“The Crossroads” of MobLand: Inside Season 1, Episode 7’s Bloody Turning Point
Season 1 of MobLand hits its true point of no return with Episode 7, “The Crossroads” — a 40‑ish‑minute pressure cooker that turns a simmering London gang feud into open war, live‑streamed execution included.
Released on May 11, 2025 on Paramount+ as part of the show’s 10‑episode first season, “The Crossroads” arrives after weeks of steadily rising stakes. By this point MobLand had already broken out as a major streaming hit, contributing to a season that drew 2.2 million global viewers on premiere day, expanded to 8.8 million in its first week, and ultimately reached 26 million viewers by late June, making it Paramount+’s #2 most‑watched original series. All of that momentum funnels into this episode’s brutal, tightly constructed story.
Before we get into the emotional carnage, it helps to understand exactly how Episode 7 fits into the wider season arc.
How We Got Here: Antwerp Deals and Maeve’s Quiet Betrayal
Episodes 5 and 6 set the board for the chaos unleashed in “The Crossroads.”
In Episode 5, “Funeral for a Friend,” the Harrigan and Stevenson clans gather for Tommy Stevenson’s funeral. The uneasy truce dies with the flowers. After being publicly humiliated by Tommy’s mother Vron, Maeve Harrigan retaliates with a car bomb that kills Vron, all but guaranteeing escalation to an all‑out gang war.
At the same time, next‑generation Harrigans Brendan and Seraphina push to prove their worth. Brendan persuades Seraphina to front a high‑stakes diamond deal in Antwerp, far from the Harrigans’ Cotswolds stronghold and London base. That deal becomes the hinge on which Episode 7 swings.
In Episode 6, “Antwerp Blues,” we learn just how ruthless Maeve is willing to be. While Harry Da Souza tracks the siblings to Belgium, Maeve secretly phones rival boss Richie Stevenson, gives him the exact Antwerp location, and explicitly asks that only Seraphina be killed, with Brendan spared. Richie’s men hit the meet, guns blazing, and the episode ends with Brendan and Seraphina held at gunpoint — a cliffhanger that “The Crossroads” resolves in the most harrowing way possible.
Opening in Blood: “WAR” on the Warehouse Floor
“The Crossroads” opens with Harry already too late. When he reaches the Antwerp diamond‑deal warehouse, the deal is over in the most literal sense: the building is littered with corpses.
On the floor, written in blood, is a single word: “WAR.” Multiple recaps and Entertainment Weekly’s write‑up highlight this image — a blunt, visual declaration that the feud between the Harrigans and the Stevensons has moved past a series of tit‑for‑tat attacks into outright conflict.
The scene was filmed in a warehouse space at Building Q121 in the historic Farnborough Wind Tunnel Buildings in Hampshire, repurposed on screen as a Belgian crime scene. The cavernous, industrial architecture amps up the sense of scale and finality: this is no small‑time hit; it’s a declaration.
From the dead and the blood, Harry pieces together what happened. The kidnapping chain runs like this:
- The Antwerp deal draws in Moroccan gangsters connected to the Antwerp docks, part of the El Youfsi mob.
- Those Moroccans abduct Brendan and Seraphina.
- They hand the siblings over to a Mexican cartel aligned with Richie Stevenson.
- The cartel, led by Jaime Lopez (played by Jordi Mollà), moves the captives on to a fortified warehouse base in Amsterdam.
In typical Harry fashion, deduction quickly gives way to violence. He tracks the Moroccan crew to their base — described in recaps as a drug‑processing facility — and takes “extreme measures,” as the official Paramount+ logline puts it. That means a one‑man assault in which he kills his way through the operation to extract the next link in the chain: Amsterdam and Jaime’s cartel warehouse.
Maeve’s Lie, O’Hara’s Warning, and a Family on Edge
While Harry is carving his path across the European criminal underworld, the Harrigan inner circle retreats to their Cotswolds estate, filmed at Waverton House in Gloucestershire. There, the emotional story of “The Crossroads” really kicks in.
Maeve has already betrayed Brendan and Seraphina by handing them to Richie; in Episode 7 she doubles down with a calculated lie. She tells Conrad Harrigan that Richie has taken the children and claims she received a text message confirming it. When Conrad asks to see the text, she pivots, insisting that his request means he doesn’t trust her — an emotional feint that gets her off the hook, at least in the moment.
This is where the show’s cops thread back into the frame. O’Hara arrives at the Cotswolds estate with a simple, chilling message: there is a rat inside the family, and police pressure is intensifying. That warning supercharges every look and side‑glance around the Harrigans’ long dining table. Viewers know exactly who the rat really is in this immediate context — Maeve — but the characters don’t, and “The Crossroads” wrings a lot of tension out of that asymmetry.
