The 94-minute series finale of the three-night event felt like The Continental, finally managing to tap into what made John Wick so delicious as an action-packed spectacle in the first place. With the episode completely focusing on the heist aspect and takeover of The Continental, this results in gory action set pieces and a bloodbath. It is, of course, not as balletically choreographed as the John Wick movies, but The Continental finally manages to make a somewhat weak stamp on its validation of existence in the John Wick franchise. The bastardization and non-necessity of the previous two episodes are rather evident now in hindsight, and it’s not as if the show magically becomes flawless in its final leg. But it is a significant improvement from the lacklustre pilot episode and the somewhat stronger second installment.
The Continental: From the World of John Wick, Series Finale, Episode 3 “Night 3: Theater of Pain” Recap:
As the show opens, you are still scared because there is a shootout sequence that subverts into a training sequence and banter between characters. Barring the fact that none of these characters feel close enough to share any banter, it also feels very unnecessary. The important bit comes with Winston meeting Mazie, the bowery queen, at an abandoned bank, which he had bought for her. It would be a sort of poetic revenge, as his mom had to beg for money from a man in a suit working at the bank. Thus, as an act of subversion, he is gifting the Bowery homeless mercenaries suits, which they can use to camouflage themselves. It’s a strange plot rationalisation for actually placing these characters as cannon fodder.
On the KD front, things slowly start making sense regarding her character’s force-fitting into the plot when she comes to Lou’s dojo to look for one of the kids that had started who had killed her family in a fire. It’s almost a blink-and-you-will-miss-it, but the revelation works perfectly in the third act. Lou doesn’t reveal anything, but she does manage to send her towards Winston. Mayhew, KD’s partner, then follows Lou, who is going to the hotel where Winson is staying. To question Lou, Mayhew gets himself beaten to a pulp in 70s blaxploitation style by Lou. Mayhew, who cares about KD enough, tries to help KD but is immediately shooed away angrily by her. ‘Shoo’ might be too kind a word considering the amount of vitriol she expresses when she learns that Mayhew has gone through the box KD used to hide in her oven. But Mayhew reveals to her the hotel where Winston Scott will be staying.
Lou walks into the hotel to meet with Winston, where unexpectedly a shootout occurs because Cormac had decided to kidnap Winston after sending Charon for information regarding Winston’s hideout, which Charon did by apparently kidnapping and questioning the bus driver from the previous episode. The shootout at Winston’s hotel room extends to the lobby, where Winston and KD cross paths until KD pulls a gun on Winston. However, Hansel (one of the twins) shoots KD, which grazes her head after hitting Lou, who had knocked her unconscious. With both of them out of commission temporarily, the twins kidnap Winston and take him to Cormac.
You will never be able to convince me that Mel Gibson did not take on this role so that he could be mostly himself. There are very few actors who can embrace over-the-top insanity and make it feel like a part of their skin, and Gibson has a sense of manicness that makes him terrifying. After capturing Winston, Cormac orders his bodyguards to throw him out of the terrace such that no blood would be spilt, but it is revealed that this was a retroactive part of the plan, as the bodyguards holding Winston are shot dead through the skull by Gene, who had managed to book an apartment overlooking The Continental. Logically, Cormac should be killed next, but Charon hesitates while holding him at shotgun point, which helps Cormac escape.
Meanwhile, all the players are converging on the Continental. KD had managed to infiltrate The Continental after recovering by rummaging through one of the killers’ pockets and finding a gold coin. Ronnie had been setting up their mobile headquarters in a garbage truck; Lemmy had parachuted into the hotel; and Miles and Yen had been successful in infiltrating through the ground floor of the hotel. However, Yen almost immediately goes separately from Miles because she is going to take revenge on the twins for killing Frankie, and woe be to any assassin that stands in her way.
