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From: Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: I thought the Europeans were really squeamish about TV violence
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2025 19:06:21 -0400
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Europeans have long professed to find American films and TV shows 
excessively violent while at the same time those films and shows are 
somewhat prudish about portraying sex, at least by European standards. 
Most of Europe was said to have no problem showing naked people and also 
naked people having sex but quite averse to shooting and killing.

I just finished watching the 5th episode of Gangs of London, Season 3, 
which just became available the other day and found myself leaning 
towards the idea that the Europeans, or at least the Brits, have gotten 
over their squeamishness about violence. I'm adding a spoiler space for 
the sake of those who have never seen the show, particularly the new 3rd 
season....

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Gangs of London *is* a violent show and always has been so there's that.

The first episode of season 1 showed a scene at the top of a very tall 
building and depicted two men having a conversation. One man was 
standing on a level service at the top of the building. The other man 
was dangling from a rope many storeys above street level. The man at the 
top was interrogating the guy dangling from the rope. The other man was 
begging and pleading for his life. Ultimately, the man at the top did 
not find the other man's words satisfactory and set the rope on fire 
which in turn set the man holding it on fire and causing him to plummet 
dozens of storeys to his death.

That's how they set the tone for the whole series, a tone that has 
continued into the third season.

Flash forward to episode 5 of Season 3. The episode focuses on Lale, a 
woman who runs a major drug gang in London. She is foreign born but I 
forget what country she's from but it might be Iraq. Anyway, a helpful 
flashback reminds us that she was raped by Sean Wallace (the rival gang 
leader who we first me in the pilot when he set the guy on the rope on 
fire) and is pregnant with his baby. It turns out that Sean's mother, 
Marian, who is the widow of Sean's father Finn who led the gang before 
Sean inherited, is keen to have the baby so that Asif, the leader of 
*another* gang has arranged to take (kidnap) Lale to Lahore, Pakistan 
until the baby is born, at which point Marian gets to have the baby, 
Asif gets access to ports to import his drug to the UK, and Lale gets 
her throat slit for having killed Asif's son in Season 2. Got all that?

Anyway, things don't quite go according to plan. Lale manipulates Asif 
and Marian to letting her go back to London to have the baby. Having 
arrived in London, Lale improvises a plan to escape the car that is 
transporting her to Asif's lair, despite the presence of several armed 
minions that are there to prevent that. Her plan works to get her out of 
the car and establish a small head start. She sees the minions coming 
after her and ducks into an empty office building - it's never clear why 
it is empty - and tries to hide. But she gets distracted by the 
unexpected arrival of the baby.

Knowing that she is being hunted and must be extremely quiet, she has 
the bad luck that her baby has decided to be born NOW. She stands up 
behind a desk, rearranges her clothing and the baby conveniently exits 
the womb head first. She has no help or medical supplies of any kind and 
manages to deliver the baby with hardly a sound. Then she hears the 
first of the minions, shoots him dead, and realizes she has to MOVE! She 
fashions something to hold the baby to her chest, climbs up into the 
ventwork in the ceiling, The baby makes no sound and you start to wonder 
if it is dead, perhaps having caught a stray from the first minion. But 
no, the baby is fine. She crawls down the vent a way and finally finds a 
place to get back out of the vent. She hides behind a partition, severs 
the umbilical cord by biting on it, then delivers the placenta.

THEN the baby starts crying. She nurses it and it quiets down but after 
its finished, it decides it needs to cry again and there's nothing she 
can do to quiet it. The noise attracts the surviving minions but they 
come in ones and twos. Her gun was empty so when the second minion 
attacks her, she has to improvise. She grabs the placenta and umbilical 
cord and STRANGLES the second minion with it. A few additional minions 
are dispatched as well. (I won't tell you *all* the details in case you 
actually want to watch this show.)

This is not nearly all of the violence in this episode, let alone the 
series, but it marks the first time I've ever seen a woman (pretend to) 
give birth, deliver the baby and the placenta, and kill a guy with the 
placenta and umbilical cord.

I suppose writers and producers have to constantly invent ever newer 
acts of mayhem in order to get eyeballs on their productions but I am 
now officially over the notion that Europeans - or at least the Brits - 
are squeamish about violence in their TV shows, especially with respect 
to American productions.

I wonder if AMC will censor the crap out of this or just put in some 
viewer advisories at the beginning like Sky does.


-- 
Rhino