MobLand Season 1, Episode 4 – “Rat Trap”: The Quiet Hour That Springs Every Trap
By the time MobLand hits Season 1, Episode 4, “Rat Trap”, the series has already laid out a full deck of feuds, secrets, and cover‑ups. But instead of going bigger and bloodier, Episode 4 slows down—on paper, at least.
Running about 41–42 minutes and premiering on Paramount+ in the US on April 20, 2025 (and later in Italy on June 6, 2025), “Rat Trap” is what Entertainment Weekly calls an “uncharacteristically quiet episode” that still delivers “explosive twists, turns, and reveals.” It’s a pressure‑cooker chapter where the killers, the liars, and even the undercover cops start to realize that every secret has a timer on it.
Behind the camera, multiple industry sources credit Anthony Byrne as director, with Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth scripting—continuing their run as the sole writers of the season. Some fan wikis list Daniel Syrkin as director, but professional episode guides, Metacritic, and Helen Mirren’s official archive all align on Byrne for Episode 4, making that the most reliable attribution.
And in front of the camera, the episode leans heavily on the core ensemble: Tom Hardy as fixer Harry Da Souza, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren as Harrigan power duo Conrad and Maeve, plus Paddy Considine, Lara Pulver, Joanne Froggatt, Anson Boon, Emily Barber, Geoff Bell, and others.
“Rat Trap” may not be the flashiest hour of the season, but critics repeatedly flag it as a pivot point—especially for Conrad, Jan, Maeve, and the fragile illusion that Harry can keep his work and home lives separate.
When the Dead Won’t Stay Buried: Archie’s Body and the Mole Hunt
“Rat Trap” opens by yanking an old crime back into the present.
Police, led by DS Ivan Fisk (Luke Mably), uncover the body of Archie, a once‑trusted Harrigan associate who was secretly buried by Harry and Conrad. Only those two men knew the location, according to series summaries, which instantly raises a terrifying question inside the Harrigan estate: who else could have known where Archie was?
This discovery plays out primarily in the Harrigans’ London stronghold—Conrad and Maeve’s base of operations—and it launches one of Episode 4’s key narrative engines: paranoia.
- Maeve quickly seizes on the find as proof that there is a mole inside the family.
- She starts to subtly steer suspicion toward Harry, weaponizing the fact that he was with Conrad when Archie was buried.
Recaps note that she whispers doubts into both Conrad’s and grandson Eddie’s ears, hinting that Harry might be the leak. This is especially chilling given what else Maeve is hiding: that she and Eddie are the real architects behind the season’s central killing.
The Secret Within the Secret: Maeve and Eddie’s Role in Tommy’s Death
While Richie Stevenson’s gang still believes Tommy’s death is a messy, possibly random act, Episode 4 sharpens what’s really happening on the Harrigan side.
Dialogue between Maeve and Eddie makes it explicit that:
- Eddie Harrigan stabbed Tommy Stevenson, and
- Maeve orchestrated the hit, turning her grandson’s impulsive violence into a calculated play in her long‑term power game.
LifeInism’s recap underlines how “Rat Trap” stops treating Tommy’s murder as a simple, isolated brawl gone wrong. Instead, the episode frames it as part of Maeve’s quiet campaign to guide the family’s future without Conrad fully realizing how far she’s willing to go.
At the same time, Maeve is blaming Harry for a possible leak—while she’s the one actively moving the pieces around Eddie and Tommy’s death. It’s the most overt look yet at Maeve as the show’s long‑game strategist.
Bella, Antoine, and a £40,000 Bribe That Doesn’t Work
Away from the Harrigan mansion, Harry spends much of Episode 4 trying to keep a different scandal from blowing up.
We learn that Bella Harrigan (Lara Pulver) has been entangled with Antoine, a fixer/blackmailer who holds incriminating footage related to her father. To neutralize that threat:
- Harry tracks Antoine to his London apartment.
- He forces Antoine to hand over a memory card and its backup—the digital insurance policy that’s been hanging over Bella.
- Antoine tries to flip the script, offering Harry £40,000 to walk away and keep the material in play.
Recaps from High On Films make clear that Harry refuses the bribe, takes the evidence, and returns it to Bella. The sequence hits multiple MobLand pressure points at once:
- It reinforces Harry as the “fixer” type Tom Hardy has described in interviews—the character who does diplomacy, cleanup, and the “invisible” work instead of grandstanding.
- It binds Harry even more tightly to Bella’s secrets, which is dangerous given what Kevin eventually confesses about her relationship with Conrad.
