MobLand Season 1, Episode 10 – “The Beast in Me” Full Story Breakdown
Season 1 of MobLand closes with “The Beast in Me,” a 54‑minute finale that doesn’t just end the Harrigan–Stevenson gang war – it detonates the entire family power structure from the inside out.
Released on June 1, 2025 on Paramount+ as the tenth and final episode of the season, the Anthony Byrne–directed hour (written by Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth) is structured as both a brutal crime showdown and an intimate family horror story. It takes the show’s recurring question – which “beast” really runs this world: violence on the streets or violence at home? – and answers it with methodical set‑pieces, devastating reveals, and a final domestic gut punch.
Before we dive into the beats, a quick look at where the show stood going into this finale: MobLand had already become Paramount+’s biggest global series launch ever, pulling 2.2 million viewers on premiere day and 8.8 million in its first week, a 298% jump that set new platform records. By June 23, 2025, Paramount+ reported over 26 million viewers to date, ranking the show as its #2 original series behind Landman. Those numbers all landed within weeks of “The Beast in Me,” raising the stakes for how the finale would land with a rapidly growing audience.
Where and When It All Goes Down
Episode 10 continues MobLand’s London‑centric underworld setting but pushes characters into more isolated and symbolic spaces:
- A blood‑soaked suburban house belonging to fixer Alan Rusby, where Kevin Harrigan opens the episode.
- A woodland safe house near Guildford, where the Harrigans and the Da Souzas regroup under heavy protection.
- Richie Stevenson’s South London pub/headquarters, long established as the Stevenson base of operations.
- A prison that now holds Conrad and Maeve Harrigan – yet still functions as the psychological center of power.
- The Harrigan manor in the Cotswolds, to which survivors drift back after the climactic violence.
All of it dropped on Paramount+ at the service’s standard U.S. release time – 3:00 a.m. ET / 12:00 a.m. PT – as the capstone of a weekly run that started on March 30, 2025.
Opening in Blood: Kevin, Rusby, and the First “Beast”
“The Beast in Me” begins not with a gang shootout, but with Kevin Harrigan having a one‑sided conversation with a corpse.
Alone in Alan Rusby’s blood‑spattered house, Kevin talks to the dead fixer, confessing long‑buried secrets. According to multiple episode recaps and the official episode summary, this is where he finally verbalizes that he has known for years that Eddie is not his son but his half‑brother – the child of his wife Bella and his own father, Conrad Harrigan. That revelation reframes nearly every Kevin–Eddie interaction from the season.
The cleanup is handled with chilling efficiency. Harry Da Souza arrives at the house, helps Kevin dispose of Rusby’s body, and restores some semblance of operational order. From the outset, the finale locks into one of its core themes: Harry is the man who can clean any mess – except the emotional wreckage of the Harrigans themselves.
The Mole Unmasked: O’Hara, the Guildford Safe House, and a New Order
From there, the action and the politics move quickly.
Harry confronts O’Hara, the family’s long‑trusted enforcer, and confirms what the season has been building toward: she has been the mole feeding information to rival boss Richie Stevenson for about a year, often while high on fentanyl. Instead of killing her immediately, Harry repurposes the betrayal. He orders her to set up a meeting with Richie – a tactical move that will pay off later in the episode.
At the same time, Conrad arranges for the Harrigan core – along with the Da Souzas – to be transported to a woodland safe house near Guildford. The forest compound becomes the major staging ground for the mid‑episode siege, but it also functions thematically as a limbo zone: a place where the family’s old rules are exposed and stripped down.
Inside that safe house, several crucial dynamics sharpen:
- Kevin begins acting like a man who expects to take full control.
- Bella remains fiercely loyal yet increasingly cornered by the secrets surrounding Eddie.
- Eddie grows more erratic as he senses that everyone knows more about him than he does.
All of this is happening while the old bosses – Conrad and Maeve – are physically removed to prison, but mentally still calling plays.
Kevin vs. Conrad: A Son Declares War
One of the episode’s most pivotal scenes occurs in that prison.
Kevin visits Conrad and informs him of two things:
- O’Hara has been identified as the rat.
- Kevin is now taking over the Harrigan empire.
Recaps and episode guides note that Kevin openly blames both Conrad and Maeve for years of abuse and emotional devastation. The conversation isn’t simply about who runs the business; it’s about a son repudiating the twisted legacy that built it. From this point on, the finale tracks Kevin as a man trying to win a war and purge his past at the same time.
Maeve’s Last Play: Eddie’s Parentage and the Attempted Matricide
If Kevin breaks with Conrad, Maeve responds by trying to mold the next generation directly.
