Steal Recap ‘Short Run’: Back Office

Steal Season 1 Episode 3

The third episode of Steal involved a flashback that showed how Luke and Zara got entangled with the robbers, and some major developments in the investigation that hinted at a greater conspiracy. This kind of growing narrative complexity can go two ways – very well, for people like me who enjoy parsing out details and making connections, and not so well, for viewers who just want to watch a quick, well executed thriller at the end of a long day. Because Recap Lab is more of an explainer site than a review site, let’s try to explain what’s going on here, at least, based on what we know so far.

Luke and Zara were both members of the trade processing team; they make about 30 to 40 thousand pounds a year, which is close to the average earnings in the UK as of last year. They both went to college, they have stable office jobs, so depending on one’s point of view, they were either doing well enough in the sense that they could live a middle class life and eventually retire, or, they were wasting their lives whilst the people at the Investment Committee earned one million a year in basic pay and another million in bonuses. As Darren helpfully pointed out, it would take them three decades to make what their colleagues took home in a year, double if the bonuses were included.

It was this massive income imbalance that Luke first tried to use to convince Zara to become part of what he at that time thought was a hack. Luke said that he was approached whilst playing Call of Duty and offered one hundred thousand dollars in exchange for assistance in hacking a pension fund. Luke, in a deep financial hole because of credit card debts, was all in, but they needed two members of the trade processing team, and so one night at the club, whilst they were getting high from drugs (at least, Luke was), Luke did his level best to persuade Zara to join him.

Zara said no, and when looking into a dire future of seeing the members of the Investment Committee get younger and younger whilst the two of them were stuck processing trades and getting paid very little, Luke decided to go below and belt and told Zara she would turn out like her mother. A furious Zara declared that she would shift teams, even go into investment. Luke did not think she would get anywhere with that, since her psychology degree was not from a fancy university, and she has never before shown ambition.

Zara did try, the next day, but she was told that she was best suited to remain in her back office role. She told Luke she was in, on one condition: she wanted to meet the would be ‘hackers’ in person. 

One of the challenges of a minuscule independent blog is that we don’t get advance information or promotional materials about the shows we cover. Personally, I do tend to enjoy going into these shows blind, as it allows me to experience a show from a regular audience’s point of view, and write about it in the same way. But there are times when it’s hard. In this case, I only found out these thieves’ aliases on the third episode – London and Glasses. The third member of the robbery group who met with Luke and Zara was still unnamed. 

What they wanted from Luke and Zara was an hour-long chat. In exchange, they would each receive one hundred thousand pounds. The money would be taken from tobacco executives, so from their point of view, this was a victimless crime. They promised that no one would get hurt. 

Zara was sharply observant and skeptical. She wondered why the would be hackers did not wear disguises. Why would they show their faces to strangers? She surmised that it was because they would be killed after the hack. She also wondered if bringing a woman, Glasses, to the meeting was supposed to give them some female reassurance. 

The meeting ended without Zara committing to the ‘hack’. London said they were to leave one by one, and Zara left first. The unnamed thief was next, and Zara had her Uber follow the thief’s car to a building that, based on the spread of light after he went in, was a large space. 

It was Zara’s quick decision to follow the thief that led her back into that building following Luke’s abduction. She researched how to lift fingerprints off the bloody bottle, then took the bottle to what looked to be the robbers’ lair. Most of the space was dirty and unkempt, but there was one room with a computer running showing multiple accounts and a CCTV. Zara looked straight at the CCTV and made a show of leaving the small bottle on the table. 

As she was about to leave, one of the thieves, Deuchart, tried to stop her. Zara said she went there to let them know they could trust her. She would not make trouble the way Luke did. She said she could have given the evidence – the bottle – to the police but she did not, she brought it to them. This was Zara bargaining for her life. The thieves tried to catch her but she got away and managed to board a bus. It was as she was running – into a bar, at a basement, out on the street – that it dawned on me that Sophie Turner really could carry a show. She is a star. Of course I watched her in Game of Thrones, I knew she could act, but being able to carry a show, to bear its weight when your character was the only one on screen, that was an entirely different level of presence and charisma. It was even more impressive because Zara as a character was stripped down of Ms Turner’s natural glamour. She was an everywoman, yet she was a compelling presence on screen. To be honest, I thought of skipping the upcoming Tomb Raider (I skipped the 2018 film too) but having seen her work here, I am now looking forward to it. 

The social game may be rigged, but Zara lucked out off a mother who actually cared for her, too. DCI Rhys went to interview Haley, and it was like a stranger talking about someone she despised rather than a mother speaking of her daughter. Haley lied and said she has not seen Zara in months, and when Zara showed up to retrieve the cold wallet she stashed in her old room, it became clear why. Haley had already taken the cold wallet and got Zara to admit how much was in it – five million – and demanded 20% of it. Zara protested that if she gave Haley that money, she would blow through it and get the both of them arrested. Haley countered that her pension was amongst those stolen by the thieves, which I thought was an odd argument to make because won’t the government have safeguards in place to protect people’s pensions? Won’t there be some kind of bailout involved here? Haley told Zara to think about it, and Zara tearfully said that she won’t be alive in a few days. What was especially heartbreaking about this scene was how familiar it was. Spend any little time online and read people’s stories, and see how devastatingly common having a mother like Haley was.

Zara did not make it home. There were a couple of men outside her flat, and a few more with flashlights inside. It was DCI Rhys who got her out of there, and told her that contrary to what she thought, those men were not the thieves. They were MI5.

Did Steal suddenly turn into an espionage show? Not really, but the investigation, and the roadblocks it encountered, showed a conspiracy deep within the government. Rhys’s boss Nichols told him MI5 sent a liaison, Sam Fitch, to help them with the investigation. Sam claimed he was there to help, not take over the investigation, but as Ellie and Rhys soon found out, Sam was there to coolly, casually stir the investigation to serve the yet unspecified needs of people powerful enough to hold sway over the security services.

It was Ellie and Sam who went to Zara’s flat to take down her statement following Luke’s abduction. Zara was now almost as bad as Luke in answering questions, and both Ellie and Sam could surely tell that she was not telling the truth. Outside, Sam told Ellie that Zara was not the angle, it was Luke and the money, and that he would speak to Nichols about turning down the surveillance request Rhys put in. 

Ellie went to Rhys, who went to Nichols, who told him, not unkindly, to find a reason to excuse himself from the investigation. Nichols brought up Rhys’s gambling debts and warned him they would come out. Rhys figured he was picked to head the case and become the fall guy. But why? And what did powerful forces within the government have to do with a robbery of a pension fund.

Darren may have the answers. Since their request for information from the bank in the British Virgin Islands was still pending, he suggested using leaked offshore account details and cross checking them with the accounts they knew received the stolen funds. He found out that those accounts belonged to a massive defence contractor. Now why would a company like Gould-Simmons need stolen cash?

Rhys pointed out that if the funds were supposed to purchase arms, it would have been done way under the table; the robbery was a massive national news and, as Darren proved, it was easy enough to track down the accounts based off already available information online. If someone was using the Gould-Simmons accounts without their knowledge, then that begged the question of why whoever was behind the robbery did not simply set up their own accounts. If the Gould-Simmons account was some kind of slush fund used to pay bribes, then the money moved the wrong way. If Rhys and Darren escalated their findings, they both knew their superiors would simply sit on them. Darren suspected that MI5 with their resources probably already knew all about these accounts. They had one option if they wanted to see movement on this investigative front, leak the information themselves.   

'Short Run' was a twisty episode that moved Steal from a private financial institution heist into government conspiracy territory. At its core, however, is the story of a young woman who was not quite reaching her full potential at work, and now had to use her natural brilliance to save herself from the very dangerous situation she found herself in. Luke was still missing, and now Zara was on the run. On to the next episode!

Rating: A

Strays

🌳Both Ellie and Nichols knew about Rhys’s gambling. After paying off 20 thousand pounds in debt, Rhys was given another week to pay off the rest, or his debt would be sold to people who did not care he was with the police. 

🌳It was Rhys who first tried speaking to Zara about what she saw inside Luke’s building, to no avail. 

🌳Haley spoke of how Zara had the dangerous combination of intelligence and frustration. Her back office role was not her choice, she was too scared to reach for more because she wanted everything to be ‘settled and calm and safe’. Haley had enough self reflection to know that Zara craved the safety of the routine because of a mother like her. She also told Rhys he was her type, which, hmm, okay show, way to foreshadow that final scene.

🌳Fitch saw the hydrogen peroxide in Zara’s bag. I wonder what he thought it was for.

🌳If it was the MI5 who were searching Zara’s flat, why didn’t they simply turn on the lights. They were not exactly hiding. Two of them were right outside the flat. The flashlights inside were very visible from outside. The scene screamed burglary in progress. 

🌳Zara wanted the money so she could get out of the country. She told her mother once she was out, she would wire her money. Haley did not believe she would ever see her daughter again once she was away with all that cash. Well, can you blame her, Haley?

Episode Title: Short Run

Episode Writer: Sotiris Nikitas

Episode Director: Sam Miller

Original Release Date: January 21, 2026

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