But while Yen crawls through the shaft over the floors of the hotel, all the other players are being attacked on different fronts. Cormac, after managing to escape, declares Inimicus on the crew, which causes colourful assassins from every room in the hotel to attack the team members. Miles uses his shotgun and military tactics to fend off the assassins by any means necessary. Meanwhile, Lemmy had managed to enter the mail room, where he suddenly got into a battle with one of the accountants, only managing to defeat her by throwing an axe at her chest. He gets knocked unconscious by a thrown ashtray, while she gets cleaved by the axe embedded in her chest. Meanwhile, KD manages to hear the declaration of Inimicus, but she is recognised by Cormac’s goons until she takes down two of the goons in the typical wide-shot kills emblematic of the John Wick films.
Outside the Continental, Lou is undergoing an existential crisis of her own. Her nemesis this season, the Orphan Master, reappears with his goons to destroy the dojo. He reveals that “Heironymous Burton”, Lou’s father, killed the family that built this place, suggesting that Orphan Master might be a descendant of that family. He was handed a big pistol with the name “Heironymous” engraved on its side. As she sees her dojo being torn apart, she takes the young protege of Orphan Master to her side and then blows her dojo up in a move that she had thought of as a last resort. She then asks Ronnie to look after the kid while she begins her trek by joining the fight at The Continental.
Back at the hotel, both Charon and Winston reach the armoury and try to open it, but are stopped by Cormac’s army of suited assassins, who hold them at gunpoint. However, the suits came in handy for Mazie, who had led her boys to disguise themselves as assassins for Cormac, and now they are at a stalemate. Cormac, forced to acquiesce, goes to open the armoury with his keys, only to destroy the key and then shut off the lights in the room. Throwing the room in pitch darkness, the only hint of violence occurring is muzzle fire eruptions and screams of agony. When the lights finally come back on, Charon and Winston are the only ones alive, with Winston hiding beneath a dead body to save himself from crossfire. Cormac, meanwhile, escapes to the 13th floor, where the communication room is present. There, he announces via loudspeaker throughout the hotel that a bounty of over $2 million is up on Winston’s head.
Winston and Charon try to locate Cormac when Winston is held at gunpoint by KD and brought to her room. There, he finally learns that KD is searching for the Scott brothers because they have been responsible for killing her family by throwing a Molotov cocktail through their apartment. But as she starts dousing him with kerosene and preparing to light him up, she is shot in the stomach by Gene, who is helping all the players on every floor of The Continental while also flirtatiously conversing with the terrified tenant of the apartment. KD drops down, and Winston helps her sit up and leaves the special medicine for her on the bed, promising to come back for her.
At the speakesy Hansel and a goon corner, Miles is behind the bar counter. Conversing with Lemmy via walkie-talkie, who had finally come, Lemmy manages to send a grenade through the piping system, which blasts through the room, killing the goon and injuring Hansel. But Hansel, not to give up, takes Lemmy’s tactics and uses a grenade to blow up the piping system, destroying the mailroom and killing Lemmy. Miles, in anger, attacks Hansel, who responds furiously to his punches and kicks, and when he is overwhelmed, Miles is joined by Lou. Both of them are, however, clearly not enough for Hansel, who manages to push a pull cue through Miles’ shoulder while using the snooker ball organiser to choke Lou out. However, Lou sees the kid, who apparently can talk to objects, throw the “Heironymous” gun at Lou from the crawl shaft where the kid had crawled up, and Lou shoots Hansel in the eye, killing him. Gretel, on the other hand, had been chased by Yen to the terrace, where they both threw their guns away, and we saw a flurry of kicks and martial arts moves until Yen twisted Gretel’s neck. But Gretel has a supernatural ability, and just when it seems Yen is overwhelmed and has drowned in the swimming pool, Gretel climbs up to the surface only to find the C4 strapped to her. Yen had finally taken Miles’ advice and chosen life, instead of taking Gretel’s life by blowing her up.
The Continental: From the World of John Wick, Series Finale, Episode 3 “Night 3: Theater of Pain” Ending, Explained:
How does Winston finally take over The Continental?