From prison, she uses a burner phone to summon Eddie. Multiple outlet recaps agree on the essentials of their conversation:
- Maeve tells Eddie that Harry and Seraphina are plotting a coup and that he needs to kill them.
- She promises that if he does, he will be king of the family, with Maeve as his “queen.”
- When that pitch doesn’t land, she detonates the bigger bomb: Conrad is Eddie’s biological father, not Kevin.
Back at the Guildford safe house, Eddie confronts Bella with what he’s learned. Bella embraces him, apologizes, and insists that she loves him. In one of the darkest turns of the episode, Eddie uses that hug to try to strangle her to death. It’s only the intervention of bodyguard Kiko that saves Bella’s life.
In a single sequence, the finale exposes the damage done by decades of secrets: a son weaponized by a grandmother, a mother nearly killed by the child she lied to protect, and a family whose concept of “blood” has become poisonous in every sense.
Kat McAllister, Alice’s Fate, and the Wider Chessboard
While the Harrigans implode, the wider underworld is still in motion.
Power broker Kat McAllister reaches out to Seraphina Harrigan and hints at wanting to discuss the family’s future. Later, she meets with Harry directly. According to episode summaries, Kat downplays Seraphina’s importance and effectively offers Harry a job helping her take over the London crime scene.
Harry refuses. He not only turns down the offer but also rejects her implicit threats against Jan and Gina, signalling that there are still lines he will not cross, even as he orchestrates mass casualties elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Alice/Nicola – the informant who helped expose Conrad and Maeve by delivering DNA evidence and bugged phone data earlier in the season – meets a grim end. Colin betrays her, handing her over to Richie’s crew. She is killed off‑screen, a deliberate tying‑off of a plotline that had become too dangerous for all sides.
These moves emphasize that, even as one war seems to be ending, the criminal ecosystem around the Harrigans is already rearranging itself.
Forest Fire: The Guildford Ambush and Kiko’s Death
The middle of the episode delivers the kind of action sequence MobLand fans had been expecting all season – but threaded with the consequences of O’Hara’s betrayal.
Despite Harry’s earlier gambit, O’Hara double‑crosses the Harrigans again, giving Richie Stevenson the exact location of the Guildford safe house. Richie sends armed teams into the woods, expecting a surprise massacre.
Instead, he walks into a plan Harry and his crew have already put in motion. Paul, one of the Harrigan enforcers, has wired multiple approach routes with explosives. As Richie’s soldiers move in, the episode unleashes a forest‑set bloodbath: vehicles and gunmen are blown apart in carefully staged blasts around the compound.
Inside and around the safe house, Zosia and Kiko mount a desperate counter‑attack. The Harrigans ultimately survive the assault, but not without cost. Kiko is killed in the fighting, adding one more name to the finale’s already long casualty list.
The Guildford sequence closes off Richie’s last chance at a surprise win, but it also clears the way for the most direct confrontation yet.
The Pub Assault: Richie and O’Hara Meet Their End
With Richie’s forces badly mauled in the woods, Harry and Kevin switch from defense to offense.
They launch a direct assault on Richie’s South London pub/headquarters, the long‑standing heart of the Stevenson operation. In a close‑quarters firefight, both Richie Stevenson and O’Hara are killed. Entertainment Weekly’s recap emphasizes that this is the moment the Harrigan–Stevenson war definitively ends in the Harrigans’ favor, with Kevin personally executing Richie.
On the surface, this scene delivers what a season‑long gangland feud promises: the rival boss is dead, the mole is removed, and the apparent victors walk away. But the episode immediately shifts from street power to internal reckoning.
Shared Trauma: Kevin and Bella After the Smoke Clears
Following the violence at Richie’s pub, the focus narrows back to Kevin and Bella.
Kevin confronts Bella about both Eddie’s parentage and the way she responded to his teenage abuse at the hands of Conrad. Instead of deflecting, Bella reveals that her own father raped her for years, creating a grim parallel between their histories.
This disclosure serves several purposes at once:
- It confirms that cycles of abuse sit at the absolute core of the Harrigan story.
- It reframes Bella not only as a betrayer of Kevin but also as a survivor who made catastrophic choices under extreme trauma.
- It solidifies her pledge of loyalty to Kevin going forward; both characters acknowledge that they are bound together by more than just Eddie and the business.
For a show often defined by its stylized violence, the Kevin–Bella conversation stands out as one of its bluntest emotional scenes, and it’s directly rooted in factual recaps from major outlets.
Harry Comes Home: Jan’s Knife and Jez Butterworth’s Clarification
While wars are ending on the street, Harry’s “beast” finally catches up with him at home.
