There’s A Rat In The Kitchen deepens Eddie Horniman’s uneasy embrace of power with stylish swagger, sharp moral friction, and the series’ trademark blend of posh restraint and criminal chaos.
Guy Ritchie’s Netflix crime comedy continues with confidence in its second episode, tightening the screws on its aristocratic antihero while growing the web of alliances, blackmail, and bloodshed that formed the spine of the first season. There’s A Rat In The Kitchen is a lean episode that balances high-society manoeuvring with underworld pragmatism. It increases the season’s central tension, Eddie (Theo James) wrestling with how far he is willing to go, taking the series to darker places, without losing the show’s distinctive mix of dry wit, kinetic set pieces, and glossy visuals. The episode feels like a deliberate step deeper into the grey zone that makes the series so watchable: the collision of old-money manners and new-money ruthlessness.
The story continues with Eddie and Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) navigating the consequences of their expanding cannabis operation. A deal with Italian mafia figure Marco Moretti requires a show of good faith that pulls Eddie into territory he once would have rejected outright. Also, arrangements involving Lord Hawthorne (Hugh Bonneville) and Jack Glass create a second, more farcical thread of social climbing and transactional loyalty. The dual plots converge in classic Gentlemen fashion: one path demands cold calculation, the other leans into opportunistic improvisation. Both test Eddie’s evolving code.
Theo James continues to carry the series with a performance that has grown more interesting as the character hardens. In Season 1, Eddie was the reluctant gentleman pulled into crime; here he is already tasting power and finding it fits better than he expected. One of the episode’s standout scenes involves a dream encounter with Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito), whose presence is brief yet memorable. The surreal, history-laden conversation about power, crowns, and kings is an entertaining exposition dump, giving Eddie a mythic frame for the practical decisions he is making. Esposito brings his familiar delivery style, and the scene is among the more stylish the show has delivered.
The all the cast delivers reliably strong work. Scodelario’s Susie remains the sharpest operator in the room, pragmatic and unsentimental without tipping into cartoonish hardness. Ray Winstone’s Bobby Glass, even when not centre stage, exerts gravitational pull through reputation and the occasional pointed reminder of family principles. Hugh Bonneville is a great new addition as the dissolute, easily flattered Lord Hawthorne. His scenes inject pure comic energy, awkward social climbing, overconfident assumptions, and the classic Ritchie pleasure of watching an establishment figure scramble when the ground shifts under him. The night-on-the-town scenes involving Hawthorne and Jack Glass are full of awkward humour, providing necessary levity against the episode’s darker undercurrents.
The Takashi subplot stands out as one of the episode’s most revealing and efficiently handled threads. Introduced as an ultra-violent loose end who threatens to spiral into indiscriminate harm, Takashi forces Eddie and gamekeeper Geoff into a decisive, unglamorous intervention. Rather than allowing the chaos to spread, they eliminate the threat, then immediately repurpose the body with cold practicality, staging it in Lord Hawthorne’s bed as leverage to secure the peer’s continued cooperation. This is pure Gentlemen ingenuity: brutal necessity quickly transformed into political capital. It underscores Eddie’s growing facility with the grim demands of the criminal world while still allowing a flicker of the character’s earlier reluctance to surface. It advances both the Italian alliance and the parliamentary ambitions in a single, ruthless stroke, demonstrating how the show can fold violence, improvisation, and social climbing into one tightly wound package.
The episode also shines a light on the cost of the life on the characters. Eddie’s reluctance to carry out a clean, premeditated killing is not presented as pure heroism; it is complicated by self-preservation, residual morality, and the practical realities of the world he has chosen. A brief flashback to the hunting coversation with his brother in the first season makes the point without over explaining. When violence does occur, it is sudden, brutal, and shocking to Eddie.
The episode also lays the groundwork for future plot lines with feeling forced or overstuffed. Freddy’s situation in rehab and an unexpected visitor hint at unresolved threats from Season 1. The Italian alliance and Eddie’s parliamentary ambitions raise the ambition of the series. Eddie is no longer simply protecting the estate or keeping the peace; he is actively consolidating influence, land, and legitimacy. The show is smart enough to let you feel both the appeal and the corruption of that path. There is still humour, sharp dialogue, absurd social situations, the endless contrast between the class of characters but the comedy sits alongside a growing sense that choices are becoming harder to walk back.
Season 2 is already signaling a darker, more ambitious run than its predecessor while retaining the fun of watching clever, compromised people navigate a world of overlapping criminal and aristocratic codes. Episode 2 executes that balance with style, wit, and enough genuine character friction to keep the proceedings feeling dangerous. Charismatic leads, sharp dialogue, inventive criminal problem-solving are strenghts used without apology.
The episode leaves you curious about where all this goes next, which is exactly what an early-season episode should do, with the opening of the first episode still foreshadowing a fall. Eddie is further from the man who first inherited the estate, closer to something more dangerous and more interesting. The question is how far this gentleman is prepared to go.
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Where to watch The Gentlemen – Season 2, Episode 2: There’s A Rat In The Kitchen: