The following contains spoilers for A Thousand Blows season 2.

Hulu series A Thousand Blows was one of last year’s most intriguing offerings, a Victorian-set period drama about bare-knuckle boxing and the vaguely criminal underworld at the heart of London’s gritty East End. From the mind of Steven Knight, the man behind such shows like Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, it featured a sprawling cast richly drawn characters and plenty of contemporary themes, with plots that wrestled with racism, misogyny, tradition, and the class conflict at the center of an ever-industrializing London. 

It’s almost immediately apparent, however, that the second season of A Thousand Blows is an outing that’s markedly different than its first. The subject matter is grimmer, the characters find themselves in darker and more dangerous positions, and the overall vibe is generally a lot more depressing. Most major players are kept siloed in their own stories this season, and almost everyone is in mourning for a life they once had (or thought they could attain). With so much change and separation — and a reframing of the central boxing rivalry that drive the bulk of season 1 – almost everyone, but most especially Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby), Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) and Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham) find their mettle tested in new and unforeseen ways.

Here’s a rundown of some of the big changes and reveals from A Thousand Blows season 2 and what they might mean for the show’s future, with a little help from the series’ creators and cast.

There’s a Lot Less Boxing, But There’s a Reason for That 

For a show that’s ostensibly about Victorian-era boxing, there’s surprisingly little fighting in A Thousand Blows season 2. Sure, there’s still lots of other kinds of drama, including a violent revenge plot, an elaborate art heist, some gang drama, crippling alcoholism, and grief. But the number of punches thrown has decreased by an order of magnitude, particularly when compared to last season. And that, at least according to Knight, is on purpose.

“We’ve established we’re a show about boxing. But in the second season, unless boxing is telling us something about the relationships of the characters, it’s just a given. Do you know what I mean?” Knight told Den of Geek. “Season 1 is doing the work of getting the characters established and hopefully getting them into the hearts of the audience. Then, in season 2, I wanted to gradually delve deeper. I wanted to take the characters on their own paths, and then have the gravity of their relationships bring them back together, slowly throughout the season.” 

Sugar, the infamous boxer whose fists played such a central role in the show’s first outing, has spent the year between seasons living on the street, estranged from his family, absent from the sport he loved, and generally in a state that can only be described as perpetually drunk and borderline ill. His journey to find his feet again is one that’s both literal and figurative, as he fights for both sobriety and the reunion of the family he helped fracture last season.

“The journey that Sugar goes on, obviously, we find him at a very low point,” Knight said. “What I really wanted was to replicate that moment from the start of season 1, that shock when we see Stephen Graham as Sugar Goodson, but this time I wanted the audience to wonder, can that be him? Really? He’s this now. And then over the course of the season, he becomes himself again. But is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?”

While Sugar’s lingering anger toward Hezekiah is a major plot point in season 2, the character’s primary arc this season is about his relationships and the mess he’s made of them. After beating Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce) to pulp in last year’s finale, Sugar is reunited with his younger brother when they’re both at their lowest points, and how both men find a way to move forward.

“I mean, I’ve always been in love with Stephen,” Nelson-Joyce said. “So for me it was always really easy to do that little brother thing of looking up at him and going, yeah, you’re the coolest person in the world. Obviously, their relationship is fractured at the start of season 2 and Treacle, but you see in season 1 how important his family is to [Treacle], including his brother in that. And to see that it’s all just disappearing from him now, it’s slipping through his fingers. So when he sees Sugar turn up in that first scene… obviously, we’ve got to help him, to try and save his life and get him back on track.”

Getting What You Want Doesn’t Guarantee Happiness

One of the big thematic lessons of A Thousand Blows’ second season is about what happens when you finally get what you want. For almost everyone on the canvas, achieving a major goal — a successful heist, a win in the ring, etc. — isn’t the panacea they once dreamed it could be.

“Hezekiah and Mary, they have their own ambitions and trajectories. They think they know what they want to achieve and they achieve it,” Knight said. “But once they do, it completely changes the way they look at the world.”

Hezekiah successfully returns to the ring, manages to earn the respect and friendship of a future King of England, and even reclaims the land that once belonged to him in Jamaica. But these accomplishments don’t come with the satisfaction he hoped for.

