Legends Recap ‘Alliance’: Play It Out
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
This is a detailed recap of the second episode of Legends and contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t seen it yet, please head over to Netflix and watch this 1990s-era thriller about a group of white collar Customs officers who went undercover to bust the heroin trade.
Carter (Tom Hughes), who turned out to be the boss of the Liverpool operation, told a man he met, who turned out to be a cop, that he needed to improve the quality of the product and the people. He said it casually, just another businessman hiring someone to do a job for him. That he decided to ally with Hakan, whom he declared had the better product, I should have guessed. His other move, however, was even more ruthless and brilliant.
One of Hakan’s drug runners drove all the way to Scotland to deliver product. The kid walked into a flat unaware of the danger; two men from Carter’s operation shot him point blank. They claimed it was a show of strength against the Turks who were taking their business. Carter showed his displeasure without raising his voice. Killing the kid meant a murder charge, attention that their organisation did not need. Later, the cop he bribed led an operation that captured the two murderers.
Just like that, Carter opened communications with a rival organisation, potentially gaining him access to the better product he wanted, and rid himself of two men who did not show him respect and whose reckless decision making could endanger his business. This is how you introduce a character.
Hakan had a problem. Whilst he had an established network bringing the heroin from Khyber, Pakistan and across the borders of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, getting them into the UK was a different challenge. The increasing demand meant the need to increase supply, and they were quickly running out of personnel to do that. Enter Guy, with his import export business cover and his promise (they had no idea how accurate) that he had an in with customs.
Getting him in with Hakan was not easy. The first test was Zeki at his flat, which he passed. Mylonas told him Zeki was an opportunity because he was recently promoted and made mistakes. They were able to tail him to a dry cleaning business which functioned as a distribution centre for drugs. Next, Mylonas brought Guy to a Greek-run gambling establishment, where he purposely got caught cheating so he and Guy could outrun men with guns and firm up their legends on the street. Mylonas also wanted to see if Guy could fight; he could.
Tom Burke (The Musketeers, Strike) is an experienced actor and a quietly charismatic lead, who taps into the happy adrenaline Guy gets from the danger of his work whilst never downplaying, or overplaying, the seriousness of it. When he finally got his face time with Hakan, he sold his business enough that Hakan wanted it checked right then and there.
The problem was that the company office that Don set up would only survive a drive by but not a close inspection. It took time for Don to answer Guy’s urgent call – Erin was not at the office because she was tailing Guy, his only field support after he turned his car in with a bullet hole – and Guy calmly told him that the Emerton (his fake company) office needed to go live now or he was dead.
Don himself had to play the employee at Emerton when Zeki and another one of Hakan’s men turned up asking questions. So he was busy when both his Liverpool team (Kate and Bailey) and Erin were frantically trying to reach him to ask for instructions, because both the Liverpool and the London crews were headed to the M6 with guns. The way writer Neil Forsyth set this up, the relentless build toward this climax, the way the limitations of the time period and the group’s resources were integral to the tension, the quick pivot toward bureaucracy as Don called his boss Blake for his team’s marching orders – all of these were reminders of what makes so many British TV shows great. The pleasure is in the storytelling rewards of attention to detail.
Now, let’s back up a bit, and go through Kate and Bailey’s part of the investigation. Kate and Bailey were still tailing the Daybreak Bakery van, the one in charge of delivery for the Liverpool crew. The owner of the bakery was Jed Dalby, who recently bought a nice house with cash though his business was supposedly losing money. The driver was Dean Narey, whom Kate wanted brought in for benefits fraud so they could replace him with someone from their side – Shaun, a Liverpool native and, like Bailey, a VAT officer.
Kate and Bailey were working out of the Custom House in Manchester; it was there that Shaun handed them his CV and explained that he had figured out what they were doing there and that he wanted to work with them. Shaun looked nervous, and I was completely on Bailey’s side when he expressed his reservations about recruiting him, because I've watched lots of tv in my lifetime and no, nope, this will not end well. But, Kate was adamant, and given that the rest of the team only had three weeks training themselves, Bailey gave in, though he did let Don know that they recruited from within Customs, much to Kate’s annoyance.
Bailey’s more cautious nature was borne out of a lifetime experience as a black man. Whereas Kate bristled when a policeman approached their car for no other reason than because they saw a black man with a white woman, Bailey remained polite and simply drove off. Keeping his head down and not taking risks was part of survival, but his decision to join this covert anti-drugs squad was itself risky.
Putting Shaun on the field was also terribly risky. He grew up on the same estate as the 15-year-old kid who died in the first episode. He was emotional about this job, not exactly the best place to start. Neither Bailey nor Kate had Don’s undercover experience; alarm bells did not ring for them. It was the one thing both of them missed when they argued about whether to let Shaun in or not; yes, they were only trained for three weeks, but the guy who picked and trained them knew what he was doing.
Shaun successfully got the driver job, and he passed Jed’s many tests. Soon enough, Jed tasked him with the job he (Jed) was supposed to do – take the bag with the cash from the van to a drawer inside the building and wait for it to be returned with a fresh batch of drugs. Shaun figured out the door code from Jed’s clue – another successful passing of a test – and suddenly found himself with a gun to his head held by Eddie (Johnny Harris), Carter’s right hand man. Eddie was furious that Jed outsourced the job just because he was too lazy to get out of the van.
Shaun survived the encounter, and so Kate and Bailey were able to follow Eddie and Carter’s two-car convoy. Erin similarly followed Hakan’s convoy; Guy was in the same car as Hakan. Don told Blake that if they bust these two groups, their operation was over. Blake’s brief historical lecture was not bad, it was just not needed, but he did tell Don to let it play out. And so Carter and Hakan met, with Kate taking photos of this new alliance that was forming.
A huge part of what made 'Alliance' a strong episode was in how it handled its tension, with cerebral intent. The camera slowly focused on Guy as he figured out what Mylonas was doing in the casino. Guy saying no when Don asked him if he needed support, and Don walking to the back of the car he just left and finding a bullet hole. Guy lying to Mylonas about having a family. Tension was not only on scenes as when Jed quizzed Shaun on which side the bed was on in the B wing of the prison he supposedly spent time in. Tension was in small scenes, in casual dialogue, underlining the reality that undercover work meant never relaxing, ever.
My one quibble? I wish the show had a better title, something that would easily trend, because this is definitely a show that deserves attention.
Rating: A
Strays
🕵️Aziz (Kem Hassan) was Hakan’s son,
🕵️Part of Mylonas’s move to get Guy inside Hakan’s operation was to give money for the kid who was shot by members of the Liverpool crew, a show of respect in the community.
🕵️The two men who shot one of Hakan’s runners claimed they controlled the docks.
🕵️Zeki watched as Guy spoke to his wife Sophie from a pay phone. Later, he hit redial and tried to get Sophie to tell him who she was. She hung up without responding.
🕵️Sophie spotted a suspicious white van outside her house as she was leaving with her daughter. When she noticed that the van was still there when she got back, she walked towards it, but it drove off immediately. She called the number Guy gave her and Don answered, but this was whilst Don was coordinating the two operations that were about to collide. Sophie asked how Guy was; Don’s ‘He’s terrific!’ was my favourite line delivery of this episode.
Episode Writer: Neil Forsyth
Episode Director: Brady Hood
Original Release Date: May 7, 2026