‘The Gold’ Season 2 Introduces a Second King
“That was an escalating sequence of misunderstandings!”
Neil Forsyth’s The Gold was the first in what could become a running series of two-part dramatizations of ripped-from-the-headlines “so crazy it has to be true” events. (His follow-up, the 1990s-set Legends, is over on Netflix; Season 2 is currently in production.) But Legends wouldn’t exist without The Gold Season 2, and The Gold Season 2 wouldn’t have happened without The Gold being a hit in the first place.
Perhaps the most “so crazy it has to be true” story of the last 50 years, the Brink’s-Mat gold heist was the kind of crime that couldn’t happen today. On a cold night in November 1983, six professional small-time crooks walked into a Heathrow airport vault expecting to find one million Spanish peseta banknotes, worth £4,500 ($9,000 U.S.) in total, or £750 ($1,500) each. Instead, they found £26 million in gold bullion, and though none of them knew how to turn a bar of gold into cash, they took it anyway.
Season 1 covered the public events that followed: two of the six thieves, Micky McAvoy (Adam Nagaitis) and Brian Robinson (Frankie Wilson), were caught, but they kept their mouths shut, did their time, and came out the other side. Not that they saw a shilling, as the need to reforge the bars took the gold out of their hands and into the paws of goldsmiths Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden) and John Palmer (Tom Cullen), who then had to pass it to solicitor Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper) to launder it all through Swiss banks under the watchful eye of mastermind gangster Gordon Parry (Sean Harris).
By the time DCI Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) accepted assistance from DC Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) and DS Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer), most of it was already disappearing into real estate, as the condemned docks of West London magically turned into Chelsea Harbour, creating one of the most expensive places in the city to live today.
However, only £13 million of that gold bullion was sunk into the harbor redevelopment. Season 2 rewinds to that fateful day in November 1983 and begins tracing what happened to the other half. That story apparently starts in Cornwall, as Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell) shows up unannounced at the doorstep of his old fellow inmate Danny (Dickie Beau) and his poor wife, Angie (Gennifer Becouarn). Charlie has dozens of cardboard boxes filled with gold bars stashed in his truck, and he drags Danny out to a nearby disused mineshaft to offload them. He plans to lay low for the next few years, and then come back and see how far what he’s got will take him.
Fast forward a few years, as the events of Season 1 wrap up. Boyce, Brightwell, and Jennings still haven’t found a single gold bar from the robbery, though they did manage to round up some cash and a suspect or two, and Boyce is clearly getting desperate. After yet another dead end, Assistant Commissioner Cath McLean (Amanda Drew) and her boss, Commissioner Gordon Stewart (Peter Davison), call time on the investigation and tell Boyce he’s got two weeks to follow up on rumors circulating that Charlie is heading back to the U.K. to get his half, and if they find nothing, wrap it up.
The premiere also checks back in with John Palmer, who, unlike his partner Noye, avoided having any of the smelting pinned on him and has stayed out of police custody thanks to the right mix of upper-class connections and smooth talking. One of the few who walked away much richer than he started, Palmer now runs a timeshare business in Spain at the El Dorado (nice touch), and is starting to forget to be cautious, much to the chagrin of his accountant, Shirley (Beth Goddard), and his wife Marnie (Stefanie Martini). However, he’s being watched everywhere he goes, from the postman to the flight crew on his private plane, and it’s pretty clear these people aren’t watching him on Boyce’s behalf. He may rely on his heavy, Jerren (Joshua Samuels), to keep him safe in the U.K., but it’s unclear how much longer he’ll be allowed to operate like this.
Boyce and his minions head down to Cornwall on a tip, find Danny, and demand he turn Queen’s evidence on Charlie. At first, he seems to knuckle under at the threat of returning to jail, but when Charlie calls, Danny metaphorically rattles the tin cup in warning. An extraordinarily clever scene follows: the gold leaves right under the cops’ noses via ambulance, and they don’t realize it until it’s far too late. But hey, Charlie left them a single gold bar. At least Boyce finally found one of the missing bars, even if the villain basically gave it to him.
However, Boyce is about to get a shot in the arm for his team, even if he doesn’t know it yet, in the form of Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore). Lundy, a disgraced former police officer, has just been cleared by a panel of his peers and, despite his clear distaste for authority, is being re-commissioned into the field as soon as they can find a department desperate enough to take a man with his reputation. We all know it’s gonna be Boyce’s.
Of course, Charlie now has the same problem Mickey and Brian did in the Season 1 premiere: £13 million in gold bars is all well and good, but you cannot walk into a shop and buy a pack of cigarettes with one. He’ll also need a smelter to reforge them and an upper-class solicitor (or, like Edwyn Cooper, an upper-middle-class one who married in and can fake it) to run the reforged gold through Swiss banks to turn it into spendable funds.
For the first part, he’s already found himself a far better option than the Noyes and Palmers of the world, who would take all the gold from him without a second thought: The Romani. The Indo-Aryan nomads have been traipsing around Europe for centuries; however, they have their own culture and system of governance, and their insular, outsider status makes them the perfect people to go to when needing to have gold reforged without worrying.
As for laundering through Swiss banks, Charlie also one-ups his Season 1 counterparts by landing a genuine blue-blooded upper-class twit-of-the-year contender: Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire), who literally refers to himself as a “Cambridge boxing half blue” at one point, and has far too much love for cocaine. (“That was an escalating sequence of misunderstandings!” is Quote of the Week, if not the series.) But while Douglas isn’t beholden to gangsters like Cooper was, he’s just as stupid about the money he’s been laundering. Instead of preparing them to be digitized in the coming decade as part of some secure financial holdings, he’s been bringing them home in bundles and stuffing them in a filing cabinet. I suppose it’s more organized than a mattress, but it seems likely this won’t end well.
The Gold Season 2 continues with new episodes every Sunday at 10 p.m. on local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. PBS Passport members can stream all six episodes from premiere day. As always, check your local listings.
All episodes of Season 1 are available on PBS Passport.
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