An Unsympathetic Gentleman delivers another tightly wound, gleefully twisted chapter in Guy Ritchie’s stylish crime-comedy universe, blending aristocratic manners with underworld pragmatism and a generous helping of the unexpected.
The episode opens with characteristic irreverence. At Dorset Hall, a guided tour of the Bassington family seat is interrupted by the eighth Lord Bassington himself, naked except for a gas mask, waving a submachine gun and ranting about lizards, before he collapses from a heart attack. It is a perfect encapsulation of the series’ tone: heritage Britain colliding with chaotic eccentricity, played for dark laughs that never quite tip into pure farce. From there the story settles into its central problem. Susie Glass wants to expand the cannabis operation. Eddie Horniman is determined that expansion will not happen under his own estate. Opportunity appears in the form of Max Bassington (Freddie Fox), the newly elevated lord and aspiring actor whose inheritance includes a sprawling property that could solve everyone’s immediate needs.
Eddie proposes a deal. Max is receptive but has a problem of his own: a blackmailer holding compromising material. What begins as a straightforward favor, retrieve the documents, pay off the blackmailer, secure the land, quickly unravels into something far more grotesque and revealing. The blackmailer, Frank (John Thomson), an ex-journalist fallen on hard times, is tracked down with Susie’s efficient help. Documents change hands. Only then does the truth surface: the target was never Max’s father. It was Max himself. Pressed for transparency, Max leads Eddie, Susie, and Frank into a hidden chamber lined with paintings by Adolf Hitler. He speaks of the Führer’s genius with the earnestness of a true believer, comparing the work favorably to Monet and producing the collection’s prize: a preserved testicle he claims belonged to Hitler. The moment is pure Ritchie, shocking, absurd, and delivered with a straight face that makes the horror funnier and more unsettling at once.
What follows is a chaotic confrontation that escalates into violence. A scuffle, a German shepherd with unfortunate timing, and a shootout involving old wartime armaments leave the carefully negotiated arrangement in ruins. Max’s secrets prove fatal to the deal, and Eddie is forced back to the drawing board. Yet the episode is not merely a series of escalating set pieces. Freddy and Jimmy share a fishing trip laced with dynamite and quiet insecurity as Freddy tries to convince himself he is an asset rather than a liability. Jimmy’s entanglement with the mysterious Gabrielle deepens, sowing seeds that will clearly complicate matters later. Most satisfying of all is the quieter resolution provided by Lady Sabrina and the estate’s groundskeeper Geoff. While the men are busy with blackmail and Nazi memorabilia, Sabrina secures a neighbouring sheep farmer’s substantial acreage through charm, timing, and a clear-eyed understanding of financial desperation. The contrast is sharp and effective: violence and revelation on one side, practical aristocratic problem-solving on the other.
Theo James continues to anchor the series with understated competence. Eddie’s military calm and moral discomfort play well against the escalating absurdity; his decision not to open the blackmail file until forced is a small but telling character beat that underscores both his residual sense of honour and the limits of that honour in this world. Kaya Scodelario’s Susie remains the a compelling presence, cool, strategic, and capable of pivoting from negotiation to intimidation without breaking stride. Freddie Fox is given a gift of a role and runs with it. Max’s transition from affable, slightly vain heir to unhinged ideologue is both comic and chilling; Fox sells the sincerity of the delusion without overplaying it into cartoonishness. John Thomson brings a weary, opportunistic energy to Frank that grounds the more outlandish turns. Joely Richardson’s Lady Sabrina, meanwhile, quietly steals scenes by demonstrating that the old-world social machinery still has power when applied with precision.
While the overarching tension of Eddie’s attempt to extricate himself from the Glass empire continues, the episode still delivers a complete arc of negotiation, revelation, and consequence. The Hitler collection and its infamous centerpiece are the kind of outrageous invention that risks tipping the tone into pure provocation, yet the episode largely earns the shock by treating Max’s ideology as both ridiculous and dangerous. The dog’s involvement in the climax is pure black comedy of the sort Ritchie’s work has long specialised in, appalling and hilarious in equal measure.
This is a shorter and breezy epiosde, and some of the subplots (Freddy’s self-justification, Jimmy’s romantic entanglement) feel slightly underdeveloped in the rush toward the confrontation at Dorset Hall. The violence, while stylised, occasionally risks becoming repetitive with a “things escalate, people die, mess is cleaned up” pattern. Max’s ideology is so extreme that it borders on caricature; a slightly more nuanced portrait of residual aristocratic bigotry might have carried greater satirical weight. Still, the humour lands, and the performances are on point.
There is a confidence to this episode. It can move from a naked lord’s final rant to a blackmail exchange in a Chinese restaurant to a secret shrine and then to a mother calmly securing land for an illegal enterprise, all without losing coherence. The series continues to explore the boundary between old money and new criminality, showing how both worlds rely on reputation, leverage, and the willingness to do ugly things quietly. Eddie’s growing comfort with that world is the quiet through-line; each successful (or partially successful) crisis management mission pulls him deeper even as he insists he wants out. Susie remains the counterbalance as she sees opportunities where Eddie sees complications, and she is rarely wrong about the immediate practicalities.
By the end, the land problem is solved not by the elaborate blackmail scheme but by Sabrina’s quieter intervention. The men chase secrets and guns; the women (and the canny groundskeeper) simply rearrange the board. The final image of Eddie laughing at the irony in his study, whiskey in hand, captures the series’ knowing tone perfectly. Chaos has been contained, for now. The cannabis operation has a new home. The multiple costs (moral, physical, and reputational) continue to mount.
An Unsympathetic Gentleman is the series operating at a high level of controlled excess. It takes a premise that could have been pure shock value and turns it into a revealing character study wrapped in crime-comedy mechanics. Freddie Fox’s performance alone (maybe inspired by his cousin) makes the episode essential viewing, but the surrounding ensemble, the reveal, and the plotting make this more than a one gag episode. The Gentlemen remains a stylish, cynical, and frequently very funny examination of power, inheritance, and the thin line between respectability and ruthlessness.
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Where to watch The Gentlemen – Season 1, Episode 4: An Unsympathetic Gentleman: