Saddle up, it’s “Loyalty to the Master” of The Continental, and we’re putting a little team together. Assembling the proverbial Seven Samurai (or Magnificent Seven, depending on your favored side of the John Wick genre coin) to mount a raid on the New York underworld’s Hidden Fortress, lock, stock, and barrel.
Frankie’s body goes up in flames. The warrior’s funeral, Jedi energy ascending, and so forth. Winston and his new assembly of confidants stand around Frankie’s ashes. The streets have already given word that Cormac never got his coin press. The Adjudicator has served a heavy ultimatum from the High Table: Cormac’s got three days to locate the coin press and bring those responsible to their feet. Failure will result in immediate suspension and a declaration of “Interregnum” (in the Wick-verse, every procedure from the High Table has a dope-sounding Latin name as a treat). He’ll be desperate now, and Winston sees the hands of fate opening a window of opportunity.
So who’s on the roster? To Winston’s immediate aid, we’ve got Miles, Lou, and Lemmy. It takes Lou a minute to opt in. She’s the only one who cares about keeping her Dad’s dojo up and running (like, as an actual dojo). Now she’s got a beef with the Orphan Master, a local Fagin-from-Oliver-Twist type gangster who’s expanding his turf, moving cigarette machines into all the Chinatown shops to extract a wider expanse of “protection fees.” Lou isn’t having it. Levels a whole-ass group of the Orphan Master’s cronies, Cleopatra Jones style … twice. As far as she knows, her father had an understanding with the previous Chinatown crime boss, left alone to win championship belts and run his dojo with honor. There’s more to her father’s story than she knows, but she’s come by her desire to continue his legacy honestly.
“No guns,” Lou tells Lemmy during a bit of a hatchet practice. “Wouldn’t make sense for me to live any other way. With hand-to-hand or any other weapon, you have a choice: life or death. With a gun, there is no choice. Only death.” As for the Continental job, she’s on board to help, but she won’t be pulling any triggers or storming the castle with the rest of the team. Something tells me the hand of fate is itching to complicate things for her.
And the crew still needs more trigger fingers on their side. It’s hard to find a “professional” in this town who isn’t already in Cormac’s pocket. But there is the incomparable Gene Jenkins (Ray McKinnon), an old friend of Miles and Lou’s Dad and this week’s delightfully quirky psycho killer. Supposedly retired from High Table service and fresh off a bounty kill and picnic in the park, our aging horticulturist gunslinger with a fading dominant eye comes home to find Miles at his door with an offer to help take down the Continental. “I’ll get glasses. Prescription!” Gene exclaims. It’s an offer he can’t refuse. Take it from one of the old guard: “Suicidal or not, yours is a righteous cause. If anybody ever deserved to be eliminated, it’s Cormac O’Connor.” Just so happens that thinking Cormac should die is the first criterion for joining this crew. Gene is in.
Speaking of, better check in on Yen (by my count, the highest-ranking Wickian badass of the show thus far). At the top of the episode, we see her awaken from a gunshot-induced delirium to find her husband cremated without her permission. Her rage is thunderous. Nhung Kate is a race car driver and an MMA fighter, bringing a unique physicality to a role that fills the John Wick praxis of characterization via combat. Back at the dojo, Yen brings in a blueprint of the Continental, patched together and stowed by Frankie. She’s still sour at Winston but yoked to him spiritually, on the same path of vengeance. Yen is in.
With the main players all lined up, it’s time to gather some outside troops. Winston will try to get an audience with Mazie, an elusive competitor of Cormac’s, running a prolific operation out of the Bowery. Nobody knows precisely what it is or who works for her. The “army of the unseen,” they call them. Wick heads will know the Bowery as the domain of the Bowery King in the films (Laurence Fishburne), leader of New York’s secret network of unhoused mercenaries. Is Mazie the Bowery King’s immediate predecessor? Mom? Perhaps an answer for a different prequel.
Winston heads to the Soup Kitchen (the Bowery King’s home base in the movies) and gains an audience with Mazie in a scene straight out of Escape from New York. “You must be the son of a bitch everyone’s looking for,” she says from behind the shoulder of her decoy, all guns in the room drawn on him. However, things get more civil up on the rooftop, where Mazie and Winston hold a steely palaver. Winston’s ready with a cash offer. Whatever her price to secure her army’s services, he’ll pay. But Mazie doesn’t deal in dollars. Gave that up a long time ago when she rejected the comforts of her wealthy family. The men she calls her flock come to her because she helps them reclaim their humanity, organizing their invisibility to the outside world into an underworld superpower. Under her wing, they see themselves. “Love, can you dig it?”
