Why did Eddie kill Tommy in MobLand?
MobLand spent half a season finding out who killed Tommy Stevenson, but the question that matters is why, and the show has been very careful about who gets to answer it.
MobLand premiered on Paramount+ on March 30, 2025. Created by Ronan Bennett, it follows Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy), the fixer for the Harrigan crime family in London, headed by Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and his wife Maeve (Helen Mirren). Their grandson Eddie (Anson Boon) goes on a night out with Tommy (Felix Edwards), the only son of rival boss Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell), and comes home alone. Season 2 premiered on September 18, 2026, and the finale is set for November 20.
What happened that night
In episode 1, "Stick or Twist," Eddie stabs a boy named Hughie in a club. Tommy panics, curses him out, and the two of them run. Tommy is never seen alive again.
Eddie lies about even being with Tommy until Harry runs out of patience. Eddie's friends point Harry to Valjon (Peter Ferdinando), a club manager Eddie knows personally. At the end of episode 2, "Jigsaw Puzzle," Harry beats Valjon until he shows him a trunk in the basement. Tommy is inside, cut into pieces and wrapped in plastic. Harry asks if Valjon did all of this himself. Valjon's answer: "Yes. My dad was a butcher."
In episode 3, "Plan B," Valjon tells Kevin (Paddy Considine), Eddie's father, the rest. Eddie had offered him ten grand to take care of Tommy. After the first stabbing, Eddie texted Valjon to pick both boys up and bring them back to the club. Valjon left them there. When he came back, Tommy had been stabbed 50 or 60 times and Eddie was gone.
Eddie never denies it in any detail, and never explains it either.
The reason Eddie doesn't give
The show supplies Eddie's side of the motive through the people around him. His family treats him as the screwup. In episode 2, Eddie admits to Maeve that he enjoyed stabbing the man in the club, and she rewards him with a bag of cocaine. Later that episode she tells Conrad she sees Eddie as the future of the family, precisely because he has no pretensions about being anything other than a criminal.
That gives Eddie a reason to want blood and an audience that applauds it. Tommy was the obvious target: the boys famously hated each other, and Tommy was the heir of the family the Harrigans wanted gone.
The money is the giveaway. Eddie paid Valjon to leave the two of them alone in his club. Whatever happened between them, the murder wasn't a drug-fueled accident.
"What we did"
Episode 4, "Rat Trap," answers the question Eddie never does. Over an enormous English breakfast, he asks Maeve, "Was it a mistake, what we did?" The word that matters is "we."
Maeve's answer is that they have everyone "exactly where we want them." Then she spells out what the murder was for:
"When you cut Tommy up, that sent a message."
The Harrigans, she adds, are about to send another. The murder made a gang war inevitable, and the war was what Maeve wanted. One episode earlier, while Conrad wanted Richie dead, Maeve proposed a different plan B: killing Richie's wife, Vron. Eddie, the grandson she called the future of the family, was her way in.
The season 1 finale shows how literal that plan was. Maeve tells Eddie that Kevin isn't his father. Conrad is. Eddie responds by attacking his mother, Bella.
Eddie killed Tommy to prove he was a real Harrigan. He turned out to be more of one than he knew.
Season 2 takes it back
Season 2 makes Maeve's game look even colder. She sends Eddie to Ireland to deal with the gangster Medusa (Colm Meaney), a job Anson Boon reads as a setup. "He's not stupid; he knows she set him up for failure," Boon told Collider.
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In episode 7, "Ace of Spades," which streamed October 30, Maeve finds Eddie's phone searches for ways to get out. She pins him to the wall with a knife and says the one thing that undermines the whole of season 1:
"I don't think you even stabbed Tommy Stevenson."
Then she cuts his face.
It's an insult, and it may not be anything more than that. But by Valjon's own account, he wasn't there when it happened: he left two living boys in his club and came back to one body.
If Maeve is right, there's no one left to say so. Valjon took the blame for Tommy's death to protect his own children, and Richie Stevenson never fully bought his story. In episode 4, Richie asked to watch Harry kill Valjon, and Harry did it right in front of him.
Previously we wrote: The Good Daughter ending explained: Karin Slaughter kept her novel's killers and changed the sentence