REVIEW #312 Top Boy (Season 3)

Dealing with the aftermath of killing Jamie, Sully takes control of Summer House but soon finds himself having to deal with new problems effecting his business. Whilst Dushane has problems of his own to deal with.

Top Boy Season 3, or 5 if you include Summer House and the Netflix produced series together, concludes Sully and Dushanes stories in a rather poetic and inevitable way, full of brutality and unpredictability. Top Boy has always been one of my all time favourite British dramas and the latest season was no different, upping the stakes for the two lead characters, whilst also touching upon some of the social issues that are impacting the UK right now, especially the deportation controversy. Unfortunately the big criticism I have is that the 6 episodes felt very rushed, the storyline itself is great, but the many plot points were rushed along so quickly that they never really got their time to shine. For example, the wonderful addition of Barry Keoghan had me incredibly excited and the introduction of the Irish crime bosses looked like it was going to set the season alight, however that entire sub plot was over by episode three which was way to quick and it all concluded in a pretty silly way to be honest. Nonetheless Barry did do well with the screen time he had but the main star of the show was definitely Kano, who continues to illustrate his talent for the craft. He’s so good, he makes you forget that he is a rapper! But the entire cast perform brilliantly, so credit to them all.

Now I’m going to talk about some spoilers here so please ignore this part if you haven’t seen it yet! 

The finale episode concluded with Sully finally killing his oldest friend Dushane, an action that had a sense of inevitability over the past couple of seasons. I actually think that was a good choice from the writers and it created a wonderful, emotional moment when Sully realised what he had done. Skip a few days ahead and suddenly Sully is killed too, the audience never sees the killer but it does point towards Jaqs. Now I do have an issue with this plot point, the events of this season certainly make it plausible as to why Jaq would do it, but I don’t think they should have ever pitted her against Sully anyway. She was such a strong character and her loyalty was always something that shined through, so the idea of her stealing from Sully and then to not even do anything with it after she had, or even have a plan for the aftermath, made it all just seem rather pointless. But overall it still made for a really gripping season that is full of twists and turns, the production value is still amazing and although I’m sad to see the season end, it ended with a bang (pun intended).

Overall (8.5/10)

Thanks for reading.

Callan