In this episode of A Thousand Blows, it all gets blown straight to hell. From its opening moments, when Mary Carr and her Forty Elephants learn the priceless silver they stole from the Queen of England and the Emperor of China was just silver-plated junk, to its closing scenes, in which Sugar Goodson beats his brother Treacle to death and Alec Munroe takes an assassin’s blade meant for his best friend Hezekiah Moscow, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And there are many, many stops along the way.

Look at Sugar, for example. Though he’s begun boxing on the West End, his career stalls out as Hezekiah’s skyrockets. The big money now, in fact, is on setting up a match between Hezekiah and the famous American champion Buster Williams for the first-ever World Championship. So Peggy, the unctuous promoter, makes it clear to Sugar the plan to pit him and Hezekiah against one another. You can’t cash in if some two-bit hoodlum from the East End kills your golden goose, after all.

So Sugar, who isn’t playing with a full deck at the best of times, goes nuts in the ring, biting the tip of an opponent’s nose off and getting expelled from the sport as a result. When his brother Treacle takes his slot on the West End, Sugar retaliates by having him banned from the bar they co-own. While still on the warpath he discovers that Mary has begun a romance with Hezekiah; his bright idea is to propose to her. He knows she needs his protection from her vengeful overlords in the male Elephant contingent and thinks this will help seal the deal, but it’s still not enough for her to marry this guy. So he withdraws his protection entirely.

And when Treacle shows up at the Blue Coat Boy Inn despite his banishment, berating Sugar for being so old and set in his ways that he let both himself and Hezekiah lap him, the older brother snaps — smashing a glass against Treacle’s face, putting his head through stained glass, then slinging him to the floor and pounding his face in. The threat of violence this brutal on Sugar’s part has long been implicit; if this is what he was willing to do to Treacle, even though he instantly seems to regret it, what might he do to Hezekiah if and when they finally meet up?

Don’t think that her roll in the hay with Hezekiah (which the show kind of yadda yadda yadda’s, a shame given the characters’ chemistry) means Mary is having a good time of things. The moment Lady Grace spotted her maid Alice with the rest of the thieves the night of the burglary, the fate of the Forty Elephants was sealed. A Chinese diplomat was murdered during the commission of the crime, meaning they could all hang unless they give up Lao. Mary’s just well-connected enough to be able to save everyone else’s skins by giving Lao up. She’s only able to do so in the first place because she slept with Hezekiah, and thus was around to drink the trademark booze of Jack Mac, the smuggler who’d been concealing Lao in a boat.

But the cops and the Crown’s spies were just the first of her big problems. The Elephant Boys, the male mob from which her gang of female thieves is an offshoot, is furious that she risked getting them all caught up in a crime against the Queen herself. Her hateful mother Jane warns her that unless she bends the knee to Indigo Jeremy, the big boss, he’ll kill her, and probably any other Elephants he can get his hands on.

Unfortunately, that means known associates like Hezekiah are caught in the crosshairs as well. Even as he’s celebrating his big victory at the West End Boxing Club, a hitman almost certainly working for Indigo Jeremy tracks down Alec and stabs him to death, wrongly believing him to be his countryman. Mary subsequently receives the bloody knife as a token of the deed, “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”-style, but when she arrives at the Green Dolphin Hotel, she finds Alec’s girlfriend Esme devastated and Hezekiah quite alive. The episode ends with her looking down at him where he’s collapsed upon hearing the news of Alec’s death, trying to conceal obvious relief. 

A Thousand Blows remains an enjoyable show thanks to the physically commanding performances of its three leads. Stephen Graham, Erin Foster, and Malachi Kirby swagger across the screen so vibrantly now that the de rigeur digital teal-and-apricot color palette that plagues TV these days obscures their emotions. Overall, however, things are looking so dire that it’s hard to figure out how any of our heroes or antiheroes turn it around. Maybe that’s fine, and it’s crime doesn’t pay narrative, or a story about how the masses can never beat the classes. But I think snatching victory from the jaws of defeat would do this show well. These people are all survivors, bottom line. I wouldn’t mind seeing them thrive, for a change.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.