Why does Maeve hate Harry in MobLand? He's saved the Harrigans again and again — and she still ordered him dead
The last time Harry Da Souza saved a Harrigan, it was from a mission Maeve herself had sent them on, and one of the people he pulled out was his own daughter.
MobLand is Paramount+'s London crime drama from creator Ronan Bennett and showrunner Jez Butterworth, with Guy Ritchie directing and producing. Tom Hardy plays Harry, the fixer who keeps the Harrigan crime family out of prison and out of the ground. Pierce Brosnan is Conrad, the head of the family, and Helen Mirren is his wife, Maeve. Season 2 premiered on September 18, and episode 6 arrives October 23.
Everything Harry has done for them
He's the one they call, and he answers every time:
- The club — in the first episode, Conrad's grandson Eddie stabs a man at a nightclub, and Harry handles the fallout. It gets worse when Eddie turns out to be tied to the murder of Tommy Stevenson, son of the rival gang's boss.
- The war — in the season 1 finale, Harry and Conrad's son Kevin walk into Richie Stevenson's pub and end the war that murder started. Kevin fires the shot that kills Richie; Harry kills O'Hara, the lawyer who'd been passing information to the other side.
- The offer — in the same episode, Harry turns down a job from Kat McAllister to take the Harrigans out.
- The Irish job — in season 2's fifth episode, "Birdland," he arrives by helicopter in County Kerry and shoots his way into a crime boss's house to rescue Eddie and Eddie's girlfriend, Gina, Harry's daughter.
Conrad, for his part, knows exactly what he has. In season 2 he calls Harry "a wall against the dark."
When Maeve ordered him dead
In the season 1 finale. Maeve is in prison when she summons Eddie on a burner phone and tells him Harry and Seraphina, Harry's associate, are planning a coup. Her instruction is specific.
"You have to kill Harry, and then Seraphina," Maeve tells Eddie in the season 1 finale.
She sells it with a promise of a new order, Eddie as king and Maeve as queen, and with a revelation meant to cut him loose from the rest of the family: Kevin isn't really his father, Conrad is. Eddie doesn't carry it out. He goes back to the family's safehouse and tries to strangle his mother instead.
Why she wants him gone
The show never has her lay out a grievance against Harry, and that's the point. Look at what Maeve does to everyone else and Harry stops looking like a special case:
- Her son — in season 1, she hands her own son Brendan, along with Seraphina, to Richie Stevenson.
- The truce — she has Richie's wife, Vron, killed with a car bomb, which wrecks the peace the family had.
- Her grandson — she spends the finale turning Eddie against Harry, then against his own parents.
- Season 2 — she sends Eddie to Kerry with a gift basket holding a loaded gun and orders to kill a crime boss called Medusa, played by Colm Meaney, and to bring back his head. Gina goes along without knowing why.
Mirren has been blunt about how Maeve weighs the people around her. Talking to TV Insider about Brendan, she put Maeve's thinking in Maeve's own voice.
"If I've got to sacrifice someone, I don't really mind sacrificing Brendan," Mirren said, describing how Maeve thinks.
That's her son. Harry isn't even blood, and his loyalty runs to Conrad and to the family as a whole, which makes him the obstacle to every play Maeve makes for control of it. In season 2 she even resents his authority in the small things: when Harry calls the family together for a sit-down, she announces she'll sit when she pleases.
Maeve doesn't need a reason to hate Harry. He's the one person in the family whose loyalty she can't bend toward herself, and the one most likely to notice when she tries.
Where it stands now
Worse, after "Birdland." Harry's trip to Ireland left the Harrigans' Cotswolds estate unguarded, and Frankie Cooper's crew stormed it and burned it while he was gone. The family got out by helicopter. The obvious move for Maeve is to blame the man who wasn't there.
She'll have a problem if she tries. Harry has an alibi, and Paul overheard Maeve on the phone with Eddie.
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Maeve sent Eddie to Ireland, and Harry brought him back. If she tells the family otherwise, the only witness on her side would have to be the grandson Harry just saved.
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