding Jethro responsible, although he says it’s odd that his brother was killed with a fine shotgun. Eddie says it’s his and that Jethro must have taken it, yet The Gospel insists on keeping it. “Judgement will be manifest at which point the gun will be returned,” he tells them.
Eddie then shows his brother the secret weed lab. “Fuck the dog!” says Freddy. Later on, Eddie packs Jethro off on a boat to Australia, but it’s soon clear he won’t make it far — after all Felix is the captain.
Meanwhile, Eddie demands to meet Susie’s father, Bobby Glass, who’s living in the most open prison anyone has ever seen. As they BBQ steak, the young Duke reveals that he’d like to renegotiate the terms of their relationship. “I want you off my land by the end of the year,” he says. “In return I guarantee you that I’ll make you much more money.”
Susie’s not happy about it all.
Sean is a Senior Feature writer for TV Times, What's On TV and TV & Satellite Week, who also writes for whattowatch.com. He's been covering the world of TV for over 15 years and in that time he's been lucky enough to interview stars like Ian McKellen, Tom Hardy and Kate Winslet. His favourite shows are I'm Alan Partridge, The Wire, People Just Do Nothing and Succession and in his spare time he enjoys drinking tea, doing crosswords and watching football.