“I guess Hezekiah does want those things, but it’s in response to not actually being able to get the things he actually wants. You know what I mean? I think he’d love to have his best friend back. I think he’d love to be boxing. I think he’d even love to be in a relationship with this one,” Kirby said, laughingly pointing at Doherty. “A relationship that feels safe and loving, and something that it’s not right now. So he’s having to have different wants, which I think is a survival tactic in and of itself. Because I think, if you don’t have any hopes for anything, then it’s like, how do you even get up the next day? I think he settled for those kinds of things once. But what I really think he ultimately wants at this point is community and a space to thrive in.” 

For Mary, what she wants is to fix the mistakes of last season. She wants her girls back, she wants her gang’s power back, she wants to be Queen of the Forty Elephants once more. 

“I think Mary wants to have everyone in her life back in her life,” Doherty said. “I think where we’ve left her after season 1 is, it’s all fallen apart for her really. And so she could go down the route that Hez goes down, which is just complete absolute emptiness: “What do I do now? I’m just obliterated as a being.” But I think she can’t let that affect her because if she does, then everything truly will be gone. So I think she’s forced to be the one who picks up the pieces.  So I think what she’s learning is that to achieve her wants, she has to go about things in a different way. She has to switch her perception from herself, admittedly, onto other people.”

The death of her mother is a particularly life-altering event for Mary, one that forces her to confront the possibility that the very goal she’s spent so long chasing after (being the leader of the Forty Elephants) will ultimately be a much emptier victory than she realized.

“Whether we like it or not, our parental figures are so informative to who we are and the way we choose to live our lives,” Doherty says. “And really, Mary is forced to face in that moment everything that her mother wasn’t. There’s a lot of sadness there, the realization that not only has this person left her life, but her mother doesn’t have anything to show for all the things she’s done. They don’t have anything to show for it. And it’s a real emptiness that is so upsetting.”

The Series’s Best Relationship Spends Most of the Season Apart

Knight’s plan to set each of its three leads on their own personal journeys in season 2 means that this outing gives the story’s primary characters fewer reasons than ever to interact. It’s not a shock that Hezekiah and Mary start the season on difficult terms, given that she kept damaging secrets about his best friend’s murder, and he accidentally beat a guy to death. But viewers will likely be surprised at just how little time the two spend together onscreen. Yet, A Thousand Blows still manages to keep their relationship front and center thematically, as both search for a meaning they can ultimately only find in one another.

“Honestly, I think it’s just there,” Doherty said when asked about maintaining her onscreen bond with her co-star across a season where they don’t share the screen that often. “I think we felt it in the first chemistry read, and I think we’ve been building it throughout the season. Like anyone, say, any of my greatest friends or family, I can be away from them for years and then see them, and it’s like we’ve barely been apart for a day. Do you know what I mean? So I think we can spend scenes and scenes apart — even though that’s not my ideal! — and still have that connection there, because it’s a true one.”

For Doherty, the pair’s separation is an “active” one, something that allows them both to follow their own paths, but still acknowledge the connection between them.

“I love that scene when we are at the bar, and we’ve just had the big explosive moment, but then we’re just sitting quite pleasantly in each other’s company for the first time since it’s all happened,” she said “That’s the first moment that you really see, ‘Oh, these two people do want to make it work. They just don’t have the tools yet.’ And so that was a little glimpse for me about the active [nature of their] separation. And rather than going, “Oh, we don’t have much time [together].” It’s going, “Oh, okay, but how can I use that? How can I use that gap to really show their desire for each other?” Because I think they’re supposed to be together, whether they like it or not. They’re just supposed to be with each other, but they’re both learning how to meet in the middle.”

Knight, for his part, leans into the “gravity” and “inevitability” of the pair’s relationship, which he says remains evident even when they aren’t necessarily sharing the screen.

“I think that the relationship between Mary and Hezekiah has a feeling of inevitability about it, and that’s exactly what it should have,” Knight said. “There’s a gravity to [that relationship]. And I think that’s a testament to the quality of our actors. When you’ve got actors of this quality, you can have a situation where no words about a topic are said, but you, the audience, know exactly what’s going on and where everyone stands. You can see that, despite everything, actually what they really want is each other.”