Jan, Alice, and the Suspicious Country Pub Meeting
Parallel to the main kidnapping plot, Episode 7 advances the undercover‑cop storyline that’s been quietly building all season.
Jan Da Souza, Harry’s wife, is being cultivated as a source by Alice — her new “friend” from group therapy who is in fact an undercover police informant working with DS Fisk. In “The Crossroads,” Alice calls Jan in distress and says she “needs to talk.” Jan sneaks out of the heavily monitored Cotswolds estate to meet her.
That meeting point is no accidental backdrop. They rendezvous at a country pub that Atlas of Wonders identifies as the historic Falkland Arms in Great Tew, Oxfordshire. Recaps point out that it’s about a two‑hour drive from London, underlining just how implausible it is that an ordinary therapy buddy would insist on an urgent, in‑person chat so far from home. To the audience, it reads as what it is: a lure.
But the Harrigans are not nearly as careless as Jan hopes. Conrad’s enforcer Paul O’Donnell tails her, listens in as Alice and Jan talk about “killers and gangsters,” and intervenes outside the pub. He threatens Alice and forcibly hauls Jan back to the estate, slamming the brakes — for now — on any meaningful leak of information from inside the Harrigan machine.
Eddie and Gina “Make Common Cause”
While the older generation schemes, the younger generation continues to complicate everything.
The official Episode 7 synopsis notes that Eddie and Gina “make common cause.” Multiple recaps spell out what that means: Conrad’s grandson Eddie and Harry and Jan’s daughter Gina deepen their relationship and end up sleeping together or “getting frisky.”
It’s more than a romantic subplot. The entanglement between the Harrigans and the Da Souzas — fixers and clients, lovers and family — becomes another way the show keeps everyone locked in a closed system. By the end of Season 1, those blurred lines will matter a great deal.
The Chain Saw Livestream: Brendan’s Death in Amsterdam
If the Antwerp warehouse opening announces war, the Amsterdam warehouse sequence delivers its first major casualty.
Jaime Lopez, running the Mexican cartel side of the operation, has Brendan and Seraphina held in what recaps describe as a heavily fortified space standing in for Amsterdam. From there, Richie orchestrates a grotesque performance. He sets up a video conference that links:
- Richie and his crew,
- the Harrigans at the Cotswolds estate, and
- Brendan and Seraphina in Amsterdam, with Jamie and an executioner revving a chainsaw.
On the call, Seraphina tries to buy Jaime’s mercy. He refuses. As several recaps note, Jaime references a history of racist insults Conrad hurled at his father decades earlier, turning the execution into a multi‑generational revenge spectacle as well as a power play in the current drug war.
Back in Antwerp and on the road, Harry realizes there is no way he can physically reach Amsterdam in time. That’s when he makes the decision that reorders the entire show’s power structure.
Harry phones Donnie and finally agrees to be put through to Kat McAllister, the enigmatic international crime boss who has been hovering on the margins all season, trying to recruit him. Until now, Harry has resisted entangling himself with her. In Episode 7, he runs out of options.
Kat calls Jaime directly and orders him to stand down. He does — but too late for Brendan. Multiple independent recaps and the canonical episode summary agree on the outcome:
- Brendan Harrigan is killed by the executioner’s chainsaw.
- Seraphina survives, spared because Kat intervenes.
From her position at the top of a separate global crime network, Kat reaches into a Mexican cartel’s Amsterdam warehouse and overrides Richie’s plan in real time. The rescue does not save Brendan, but it saves Seraphina and, crucially, shackles Harry to Kat.
She delivers the line that CBR singled out as the episode’s fulcrum:
“Harry, you owe me.”
From here on, every move Harry makes is under the shadow of that debt.
Harry’s “Extreme Measures” and the Emerging Global Map
Seen in sequence, Harry’s actions in “The Crossroads” outline MobLand’s global criminal geography:
- Antwerp warehouse: The aftermath of the diamond deal gone wrong, bodies on the floor, “WAR” written in blood.
- Moroccan base: A drug‑processing outfit tied to Antwerp’s underworld, violently dismantled by Harry as he hunts for leads.
- Amsterdam warehouse: Jaime Lopez’s fortified cartel stronghold, where the execution is staged.
Through this chain, the series ties local London power struggles to a broader web: Moroccan dock gangs, a Mexican cartel, European port cities. Kat’s off‑screen command over Jaime signals yet another layer beyond that.
