After blazing a trail across our TV screens, The Gold Season 2 is going out with a bang.
While season one focussed on how half of the gold bullion from the Brink’s-Mat Robbery was melted down and spirited away through the criminal underworld, season two has told a very different story – how that same money went onto fund vast international smuggling webs that still operate today.
The penultimate episode served us up plenty of drama, including the end to several epic manhunts. But what happened in the finale itself?
Spoilers ahead!
Edwyn Cooper is back
We open with an extended monologue featuring everybody’s infamous lawyer, Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper), speaking to us from prison. Hooray! He’s up for parole, which apparently is a good excuse to deliver a Shakespeare-esque monologue on the power of legacy. "Legacy. That’s what I've been thinking of lately,” he tells the parole board. “How brutal legacy can be. How cruelly dismissive.”
He goes on to wax lyrical about how the Brink’s-Mat robbery is a brotherhood of sorts that brings people together, and how toxic that brotherhood is. “I wish I didn’t sit in that cell, thinking of everything I had and how I lost it.” he says. The parole officers don’t look impressed.
John Palmer takes the stand
The rest of the episode focusses on what happens to the three main criminals involved in the gold: John Palmer (Tom Cullen), Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell) and Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden).
We start with Palmer. After building a massive criminal network in Tenerife, he is finally caught by the police once again. This time, he’s in the dock for running a fraudulent timeshare business, conning UK pensioners out of money for shares in flats that were never built.
Palmer, always the charmer, decides to defend himself. And it goes well: he seems to be winning over the jury, but fortunately DI Nicki Jennings has a trick up her sleeves. She aggravates Palmer just enough for the mask to slip and the jury to see his true colours, and in the end, the jury find him guilty. He is sentenced to eight years in prison and fined £33m.
Charlie Miller is charged
Small-time criminal Charlie Miller ended last season trying to escape from Tony Lundy in Costa Rica – with mixed results. Though he avoids being charged for his involvement in the Brink’s-Mat Robbery, he is extradited to the US and faces charges of racketeering, as well as a whopping, multi-million dollar fine.
One of the key witnesses in the trial ends up being corrupt lawyer Douglas Baxter, who takes to the stand to seemingly give evidence against Miller. And yet – he doesn’t. Perhaps it’s due to Miller threatening him, but Baxter changes his testimony. Even so, Miller is still found guilty, and the judge fines him for $151m.
Kenneth Noye returns (ish)
Jack Lowden’s deranged Kenneth Noye made a surprise appearance in season two. On the run once more after murdering a motorist in the UK, he winds up in Tenerife – and ends up having his cover blown when a police informant rats him out to his contacts back home.
This time around, there’s another sighting in Cadiz, where Noye is hiding out in the woods with Brian Reader. The police spot him in town and follow him back to his hideout, but hang back out of caution; after all, Noye did kill a police officer for entering his property, in season one.
Sensing the net closing in, Noye is spooked. He tries to flee, but is arrested, after a nail-biting scene where the police debate whether or not to go in for the kill, and then a chase.
The Brink’s-Mat taskforce winds down
After all that, Detective Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) is due for a well-earned retirement. Which he does: a scene shows him returning for a catch-up with the old Brinks-Mat taskforce of Tony and Nicki. The scene also functions as a sort of epilogue, in which Boyce tells the gang that as a result of their hard efforts, over £200m of the Brink’s-Mat bullion was recouped. It is, he’ says, “the biggest financial result in the history of British policing”.
Though of course, it bears repeating that much of the gold was never actually found.
The Gold Season 2 is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
