In this piece
Season two is out now, just under two and a half years after season one. That is a long time to hold eight episodes in your head, and you have almost certainly forgotten more than you think — not the chicken suit, everyone remembers the chicken suit, but who was actually behind the sabotage, why Susie nearly had the Hornimans killed, and what Bobby was really up to at the end.
This is the main thread of season one, spoilers included, from the first episode to the last shot. A few standalone plots are left out on purpose. If you are going in fresh, go and watch it instead.
What happened in The Gentlemen season 1
Archibald Horniman, the 12th Duke of Halstead, dies and leaves the title and the estate to his second son, Eddie Horniman (Theo James), skipping over the older brother, Freddy (Daniel Ings). Eddie is a former Army captain who served as a UN peacekeeper and never expected to inherit anything.
He then finds out what came with the house. Underneath the grounds is an industrial cannabis farm belonging to Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone), who is in prison, and run day to day by his daughter Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario). The late Duke had a long-standing arrangement with them. Eddie did not know, and wants out immediately.
He cannot simply order the Glass operation off his land. Susie will not go, and Freddy is what makes the problem urgent.
Freddy owes a fortune to Tommy Dixon (Peter Serafinowicz), a Liverpudlian dealer. Susie negotiates the debt down to £4 million, payable at once, with a humiliating chicken-suit performance thrown in for Tommy's amusement. Eddie raises the money. But Tommy keeps needling a cocaine-fuelled Freddy while the video is being filmed, and Freddy fetches a shotgun and kills him, still wearing the suit, at the end of the first episode.
The only witness they cannot account for is Tommy's man Jethro, who runs. Rather than let Susie kill him, Eddie frames him for the murder, pays him £2 million and puts him on a ship to Australia — and sells that story to Tommy's brother, the pious and extremely dangerous Gospel John (Pearce Quigley). What Eddie does not know is that Susie has already arranged for Jethro not to survive the voyage. When Eddie later finds out what she did, it opens the first serious crack between them.
From there Eddie tries to buy his family's freedom while a run of problems keeps hitting the Glass operation. A shipment is stolen. The European distribution network breaks down. A boxing match is fixed. Eddie handles each one, gets deeper in each time, and turns out to be far better at it than a man trying to escape ought to be.
Every one of those problems traces back to Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito), the American billionaire circling the estate. He presents as an aristocrat with expensive taste. He is actually a methamphetamine magnate who wants Bobby's cannabis business to diversify his money, and the manor is his route in. He admits all of it in the finale, and frames the sabotage as proof of how badly he wanted the deal.
Johnston's method is patient. He puts Gabrielle (Ruby Sear) close to Jimmy Chang (Michael Vu), the Glass operation's chief grower, to learn how it works and steal a shipment; she is exposed as his operative later on. And his man is Henry Collins (Max Beesley), a boxing promoter who fixes a fight in episode six that leaves Susie's brother Jack Glass (Harry Goodwins) badly injured, as leverage to force the Glass family to sell. Collins then threatens Susie directly in episode seven. He also reveals that Eddie has been meeting Johnston behind her back. Combined with Eddie's earlier decision to bypass her and go straight to Bobby, that convinces her Eddie has sold the Glasses out. She retaliates by telling Gospel John that Freddy killed Tommy, which points an army at the Horniman family.
The characters and where each of them ended up
Eddie Horniman (Theo James). Starts the season trying to extract his family from a criminal enterprise and ends it as a partner in one. He is calm around violence, better at the work than he admits to himself, and by the last episode he has stopped pretending he doesn't enjoy it.
Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario). Runs the operation while Bobby is inside, and reads Eddie's usefulness before anyone else does. She has real evidence that Eddie has gone behind her back, draws the wrong conclusion about what he is doing, hands Gospel John the truth about Freddy, and nearly gets the whole family killed. She ends the season as Eddie's partner anyway. She forgives, and she does not forget.
Freddy Horniman (Daniel Ings). Passed over for the title, buried in debt, and the direct cause of the season's worst trouble. He offers to walk out and let Gospel John kill him to spare the family. Eddie talks him out of it. By the end he has admitted out loud that his younger brother is the killer he will never be.
Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone). Never retiring, never out of control, and running everything from a prison that looks more like a hotel. He spends the season testing his daughter and the Duke.
Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito). Behind almost every setback in the season. Arrested for tax evasion in the finale with his assets frozen, which removes him from the board for roughly one scene.
Geoff Seacombe (Vinnie Jones). The Halstead gamekeeper, and the most decent person in the show. He is also Charly's biological father, from an affair with Lady Sabrina (Joely Richardson) years earlier, a secret he never intended to tell anyone.
