I must confess that I'm a latecomer to enjoying the pleasures of this show. While I have yet to watch every episode, this one might well end up as my all-time favorite. It may not be the best episode or the most emotionally affecting, but it is easily the most fun of all of them.
It begins with a premise that many viewers have no doubt asked themselves at various points in the show, namely: why don't the many marks who have been conned by Mickey Stone's crew ever seek revenge? Enter Carlton Woods and Harry Fielding, the two slimy businessmen who were the targets in the "New Recruits" episode earlier in the series. Still smarting from their humiliation, they assemble (how they do it is perhaps the best joke of the entire episode) a collection of people who have all been swindled by Mickey and company. Their plan is an incredibly simple one: get Stone and his team to try to pull a con on someone, then walk away after the "convincer" - the point at which the mark has the bait - leaving the team out of a substantial sum of money. With the financial backing of his league of scumbags Woods gets his old school friend Alfie Baron (played as an upper-class twit by Tom Goodman-Hill in a performance that veers a little too far into caricature) to pose as a greedy investor willing to help launder dirty money - a mark too tempting for the grifters not to target.
What follows is akin to a chess match in which one side is convinced he knows in advance all of his opponent's moves and how to counter them in order to win the game. And while it's probably not a spoiler to say that things don't turn out the way Woods and Fielding plan they will, it's nonetheless enormously enjoyable to see things play out, right up to a highly satisfying denouement that is all the more entertaining for Adam James's numerous readings of the word "arse." It's hard to imagine ever getting tired of watching such an entertaining episode, with a cast and crew that are all at the top of their game.
It begins with a premise that many viewers have no doubt asked themselves at various points in the show, namely: why don't the many marks who have been conned by Mickey Stone's crew ever seek revenge? Enter Carlton Woods and Harry Fielding, the two slimy businessmen who were the targets in the "New Recruits" episode earlier in the series. Still smarting from their humiliation, they assemble (how they do it is perhaps the best joke of the entire episode) a collection of people who have all been swindled by Mickey and company. Their plan is an incredibly simple one: get Stone and his team to try to pull a con on someone, then walk away after the "convincer" - the point at which the mark has the bait - leaving the team out of a substantial sum of money. With the financial backing of his league of scumbags Woods gets his old school friend Alfie Baron (played as an upper-class twit by Tom Goodman-Hill in a performance that veers a little too far into caricature) to pose as a greedy investor willing to help launder dirty money - a mark too tempting for the grifters not to target.
What follows is akin to a chess match in which one side is convinced he knows in advance all of his opponent's moves and how to counter them in order to win the game. And while it's probably not a spoiler to say that things don't turn out the way Woods and Fielding plan they will, it's nonetheless enormously enjoyable to see things play out, right up to a highly satisfying denouement that is all the more entertaining for Adam James's numerous readings of the word "arse." It's hard to imagine ever getting tired of watching such an entertaining episode, with a cast and crew that are all at the top of their game.
