Who Is Susie Glass in The Gentlemen? Her Full Arc, Explained

To force the Glass family to sell, Henry Collins (Max Beesley) fixes a boxing match that leaves Jack close to dead. Then he tells Susie that Eddie has been meeting Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito) behind her back. Stacked on Eddie having already gone around her to deal directly with Bobby, it looks conclusive.

Before that, though, there is the part people forget. With Jack in a hospital bed she starts killing Collins's people, against her father's explicit instruction to hold. At no other point in the first season does her professionalism give way entirely, and she is in that state when Collins tells her about Eddie.

She then retaliates by telling Gospel John (Pearce Quigley) that Freddy killed his brother, which sets an army on the Horniman family and nearly gets all of them killed.

She is not being stupid. She is reasoning correctly from real evidence to the wrong conclusion, while furious about her brother, which is a much harder thing for a show to write and the reason the mistake works.

The partnership

Bobby announces he is selling the business and asks for bids. The sale is a test, of Susie as much as of Eddie. They pass it by assembling a bid of their own (Susie putting in £35 million of a £235 million offer) while systematically removing every serious rival from the board.

Once it is over, Collins is led into the woods, where Eddie offers Susie the gun (Collins nearly killed her brother). Her reply is that the kill is part of Eddie's own path. He shoots Collins himself.

They finish the season co-owning the Glass business with Bobby.

Season two: a smaller part in a bigger story

A year on, Susie sides with Eddie against her own father over the decriminalisation bill. The decision is the largest she makes in the series, and she is shown working it through: she pushes back on Eddie, checks his numbers, and says aloud what Bobby will do to both of them if it goes wrong.

But the plan she is working through is somebody else's. Eddie works it out alone and hands it to her finished. Most of her season has that shape: the direction comes from him, and her part is deciding whether to follow.

The season does find one crack in her. Lord Hawthorne's remark about how isolated she is hits somewhere almost nothing else in the show reaches, and she does not have an answer for it.

Our reading: season two gives Susie considerably less room than season one did, and it is the show's biggest self-inflicted wound. The first season's real subject was two people learning to work as equals. The second separates them, keeps them apart, and reunites them too late for it to land.

Joe Green, and the thing that is hers

Her own thread is Joe Green (Tyler Conti), an old flame she goes into the cocaine business with behind Bobby's back. That venture is the first in the series to belong to Susie, not to her father.

The thread is also, and this matters, one of the few parts of her life that is about more than work. Scodelario has described the relationship as a rare chance for Susie to be happy and unguarded, and the season is careful to show her enjoying it.

It goes wrong because Joe has been lying to her since they reconnected. Vargas had refused a deal; Joe and Hector went ahead without permission anyway; and when Vargas's organisation found out, Joe killed Hector to bury it. Vargas's men come for the product. Jack arrives shooting. Susie kills one of them herself.

Then Blanket tells her Hector had been trying to reach her, and she goes looking. At Joe's flat she finds Hector's body and works out the whole of it.

Her next move is the best she makes all season. She does not run with him and she does not bury it. She hands Joe over to Vargas and turns the wreckage into a supply arrangement of her own, one that later gets her and Eddie to Gospel John in the finale.

The fair criticism is that the show lets its sharpest operator trust Joe far too long. The fair answer is that once Jack and Blanket supply the breaks, she identifies the lie, hands him over, and comes out of it with an asset.

Where season two leaves her

Bobby ordered her away from Eddie after the bill collapsed and she went. She warned Eddie before his wedding about where his ambition was taking him, and left before the ceremony finished. When Bella died she asked her father to his face whether he had done it. And when Eddie was about to have Bobby killed for the wrong reason, she was the one who brought him the piece he was missing.

She ends the season with a relationship with Vargas that belongs to her, and that her father does not appear to know the shape of.

Kaya Scodelario has put the endpoint in plain terms: Susie realises she can no longer operate under her father's name, and cannot rely on Eddie as a partner either.

Our reading: Bobby is planning a European expansion as though he still runs one unified organisation. Eddie has made clear that any return will be on his own terms. Susie has become a third centre of power, and neither Bobby nor Eddie has adjusted to that shift.

Our reading is not a settled prediction. Matthew Read has said Eddie and Susie are probably closer at the end of season two than they have ever been, and Scodelario has described Susie as fairly lost, unsure whether to put the business, her family or Eddie first. The reversal is available but not inevitable.

Season three is confirmed at eight episodes, with Guy Ritchie directing. Nothing about the story has been announced.