He returns to Jan at the Harrigan kitchen, telling her that everything is finally over and that they can go home. The conversation quickly turns into an argument about his life as a fixer and the danger he routinely brings to their family. Jan, overwhelmed and holding a kitchen knife, accidentally drives the blade into Harry’s chest during the confrontation.
Harry doesn’t collapse in melodramatic fashion. As multiple recaps note, he reacts with eerie calm, walking away and sitting down with the knife still embedded. The episode cuts away without explicitly stating whether he lives or dies, creating an immediate talking point among viewers.
Within days, however, executive producer Jez Butterworth addressed the question head‑on in interviews. Asked if the finale had really killed off Tom Hardy’s character, Butterworth said:
“If you consider it, ‘is Harry dead?’ No. We’re not going to – we adore Harry. We adore Tom.”
He also framed the choice to have Harry stabbed at home, rather than gunned down in a gang war, by pointing out that:
“Throughout the whole tale, the ball that he kept dropping was his home life.”
Those comments, reported across outlets, settle Harry’s status going into Season 2: he survives the stabbing and remains central to the show’s future.
Conrad’s Prison Coronation
The episode’s final image underlines that power in MobLand isn’t limited to who holds the most guns at street level.
In prison, Conrad Harrigan steps out of his cell into a corridor where inmates line up to cheer and salute him. Even as his children and grandchildren drag his legacy through the mud, his legend inside the system is only growing. Conrad may have lost direct control of the family business, but symbolically, the finale leaves him as a king in exile.
This shot arrives after Kevin’s declaration of independence and Maeve’s scheming, making it clear that the “old world” of the Harrigans isn’t disappearing – it’s mutating.
The Title Track: Johnny Cash’s “The Beast in Me”
The title “The Beast in Me” isn’t just metaphorical. The episode explicitly uses Johnny Cash’s 1994 version of “The Beast in Me”, written by Nick Lowe, as a recurring musical motif.
Coverage of the finale notes that Cash’s rendition plays twice:
- As Harry and his crew clean up Alan Rusby’s murder scene near the beginning of the episode.
- Again, over montages of the aftermath at the Guildford safe house and Richie’s headquarters, effectively bookending the trail of destruction.
The track’s lyrics about a barely contained inner monster mirror multiple character arcs:
- Kevin finally unleashing his buried rage at Conrad and Maeve.
- Eddie turning on Bella after learning the truth of his own bloodline.
- Harry discovering that his most dangerous “case” is his family, not his clients.
- Maeve quietly orchestrating disaster even from behind bars.
The repeated use of the song underscores that the true horror of MobLand isn’t the gunfire; it’s the inherited damage each character carries.
How “The Beast in Me” Resets MobLand for Season 2
By the time the credits roll, the board has been comprehensively reshuffled – and Paramount+ had already signaled its confidence in that new configuration.
On June 23, 2025, just weeks after the finale, the streamer officially renewed MobLand for Season 2, citing its 26 million+ viewers and status as its #2 original series worldwide. The show has since been promoted as a Golden Globe–nominated drama, with French‑language sources recording a 2026 nomination for Helen Mirren in Best Actress in a Television Series – Drama for her role as Maeve Harrigan.
Factually, here’s where Episode 10 leaves the major pieces:
- The gang war is effectively over. Richie Stevenson and O’Hara are dead, and the Stevenson crew has been decimated.
- Kevin emerges as de facto head of the Harrigans, having rejected Conrad and Maeve’s authority but still deeply entangled with Bella.
- Maeve remains in prison yet is portrayed, in the words of actor Anson Boon, as a woman “absolutely pulling the strings and twisting this family at every turn.”
- Conrad is mythologized behind bars, walking through a gauntlet of cheering inmates in the finale’s last moments.
- Eddie knows his true parentage, has attempted to kill his mother, and exits the season emotionally and morally unmoored.
- Harry survives the stabbing, as confirmed by Jez Butterworth, but faces his most complicated battlefield yet: rebuilding (or losing) his family life after Jan’s attack.
Critically and commercially, the finale capped a first season that earned “Certified Fresh” scores around the mid‑70s on Rotten Tomatoes, mixed‑to‑positive Metacritic scores near 60, and weeks near the top of global streaming charts. NME captured one corner of the fandom’s reaction by quoting viewers who hailed it as “one of the best season finales ever.”
Within those facts lies the core of why “The Beast in Me” resonates so strongly. It doesn’t simply kill a rival boss and roll credits. It documents, with painstaking detail, how a criminal dynasty built on secrecy, abuse, and ruthless calculation finally turns those same forces inward – leaving Season 2 not to ask who runs London, but which Harrigan, Da Souza, or McAllister can still live with themselves after everything we’ve just seen.
