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

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