Kevin’s Confession: Bella, Conrad, and a Family Line Crossed
While Harry waits to see what Richie will do with Valjon, “Rat Trap” drops one of its most unsettling personal reveals.
According to The Review Geek’s recap:
- Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine) tells Harry that Bella was once Conrad’s mistress.
- Only later did she become Kevin’s partner.
That means Kevin is married to a woman who used to be his own father’s lover—a fact that reframes a lot of Bella’s position in the family. For Kevin, it’s a source of visible humiliation and insecurity. For Conrad, it’s another sign of how transactional his relationships can be. For Maeve, it’s more potential leverage.
Coming in the same episode as the Antoine evidence recovery, this revelation makes Episode 4 a concentrated hit of Bella‑related secrets. It also helps explain some of the tension and volatility that will keep building around Kevin and Bella as the season progresses.
Jan vs. the Harrigans: Therapy, Intimidation, and an Undercover Neighbor
If the Harrigan estate is where conspiracies are plotted, Jan’s boat and flat are where the human cost shows up.
Episode 4 spends substantial time with Jan Da Souza (Joanne Froggatt):
- She continues couples’ therapy alone, still trying to process her marriage to Harry and the emotional fallout of his job.
- She vents about Harry to her new friend Alice, who Jan believes is just a sympathetic neighbor.
LifeInism’s recap underscores the key twist: Alice is actually an undercover police officer, embedded in Harry’s orbit to get closer to the Harrigans—especially Conrad. However, Alice pushes back when her handler suggests using sex as a tool, delivering one of the episode’s sharpest lines:
“Then you go blow Conrad Harrigan.”
That single line tells you a lot about Alice: she’s prepared to work the case, but she’s not willing to cross every line the operation proposes.
Meanwhile, Conrad demonstrates just how dangerous it is for Jan to talk to anyone about her life:
- Having had Jan followed, he knows she is sharing things in therapy.
- He shows up at Jan’s place unannounced, flirts with Alice, then grips Jan’s knee hard enough to make his threat crystal clear.
- His message: never talk about Harrigan business again.
Later, when Harry returns, he echoes the warning in a much softer way—telling Jan she must keep his work separate from their home life. But by that point, Jan has already experienced both the velvet‑gloved version from Harry and the bare‑knuckled version from Conrad.
It’s also in this domestic sphere that the show’s core deception is cemented: Jan trusts Alice, while viewers now know Alice is part of the police effort to bring the Harrigans down.
Donnie’s “Good News” and the Sense of Being Watched
Another seemingly small but important beat in “Rat Trap” comes when Donnie, a man claiming to be Harry’s friend, turns up at the garage/workshop where Zosia (Jasmine Jobson) works.
He tells Zosia he has “good news” for Harry, but recaps and summaries stress that Donnie is essentially serving as a messenger from Conrad and Maeve. His appearance reinforces a theme running through the whole episode: Harry and Jan are under constant surveillance, and the Harrigans are not fully convinced of Harry’s loyalty.
Richie’s Torture Test: Valjon’s Death and the Funeral Invitation
On the Stevenson side, very little about Episode 4 is subtle.
We already know that Valjon, a club owner tied to Tommy Stevenson’s disappearance, has been tortured by Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell). In previous episodes, Valjon confessed to helping dispose of Tommy’s body, effectively making himself the designated fall guy.
By the time “Rat Trap” arrives, Richie is unconvinced that Valjon’s confession covers the whole story. As Yahoo‑syndicated analysis lays out:
- Richie summons Harry alone to The Sinful Monkey, his club and de facto headquarters.
- He hands Harry a gun and orders him to personally kill Valjon, framing it as a test of loyalty and a way to tie off loose ends.
Harry’s response is one of the episode’s most brutal—and telling—moments. Instead of using the gun:
- He breaks off a piece of wood and
- Stabs Valjon repeatedly until he is dead.
By avoiding the gun, Harry sidesteps ballistic evidence while still proving he’s willing to carry out Richie’s demand. Richie appears satisfied, but analysis pieces are clear that his suspicion doesn’t vanish; if anything, he now knows exactly how far Harry can go.
Then comes the episode’s final move. After the killing:
- Richie tells Harry he wants the entire Harrigan family at Tommy Stevenson’s funeral.
On the surface, it sounds like a gesture toward truce. In practice, it plays exactly like the title suggests: the bait has been laid, and the Harrigans are expected to walk into whatever “trap” Richie has planned next.