Watching Gretel being blown apart is the last straw for Cormac, who, upon learning that the High Table had washed their hands off him, chooses to activate Defensonium, basically a self-destruct mechanism to destroy the hotel. He does that by beating the young communications officer to a pulp, cutting his hand out, and putting over one of the buttons, while he presses over the other button himself, activating it. Winston and Charon, meanwhile, had regrouped in Charon’s room, where he had stored guns behind a poster of Pam Grier’s “Coffy” (of course). We also learn that Charon chose to agree to Winston’s subterfuge and help him because he knew Frankie and liked him because Frankie took the time of the day to get to know him. Charon and Winston finally reach the communications centre on the 13th floor, where they find a secret door leading to an underground railroad as the escape route.
Winston is suddenly attacked by Cormac, and as Winston is overwhelmed, Cormac raises the big wrench to beat him to a pulp, when suddenly KD appears out of nowhere. Having taken the medicine, KD had managed to walk in a daze and had followed Cormac once she had seen him coming down the elevator. Upon hearing Winston’s asking and Cormac’s confirmation that he had ordered the burning of the apartment, knowing full well the family was alive, KD shoots Cormac through the head before walking away from the scene of the crime. But there isn’t any time, and Winston manages to barely rush into the communication room and stop the Defensonium protocol by moving the butchered hand away from the control panel.
The episode ends with almost two epilogues. The first one is the team finally meeting at the bar of the Continental and sharing a drink to toast their victory and their fallen comrades. The second epilogue occurs with morning having arrived and the adjudicator arriving to inform Winston that the Continental is announced to be interregnum by the High Table. The adjudicator informs Winston that the hotel wasn’t Winston’s to take, except for Winston to remind him that he does. The coin press was actually hidden by Frankie at the back of the car where Frankie and Winston slept when they were children. The Coin Press is now under the protection of the Bowery Queen behind her bank vault. Winston reminds the adjudicator that he knows the rules of the game better than most before shooting her through the dead. Winston knows that he would need to make bold plays to ensure ownership of the Continental. Knowing the future, we are pretty cognizant of how it turns out.
Final Thoughts:
Watching the final episode and the unique flourishes director Albert Hughes utilises to distinguish the action set pieces reminds you of the potential The Continental had as a show set in the universe of John Wick. The only unique factor for The Continental had been the soundtrack, which had been a mix of gorgeous needle drops of 70s rock-and-roll and pop songs. It could be criticised that the needle drops have been so frequent that the show’s own distinctive soundscape is lost to the ether. But when your soundtrack is this prevalent and this catchy, who is complaining?
The complaint, though, of course, goes to the show itself, which rests at the curious junction of being neither too long nor too short. It rests on the unenviable junction of lacking the pace of an action film but also lacking the length of a compelling and enjoyable 10-episode television show, which had been its initial plan. The bastardization is readily apparent because the characters, while larger in quantity, don’t get enough breathing space or even compelling character arcs of their own. It also doesn’t help that by focusing itself on a gritty crime thriller from the 1970s, the show instead chooses to stumble on the pitfalls of generic television writing, even by prestige television standards.
The final episode of The Continental actually makes me wonder whether the show would have worked as a 150-minute film, with almost 70 minutes of the final episode remaining unchanged while the first two episodes were streamlined off all fat. Because there are elements in The Continental that do work to their advantage, some of the action set pieces, like Lou’s fight choreography resembling that of the blaxploitation era or Yen’s martial arts choreography, really stand out. Similarly, Gibson’s portrayal as an unhinged gangster isn’t much different, but it does stand out because it unfavourably feels like Gibson is almost playing himself, which could be uncomfortable from a certain point of view.
And even the characters of Gene, the older sniper, and Miles, the Vietnam war veteran, are interesting in their own right. Most importantly, the show needed a protagonist change because Woodell’s portrayal of Winston Scott, while having the faithful cadence of McShane’s original, is still bland. It would have helped if the show was actually from Charon’s perspective, or if they wanted to bring in KD, her character should have been more fleshed out, or the story should have completely revolved around her.
But one of the cardinal flaws the show made was focusing on world-building and not on the pure visceral catharsis that watching a John Wick movie can provide. Sometimes simplicity and vibes are enough to elicit enjoyment from the viewers. The Continental chose density and bloatedness and got sidetracked.
![Titli [2015]: A Terrifying Investigation of the Dog-eat-Dog World](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/25434380_1771599252858805_2046786633_o-768x422.png)