For anyone keeping tally, that line’s the most blatant Warriors reference thus far — a call to ditch the mirage of personal gain for tangible, collective dignity. Mazie and her army can’t be bought, but they can be enlisted by the right story. For now, it seems Winston’s procured the love of the Bowery. And with Ronnie, the helicopter pilot on deck, this crew of avenging angels is nearly assembled. The only thing missing is an inside man.
And who better to work the inside than the concierge? “Loyalty to the Master” closes out on Charon, his loyalty to the tyrant that pulled him into this underworld in serious question for the first time. Taking five on the familiar rooftop patio (that Molochian fireplace roaring), Charon writes a letter to his Father (whom Cormac has promised to bring to the States from Nigeria) while Thomas (Samuel Blenkin), the hotel cellist, serenades him. As he’ll later admit to Cormac (a fatal whoopsy), Charon is still a loyal servant of the hotel’s master, even when Thomas suggests that he “broaden his horizons.”
Taking Mazie’s wisdom to heart, Winston is able to win Charon over by telling his story — a potent warning call validating Charon’s concerns about his boss’s violent downward spiral. Back in the day, Cormac was a mid-level gangster who made collections in Winston and Frankie’s neighborhood. At Winston’s suggestion, Frankie started skimming from the top until one night, the windshield of the car they were living in exploded, and the Scott brothers were dragged across broken glass and pavement and into the service of “you know who.”
With Cormac, every relationship comes down to you or him in the end. “I’m offering you the chance to decide who you wanna be,” Winston tells Charon. “Before it’s too late.” Charon returns to the Continental to find Thomas in a bloody mess on the ground. Cormac’s not-so-veiled threat is clear: stick with me, or you’re going down. While we’re at it, the hotel’s in need of a new musician, someone they can “trust.” How about your father, Charon?
Right on cue, Charon is facing the dilemma Winston foretold: a sacrifice of anything and everything Cormac promised. Our righteous gang of thieves has just found their inside man.
Stray Bullets
• From where I sit, director Charlotte Brändström (The Witcher, The Outsider, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) does a great job taking the baton from first and third episode director Albert Hughes to make this dialogue-heavy second act feel like a crisp, efficient episode of television. John Wick has always been a hallucinatory pop-mythological ride. More about vibes than canon, even in its deepest world-building obsessions. A big question hanging over this project heading into it was, will it retroactively ground John Wick in a broader story that resonates, or will it haphazardly impose the tropes, constructions, and continuity concerns of a TV series over an otherwise ethereal cinematic property? Taking the public and critical temperature here, it looks like I’m on a small island of people who say, “Yeah, I’m thinkin’ we’re back” in the world of John Wick!
• “When The Continental displays the purity of focus that makes the John Wick films work so well […] it hits on all lizard-brain synapses,” Roxana Hadadi wrote in her review, which I highly recommend reading if you’re looking for an astute breakdown of what this show might be getting wrong. Takes of action aren’t as long, the editing is a little choppier, but “these punching-kicking-shooting-blowing-stuff-up duels are when The Continental and its characters feel most alive, their stakes the most dire.” Agreed, which is probably why I’m most keen on Yen and Lou going into the finale. Their characterizations are yoked in their physicality, and their physicality plays as a meaningful extension of their will.
• My lizard-brain synapses fired most during Gene Jenkins’ intro, sipping wine and sniping perps to the tune of 999’s “Homicide.” His scope hovers over children’s heads like the Scorpio killer’s scope in Dirty Harry or in Peter Bogdonavich’s Targets before it lands on his prey. Not exactly action ballet, but it was the moment I knew this was a shade of John Wick I’d be thrilled to have for the remainder of its runtime.
• Cormac up in that little church praying to sweet, bloody Jesus on the cross for help had me absolutely howling. Simply too devious a nod to Mel’s infamous, uh, passions for the Christ to pass up. “Now get outta here so I can pray,” he says to Hansel, Gretel, and the rest of his goons in attendance. “It’s a sacrilege you people even being here in the first place; it’s a wonder you don’t all burst into flames.” Did Mel even know the camera was rolling during that scene?