A New Queen of the Forty Elephants Is Crowned 

Season 2’s story largely revolves around a complicated heist plot in which the Forty Elephants scheme to steal a valuable Caravaggio from a wealthy collector. In the process, Mary’s young protegee, Alice Diamond (Darci Shaw), takes center stage, serving a key role in both the painting’s theft and the group’s larger scheme to trick the American mesmerist (Catherine McCormack) planning to double-cross them. 

“Alice Diamond was a real-life person, and she was amazing,” Shaw told Den of Geek. “When I read about her and some of the things she’d done and the background she came from, I quickly understood how truly ballsy, for lack of a better word, she was. She was so confident and so business-minded, she knew how to get away with all kinds of crime, and she evaded the police constantly. She was pretty epic.”

Though there are moments throughout the season where viewers are made to question Alice’s loyalty to Mary, in the end, the Forty Elephants triumph. And Alice herself is crowned as the group’s new leader, taking over its London operations while Mary heads to America and kicking off a new era for the series’s girl gang.

“Alice is Mary’s girl because she’s the one who put the trust in her initially, to take her into the Forty Elephants in the first place,” Shaw said. “She’s got Mary’s back, they’ve got each other, really. But I do think she’s gonna like being in charge. I don’t think the girls are going to like it, and she’s definitely going to get some pushback. The thing with Alice is that she lacks a little in empathy, and I feel like she’d be quite regimented and not have any sympathy for people who don’t like [her orders]. It’d be interesting to see, but I think she’d be pretty good.”

What A Thousand Blows Season 3 Might Involve

Though A Thousand Blows season 2 concludes in a fairly satisfying fashion — most characters have relatively stable if not entirely happy endings — it still feels like there’s plenty of story left to tell about Knight’s version of Victorian London. The Forty Elephants have now gone international. Mary and Hezekiah are finally together romantically, though they now have to figure out how to make a real relationship work. The Goodson family is reunited, facing an uncertain future. And Alice now sits in Mary’s place as the head (princess?) of the Elephants’ London branch. There are still endless possibilities for where the show could take these characters next. 

“It’s difficult because we are embargoed from talking about season 3, so I can’t really speculate unless I’m officially speculating,” Knight said with a smile when asked about the series’s future. “So it’s tricky… but let me put it this way. The Forty Elephants, in reality, was still in existence in the 1950s. They were still a force in London in the ’50s, which means there’s a lot of story to be told. And I would love to tell more of that story.”

When it comes to the Goodsons, Knight also offers viewers a bit of hope that Sugar and Mary might find a way to patch up their badly damaged friendship, even after his betrayal and her ostensible move to America. 

“Funny you should ask that,” Knight said when asked about the former friends’ bond. “If we get a season 3, we’ll find out. Can they move past this? But they’ve known each other since they were young. I think what I like to explore in general is the idea that relationships are very robust. Like a leg, you can break it, and it’ll mend. And so I think that I have every faith in that relationship.” 

Knight’s not the only one with thoughts about what a third season should include. 

“I feel like the story’s not finished,” Nelson-Joyce said. “And we don’t know where it goes next. It would be nice, I think, if we did get a season 3 to see the brothers come back together, maybe try to build The Blue Coat Boy back up again. Or try and get back into boxing, something like that.” 

Out of everyone, Hezekiah and Mary probably get the closest thing to a happily ever after that exists in this universe: A fresh start (at least for the moment) in America and a chance for the two to navigate their relationship on their own terms. And both of the actors who play them are eager to see what their future holds together. 

“Up to this point, I think they’ve been trying to do life apart, Kirby said. “And even when they were coming together, it wasn’t about them being together. It was about what they could achieve individually together. And so I think what’s next for them, possibly what I’d like to see anyway, is what they can achieve by actually collaborating. Not working for selfish gain, but trusting each other’s space and going, ‘Actually, with my dreamlike qualities and your know-how to get things done, and combining the two, let’s just see what that can create.’”

Doherty is quick to agree. “There’s something really genuinely, as Erin, exciting about the idea of what that authentic meeting in the middle could look like,” she said. “And I don’t think either of them knows because neither of them has committed to what that could be with anyone else before.”

All six episodes of A Thousand Blows season 2 are now available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in the U.K.

The post Breaking Down the Big Changes in A Thousand Blows Season 2 appeared first on Den of Geek.