Zach Baylin and Kate Susman’s “Black Rabbit” (TV Mini Series 2025) is yet another super-derivative Netflix series spun around embittered siblings with the ghost of deep-seated childhood trauma looming large. There’s a whole lot of demons to exorcise, emotions to settle through a maze of resentments and vendetta both nurse for the other. As much as the show gestures to building a bridge after years of terrible fray and discord, we are asked to stay a lot in the bitterness, experience the brothers’ grouchiness, temper, and irascible tantrums. This would have been bearable had there been solid, textured, emotionally specific writing. But what we mostly get is a slew of screaming matches, the brothers going at each other with full-scale fury and spite.
Soon enough, the bite of the show vaporises. The emotional force is misspent, spinning out in a plot that knows no recompense or direction. The decibel level is perpetually high, but interpersonal character-driven shading seems mostly desultory and vague. When the writing itself is so purposeless, drifting, an entire series cannot prop itself up. Cracks show early, as the bickering brothers get on our nerves instead of earning any emotion. Jason Bateman and Jude Law also look thoroughly confused and unsure how to bring weight and gravity into this without hammering the same note over and over again.
Black Rabbit (TV Mini Series 2025) Recap:
The show tries to anchor antiheroes, but to do that, it needed a clearer trajectory. It’s fine for a moral compass to be broken. However, the fault lines too should have been pronounced sharply for the conflicts to register better. This is where the show fumbles. Caught in a morass, the show is too preoccupied in one mental space without variation or a stab of fresh insight. There’s too little substance propelling it, even as it dresses up in sore wounds and aches. Why can’t the show find moments of truth by excavating its rawest corners?
Instead, the show and its actors go through the same motions, desperate for clarity and proactive action. This is stacked with an ensemble, but everyone besides the leads mostly gets doled two-bit, inconsequential roles. Amidst the rancour, faces flit by in a daze, barely impressing on us with any considerable urgency. Nothing sticks out. The show opens with cursory introductions to the eponymous restaurant, the animosity between Jake and Wes over a woman, Estelle. Suddenly, there’s a robbery. Wes tries to mediate, but the show cuts to a month ago.
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What trouble is Vince in?
The restaurant is awaiting the arrival of a food critic. Jake is busy keeping the restaurant afloat and the partial custody of his son, while his brother Vince wastes away at a casino, drinking and gambling. Vince asks his brother for help. We learn it was Vince who built the restaurant. Vince has loan sharks breathing down his neck. He gives away his father’s watch and buys more time. Wes, Jake, and Vince were once good friends. Cut to the present, Wes is shot by one of the thieves.
There are more detailed flashbacks illuminating the real networks. Wes had been brought on board as an investor on account of capital. The restaurant does get a nice review. Jake shares with Estelle his desire to open a new restaurant, without Wes or Vince. Wes urges Estelle to back out of the Pool Room project. Jake gradually learns of Vince’s debt. The loan sharks stalk Vince, led by Junior. Meanwhile, Anna makes rape allegations. Mancuso brokers a deal with Jake.
What happens to Anna?
Despite resistance, Estelle is chuffed about the new restaurant idea. Vince advances the proposal of a benefit to clear off the debt. In the middle of fixing a situation, Jake browses through CCTV footage and sees Jules drug Mel and Anna. He is about to delete when a noise distracts him. Meanwhile, Lisa, the reporter doing a story on the restaurant, is lured by its darker sides and tries to poke around. Jake and Estelle hook up, while Vince keeps up his cheerfully oblivious self.
However, when Vince asks Jake for the money, the latter insists it has been used to ensure the restaurant is kept in a positive light and to expand the franchise. Jake tries to quieten Anna, but she seethes. Anna ends up dead, amidst all the threats issued for her silence. The loan sharks press Vince about the money being ready as soon as possible. Junior and Babbit scamper away from the scene as soon as Anna fell to her death, but this will come back in several ways to tail them.
How does Jake try to keep off the loan sharks?
Jeffy gets Vince the insurance payout. The loan sharks kidnap the brothers so they cannot be ascribed to Anna’s death. Just when they are about to be shot, Jake brings up a diamond exhibition, and Babbit agrees to free them if he helps them steal. A blame game erupts between the brothers, and they part, Jake commanding Vince to vanish. So, Jake plans the robbery.
Wes and Roxie seek to buy out the Rabbit and Pool Room. Jake deletes the footage. A slew of betrayals Jake suffers takes precedence. Wes pairs with Roxie to steal Jake’s dream of the Pool Room. Jules’s lawyer bribes Jake to get him to delete the surveillance footage. Babbit betrays Junior as well. Pandemonium ensues, wherein Junior is about to kill Jake, but Vince kills Junior. Vincent escapes with the watches. Vince plans to sell the goods, but Mancuso catches up with him.
Black Rabbit (TV Mini Series 2025) Ending Explained:
Do Jake and Vince escape from the loan sharks?
Vincent flees with the cash, but Babbit has taken his daughter hostage, upping the stakes. Jake blackmails Jules’ lawyer so that Vince can be taken out of the country, to somewhere safe. He’d retained a copy of Anna and Jules. In the finale, Vince confesses it was he who killed their father, while Jake assures him he knew all along. Vince realises his brother will always be compelled to watch out for him, so he liberates Jake by jumping off the roof to his death. Vince and Jake’s father was a physically abusive man.
One day, having had enough, Vince killed him, especially once he saw him beating his mother. Mancuso loved their mother and helped dispose of the body. Ultimately, after Vince’s death, Mancuso doesn’t go after Jake anymore. He sees how deeply Jake had suffered his whole life. There has also been an emotional affiliation because of Jake’s mother. Vince’s death makes Jake reappraise his life, cut down on his ambition, and devote more time to family life. The death brings about a major shift in his attitude to life, family, and how he wants to move forward. Ultimately, the Black Rabbit is shut down. Jake ends up working as a bartender instead of further expansion into a new restaurant. Tony works with Roxie, who opens a restaurant of her own. Jules is arrested in a welcome gesture of long-overdue justice for Anna.
