Legends Recap ‘This is Liverpool’: Consequences
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
This is a detailed recap of the third 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.
Eddie McKee (Johnny Harris) had a long record of firearms violations and violence, a stark contrast to his young son who was recently home from the military and who seemed to enjoy his base jumping life. One night at the club, the son met a girl who introduced him to heroin. When it was time to go back to base, he went AWOL instead, and continued his downward spiral into addiction.
Perhaps he reached the point when he truly wanted to get clean. Perhaps he simply ran out of money. In any case, he called his father, and begged him to come get him the next day to drive him to rehab. He also said he needed food, and Eddie gave him some money for that.
Predictably, the money went to drugs, and the kid who was once a straight-backed, proud soldier died of overdose. Eddie could not even grieve with his family. Carter demanded that he come over and told him to kill Shaun, whom Carter had recently discovered was a Customs officer. Carter’s ambition blinded him to Eddie’s pain. His decision to order Shaun’s death also showed a slip in his careful control; he was feeling the pressure in his move to expand his drugs business and he made a bad call. Eddie was so recently and rawly made familiar that he lived in a universe of consequences. If we go by the look on Eddie’s face in his final scene here, Carter would soon be taught that lesson.
This is something I’d like to pause and discuss a bit – When a viewer is able to correctly predict what will happen next, is that a mark against the writing? In this episode, for example, the moment Eddie handed his son the money purportedly for food, I knew the kid would use that to buy drugs. When Bailey warned Kate not to go inside the recently discovered flat that may have belonged to Carter (Kate later confirmed that it was his address), I knew that she would of course break in. Even the discovery of Shaun’s identity, I clocked the moment his character was introduced.
The thing is, Legends is such a well written show that I cannot take against it these small moments when I am able to guess what happens next. Figuring out that the kid would use the money for drugs was just something you expect given the nature of addiction. Kate being a risk taker was already established. Shaun’s legend not holding up was written into his character, too – he was untrained, nervous, emotional, and Investigations had previously passed on him when he applied. If anything, the way these parts of the larger story coalesce speak well of the story and world building that Neil Forsyth did.
The alliance between the Liverpool and the London crews needed to survive a test run, with a handover at Birmingham, a neutral territory. It was also a test if Guy could truly deliver and keep the contraband away from Customs. Don was vehement that the drugs needed to stay within Customs control, and so Guy had to come up with a plan.
It almost did not work. With the drugs sitting inside Guy’s fake company loading dock, a Customs team doing random inspections approached. Zeki already had his gun out. Don had to run to the office, then quickly dial Blake’s number so he could threaten the SIO into pulling back his team. Guy was forced to take one of Hakan’s men, Taner, with him at the handover.
That was part of the plan. Carter and Eddie were at the handover, along with two of Hakan’s men. Guy arrived with Taner, who was holding the bag with the drugs. Armed police burst in, and Guy and Taner fled, with Taner forced to ditch the drugs. One of the policemen even tried to stand in front of Guy’s car; Guy nearly ran him over.
It was a show. Guy showed Hakan that he could get the contraband out of Customs, that he was right in saying the Birmingham handover was too public, and the drugs were never out of Customs control. Hakan sensed there was a leak, but Guy pointed out that it was not him, he could have gotten 25 years for the amount of heroin they were carrying. Hakan called Carter and told him he had a rat in his house. Just then, Jed came to him and told him the new driver was not who he claimed he was. Worse, he had parole papers that looked legitimate, which implied government involvement.
Don had given Bailey a listening device to plant to the building operated by the Liverpool crew. It was a large and rather obvious listening device that would not pass muster in this day and age, but way back when, it did the job. Kate and Bailey were able to get in the building using the code Shaun got for them. Kate even got to show off her lock picking skills, a nice callback to the first episode when she stayed up late trying to master it. Bailey planted the listening device under the table whilst Kate took photographs. As they tried to leave, however, the code would not work.
What Shaun had neglected to tell them was Jed’s instruction to keep the door open as he went inside. Shaun left his very unhappy wife to go to Kate and Bailey’s aid, but there was little he could do from the outside; Bailey’s multiple attempts to enter the wrong code had locked the system. Kate got him to call someone from the electric company. The man temporarily cut the power which allowed Kate and Bailey to get out of the building. But, as soon as the power was back on, the alarm blared.
Bailey asked the electric power guy to teach him how to turn the power back on. He stayed behind and kept it off until the following morning, when Eddie turned up. He told Eddie there was a power outage, and advised him to check his wirings as rats tend to chew through cables in these old buildings. That was the cover story for how the alarm blared until Eddie entered his own code. Inside the observation post, Kate and Shaun watched, relieved.
Shaun in particular looked exhausted. He admitted to Kate that his wife was not happy. He was scared all the time. He was also loving every minute of being undercover and did not want it to end. Kate flatly told him not to get caught. You just know right then and there he could get caught.
In undercover work, the tests never stop, even in moments of seeming camaraderie. During a casual chat later that day, Shaun mentioned something true about his life that did not match his legend, and which caught Jed’s attention right away. Shaun tried to cover, but it did not work. Jed went to Carter, and Carter told his cop friend to find out who he was.
Whilst the cop found out that Shaun was a Customs officer who had testified in a VAT trial, he also tried to reassure Carter by telling him that if the investigation were serious, the officer would not be from VAT. Shaun was based in Manchester; serious investigations come from London. If London Customs were working Liverpool, he would have heard about it. He also tried to warn Carter not to kill a Customs man, but Carter had hung up.
Carter told Eddie that Shaun could not have gotten anything, but he did not want to take chances. ‘Light him up’, was Carter’s decree, to which Eddie pointed out that he would get life for that. Carter simply told Eddie not to get caught.
Kate and Bailey heard Carter’s conversation with Eddie via the bug, and they rushed to get Shaun, his wife, and his daughter out of their flat. They watched from afar as the flat burned, unable to pick up Eddie and the two men he was with because that would expose their operation.
The third episode of Legends began with the consequences suffered by a drug dealer, Eddie, when addiction touched his own son. It ended with the consequences suffered by Shaun, a Customs officer who joined the undercover work with the best intentions, but whose family narrowly escaped the torch of a criminal boss. In the middle of it was Guy, successful in infiltrating Hakan’s circle, supported by a loving wife who understood the fire that burned within him. Yet even when the circumstances seem almost ideal for this kind of work, consequences remain. Guy was barely sleeping. And Don, who got out years ago, still carried notable scars on his back.
Rating: A
Strays
🕵️Erin found out that whilst Declan Carter had no record, there were historical charges for loan sharking, money with menaces (blackmail or extortion), and the like. The charges were dropped before the cases went to court.
🕵️Carter has been using his middle name when registering his many companies, which was why it had been difficult to get an address on him. Erin finally found an address in Liverpool; this was the flat Kate broke into.
🕵️What were those red rubber bracelets in Carter’s flat?
🕵️That little detail of Kate having a checklist of people who went in to the building, and who went out, which was how she figured out the building was empty, was excellent.
🕵️Don went to have dinner with Sophie and Guy at their house. Sophie had signed the Official Secrets Act when she did six months at Investigations. Don assured them he has had someone keep an eye on the house; this was probably the white van Sophie saw. He said the phone call was a redial from a public pay phone; Hakan’s men did not have Guy’s phone number or address.
🕵️Sophie had told Don there was nothing exciting about her time at Investigations. She later admitted to Guy that she lied, it was exciting. So this was why she had been so understanding of Guy.
🕵️Don told Guy this was the one time he would ask if he wanted out. Guy wanted to stay.
🕵️Guy and Zeki continued to be at each other’s nerves.
🕵️The police kept the death of Eddie’s son out of the newspapers out of respect for his service to his country.
Episode Writer: Neil Forsyth
Episode Director: Brady Hood
Original Release Date: May 7, 2026