Harry’s “Reasonable Man” Mask Starts to Slip
From the beginning of MobLand, Tom Hardy has described Harry Da Souza as a “consigliere or a diplomat or a fixer”—someone who is, in his words, a “really nice person and reasonable” on the surface, yet “capable of very unreasonable stuff.”
Episode 4 is one of the clearest executions of that design:
- In Antoine’s apartment, Harry is the calm negotiator, shutting down a £40,000 bribe and surgically removing leverage from Bella’s blackmailer.
- At the Harrigan estate, he plays the loyal associate who never raises his voice even as Maeve quietly lines him up in the crosshairs of suspicion.
- In The Sinful Monkey, he morphs into the man who will kill a tortured victim with a jagged chunk of wood, not out of personal rage but to keep warring crime families on a controllable track.
Hardy has said he wanted to get away from “seven years with superheroes” into something “more gritty” where he could just “swear” and disappear into a grounded role. “Rat Trap” is an episode that fully leans into that: Harry doesn’t dominate the room, but his decisions—refusing Antoine’s money, covering Bella, warning Jan yet again, and choosing to slaughter Valjon off‑script—shape almost every power dynamic that follows.
Conrad Finally Steps Out of the Shadows
While Hardy’s Harry is the connective tissue, critics have zeroed in on Pierce Brosnan’s Conrad Harrigan as the breakout element of Episode 4.
CBR’s review bluntly states that “Pierce Brosnan blows the gritty doors off MobLand Season 1, Episode 4”, arguing that “Rat Trap” is where Conrad stops being a mostly off‑screen boogeyman and fully inhabits the space as an active threat:
- He orchestrates the quiet internal mole hunt after Archie’s body is found.
- He personally intimidates Jan, demonstrating how far his reach is beyond the immediate crime world.
- His past relationship with Bella is confirmed, deepening the dysfunction at the core of the Harrigan family.
Entertainment Weekly’s description of the hour as a “quiet episode” with “explosive twists” fits Conrad particularly well: he doesn’t need big action set‑pieces to change the game; his presence alone is now clearly a problem for everyone around him.
Where “Rat Trap” Sits in the Season—and Why It Matters
Structurally, “Rat Trap” lands at the exact middle of MobLand’s first half:
- Season 1 has 10 episodes, released weekly from March 30 to June 1, 2025 in the US.
- “Rat Trap” is Episode 4, arriving after the initial chaos of Tommy’s death and Archie’s burial, but before the endgame moves of Episodes 8–10.
Several things make Episode 4 a turning point rather than a filler chapter:
- It confirms Maeve and Eddie as central players behind Tommy’s killing, rather than sidelined family members.
- It exposes Kevin’s deepest humiliation via Bella’s past with Conrad.
- It cements Alice as an undercover cop and not just a side character in Jan’s orbit.
- It shows Harry crossing yet another moral line with Valjon’s murder, while still trying to hold his family together.
All of this unfolds against the larger backdrop of MobLand’s strong performance:
- The series premiere drew 2.2 million viewers on March 30, 2025—Paramount+’s biggest global series launch ever by that metric.
- Within its first 70 days, MobLand reached around 26 million global viewers, becoming the platform’s #2 original series of all time, behind Landman.
- It stayed in Nielsen’s Top 10 SVOD original series for five weeks, a period that includes Episode 4’s initial run and early binge window.
That level of engagement is part of why Paramount+ moved quickly to renew MobLand for Season 2 in June 2025. Co‑writer Jez Butterworth has said TV was a “brand new world” he was reluctant to commit to, but that the experience “completely changed [his] perspective” and left him “excited to dive into the second season.”
How to Watch “Rat Trap” Now (December 2025)
As of late 2025, MobLand Season 1, including Episode 4, “Rat Trap”, is available to stream on:
- Paramount+ in the US and most international markets.
- JioCinema in India (as part of the platform’s Paramount+ partnership).
For viewers coming in fresh:
- Paramount+ Essential costs $7.99/month or $59/year.
- Paramount+ with SHOWTIME costs $12.99/month or $119.99/year.
Various guides note that new users can often access MobLand via a seven‑day free trial of Paramount+ (including through Amazon Prime Video Channels), depending on region and eligibility.
Whichever tier you use, you’ll be hitting play on an episode that critics repeatedly single out as a fulcrum: not the loudest hour of MobLand, but the one where the traps are set, the masks slip, and almost every character’s worst secret starts to look dangerously close to exposure.