The episode’s narrative never leaves the core characters for long, but geographically and structurally it opens the show up, hinting at the scale Season 2 is likely to explore further.
Maeve vs. Kat: Who Really Holds the Power?
Although “The Crossroads” is marketed around Harry’s “extreme measures,” critics have emphasized how much of its real power play happens outside his control.
CBR’s review argues that Maeve Harrigan is the central driver of the chaos, noting that the episode works because so much “happens outside [Harry’s] influence.” Maeve’s secret deal with Richie in Episode 6 and her lie about the text message in Episode 7 are the choices that place Brendan and Seraphina in mortal danger in the first place.
Yet when the chainsaw is revving in Amsterdam, Maeve has no power to stop it. That leverage belongs to Kat McAllister, who swoops in from offstage and proves she can overrule Richie and Jaime alike. Harry’s decision to call Kat effectively transfers a chunk of the Harrigans’ fate to an external player.
Helen Mirren, who plays Maeve, has been blunt about how her character processes Brendan’s death. Reflecting on Episode 7’s ending, she said:
“I don’t think she cared… she certainly wanted to get rid of her stepdaughter, and she kind of cared about Brendan, kind of.”
That comment fits what we see on screen: Maeve is shaken, but not shattered. Brendan’s death hurts less, for her, than the loss of control and the exposure of how thoroughly her schemes have backfired. For viewers, it’s a turning point in how Maeve is perceived — less grieving mother, more architect of catastrophe.
Kat, meanwhile, emerges from Episode 7 as the most dangerous person in the MobLand universe precisely because she accomplishes more with one phone call than the Harrigans and Stevensons manage with an entire season of violence.
How “The Crossroads” Landed with Viewers and Critics
On the numbers side, Episode 7 is part of a season that was already a certified hit.
- By early April, MobLand had become Paramount+’s biggest global series premiere ever, with 2.2 million premiere‑day viewers and 8.8 million in its first week.
- By June 23, Paramount+ reported 26 million viewers to date and renewed the show for Season 2, noting that it had spent five consecutive weeks in Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming originals.
Critically, Season 1 as a whole sits in the mid‑70s on Rotten Tomatoes and around 59–60/100 on Metacritic, reflecting generally positive reviews but a sense that the show embraces — rather than reinvents — gangster conventions.
For “The Crossroads” specifically:
- Rotten Tomatoes features a positive 8/10 critic review by CBR’s Martin Carr, who wrote that:
> Now more than ever, MobLand is moving into uncharted territory, propelled by a powerhouse ensemble that intentionally blindsides its audiences.
- Metacritic lists a 5.0/10 user score based on a handful of ratings, showing a more mixed audience response — likely a reflection of how brutally the episode dispatches one of the Harrigans’ key heirs.
Whatever individual viewers felt, Episode 7 clearly did its job: it shocked, it escalated, and it rearranged the board heading into the final three episodes.
The Fallout and Why Episode 7 Matters Going Forward
The consequences of “The Crossroads” ripple through Episodes 8–10 and into the already‑confirmed Season 2.
Immediately afterward:
- Seraphina returns to the Cotswolds alive but traumatized.
- Harry admits to Conrad that he called in Kat McAllister, though he reaffirms his loyalty to the Harrigans.
- Conrad, recognizing Kat’s reach, tasks Harry — via Kat — with brokering a sit‑down with Jaime over the fentanyl trade, trying to exploit tension between Jaime and Richie after the Amsterdam debacle.
By the Season 1 finale (“The Beast in Me”), the war culminates in Richie Stevenson’s death at the hands of Kevin and Harry, a pyrrhic Harrigan “victory” soaked in yet more blood. Police pressure, O’Hara’s duplicity, the undercover operation through Alice, and Maeve’s long‑term maneuvering all converge to leave the family badly damaged.
In industry terms, Paramount+ moved quickly to capitalize on the momentum. On June 23, 2025, the streamer officially renewed MobLand for Season 2, citing the 26‑million‑viewer milestone. By late 2025:
- Season 2 was reported to be in production in London.
- New series regulars Johnny Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond were announced, though character details remain under wraps.
- Key players like Janet McTeer (Kat McAllister), Toby Jones (Colin Tattersall), and Alex Fine (Donnie) were confirmed to return — a clear sign that the debt Harry incurs in Episode 7, and Kat’s ascent to the center of the story, will continue to drive the narrative.
Looking back from that vantage point, “The Crossroads” is exactly what its title promises: a branching point where every major thread of MobLand — family loyalty, state pressure, global drug routes, and the emergence of a new kind of crime boss in Kat — collides in one bloody, unforgettable hour.