Charly Horniman (Jasmine Blackborow). Away at university for most of the season. Comes home pregnant, works out the truth about Geoff, and stays at the estate.
Jack Glass (Harry Goodwins). Susie's brother and a professional boxer. Beaten close to death in Collins's fixed fight, and the reason Susie's judgement goes badly wrong.
Gospel John (Pearce Quigley). Tommy's brother, and a preacher by day. Accepts the Jethro story for most of the season, learns the truth from Susie, and brings a small army to Halstead in the finale demanding Freddy. The Hornimans all survive the siege, but the show never shows you how it was settled — which makes it the one loose thread of the season.
The deaths worth remembering: Tommy Dixon, Jethro, Henry Collins, Mercy (Martha Millan) and Sticky Pete (Joshua McGuire). There are others.
How The Gentlemen season 1 ended
Bobby announces he is selling the business. Bids must clear £150 million and arrive by pigeon. Eddie and Susie are told to go and collect offers from the interested parties.
Who Is Eddie Horniman?
Who is Eddie Horniman in The Gentlemen? Theo James's duke, from reluctant heir to ruthless crime lord, across both seasons.
Instead they use the auction to remove everybody in it. Johnston is told he has won, then arrested for tax evasion using his own tax records. Mercy and Sticky Pete are both told Pete has won, so Mercy kills Pete to take his place. Collins then kills Mercy. That leaves Eddie and Susie as the only viable buyers, with the £15 million Collins has put into their supposed consortium for a deal that does not exist.
Collins is taken to the woods. Eddie offers Susie the gun, since Collins is the man who nearly killed her brother. She tells him the kill belongs to his own journey, and Eddie shoots Collins himself.
Then comes the reveal: the sale was never real. Bobby reveals he was never selling; he wanted to see whether the two of them would put something on the line. They pass. Rather than buying the business, they invest in it alongside him, which leaves Bobby exactly where he was — above both of them.
Two final beats. Geoff and Charly have a quiet conversation about a fact neither of them says out loud. And Johnston turns out not to be finished at all: the last scene of the season puts him in the same prison as Bobby, over an expensive meal, with the two of them looking very much like future partners.
What to expect in The Gentlemen season 2
Season two opens a year later, and Eddie is no longer the reluctant one. Netflix's own trailer material has him scaling the operation up and enjoying the fit of it, thinking about his birthright and what being the Duke of Halstead entitles him to. Lead writer Matthew Read has said the season was built around Eddie expanding the empire and straining his relationship with Bobby, the man he now works under.
The business expands from the farm beneath Halstead into the lakeside villas of Italy, where Eddie and Susie are trying to establish a foothold without being noticed. That brings in Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian crime boss described by the production as ruthless and elegant, and Cico Maldini (Michele Morrone), the fixer they hire to navigate Italy and who is explicitly not to be trusted. Back home, Eddie is climbing inside the legitimate establishment too, which is where Hugh Bonneville arrives as Lord Hawthorne.
The engine of the season is that Bobby's decisions look increasingly unsound, and Eddie and Susie have to decide whether to move on him or lose everything. Scodelario has framed the partnership bluntly: Eddie is Susie's investment, and the question is what happens when the investment stops being reliable.
Also new: Benedetta Porcaroli as Bella, Maya Jama as Aisha, Benjamin Clementine as Nanny, Tyler Conti as Joe, Amra Mallassi, and boxer Chris Eubank Jr. Returning alongside the leads are Winstone, Ings, Richardson, Jones, Blackborow, Michael Vu as Jimmy Chang, Goodwins, Ruby Sear as Gabrielle, Quigley and Esposito. Logan Dean also appears as Blanket, identified by Netflix in a season 2 still.
Eight episodes, all streaming now. A third season is already confirmed.
Cast
- Theo James as Eddie Horniman
- Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass
- Daniel Ings as Freddy Horniman
- Ray Winstone as Bobby Glass
- Giancarlo Esposito as Stanley Johnston
- Vinnie Jones as Geoff Seacombe
- Joely Richardson as Sabrina Horniman
- Max Beesley as Henry Collins
- Harry Goodwins as Jack Glass
- Pearce Quigley as Gospel John
- Jasmine Blackborow as Charly Horniman
- Peter Serafinowicz as Tommy Dixon
- Martha Millan as Mercy
- Joshua McGuire as Sticky Pete
- Michael Vu as Jimmy Chang
- Ruby Sear as Gabrielle
Reviews in this piece
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Eddie Horniman
Who is Eddie Horniman in The Gentlemen? Theo James's duke, from reluctant heir to ruthless crime lord, across both seasons.
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