‘The Day of the Jackal’ Gets Down to Business in a Brutal Finale — Spoilers
[Editor’s Note: The following article contains spoilers for “The Day of the Jackal” Episode 10, including the ending.]
“You remind me of my parents,” the man who goes by “Richard” (Eddie Redmayne) says to his elderly captive, Trevor (Philip Jackson).
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“How did you get on with them?” Trevor replies.
“They were nice people,” Richard says, before clarifying: “Well-meaning people — like you.”
“If they were so nice,” Trevor says, accepting none of Richard’s bullshit, “where did you come from?”
In its first season, “The Day of the Jackal” doesn’t answer that question. Not completely, anyway. We see Richard, aka the Jackal, spending time in the British Army during the Second Gulf War, when he’s first approached about becoming an assassin for hire, but we don’t get any insight into how he became the world’s best sniper, who he was before enlisting, or what drove him to see life from behind a rifle’s scope in the first place.
That’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Trevor’s pointed question isn’t a tease for what to expect in “The Day of the Jackal” Season 2 (although the writers could certainly go that route). It’s a pivot point for the Jackal when it comes to his priorities — he’s desperately trying to get home to his wife and child, ready to leave his other life behind (even if it’s foolish to think he can) — but it also implies that the Jackal didn’t become a cold-blooded killer because of his parents. Nice, well-meaning folks don’t raise a man who can take a life without blinking an eye. He became a cold-blooded killer because the world needs them, just as it needs people who chase them. Whoever wins the race, so, too, do the people in power, the people who create a demand for both professions and the people who can eliminate those professions whenever it’s convenient.
These people are even colder than the killers they create, so are the killers screwed from the start? Are they doomed to live half-lives, gauged in literal length or internal fulfillment, always under the thumb of one boss or another? Can a killer, even the best killer, really win a rigged game?
For all its car wrecks and gunfights, Episode 10 is at its most brutal (brutalist?) when executives wearing finely pressed suits are simply talking. Take, for instance, Bianca’s tragic fate. Lashana Lynch’s dedicated field agent has been hot for Jackal from the start, practically frothing at the mouth whenever she thinks she’s one step closer to capturing her revered prey. Aptly, if also insultingly, her bosses often act like they’re holding back a rabid dog — chastising Bianca for taking risks and, as seen in the finale, preparing to fire her for going too far.
And yet when the shit really does hit the fan, it becomes clear that they’ve wanted Bianca to behave exactly the way she does. Like any management team that appreciates their stalwart staff working weekends for the good of the company but stays silent when all that unpaid overtime results in physical and mental burn-out, Bianca’s bosses want an obsessive, risk-prone operative, not a casual, by-the-book office drone. For one, it helps close more cases, but it also helps them control her. By exploiting her passion, they know they can bring their bloodhound to heel as needed, which now means getting her back in the hunt.
Shortly after Bianca quits, Jeremy Whitelock (Adam James), the U.K.’s bought-and-paid-Foreign Secretary, sits down with his underling and Bianca’s boss, MI6 lead Isabel Kirby (Lia Williams). “Our friends are anxious that if the Jackal is apprehended that it’s by somebody who is… simpatico,” he says. “And it would be nice to be able to provide them with some… closure.” Isabel, still getting used to her position of power, doesn’t grasp his meaning (or, at least, needs him to provide a definitive order). “Do I have to spell it out?” he says with a nefarious chuckle. “Let her deal with him, and then let us deal with her.”
Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way. Bianca does what she wants to do (and, of course, what her bosses want her to do), but she can’t outfox the Jackal in his own den. First, she accidentally does him a favor by bumping off his drunk brother-in-law, and Bianca even manages to last longer than her office hubby, Vince (Nick Blood). But that’s where her luck ends.
“Why do you do it, Duggan?” she says to the Jackal, as they navigate his living room, looking for an open shot. “Why do you?” he replies. “Because I like to win,” she says. “So do I,” he quips, right before delivering the final, fatal bullet.
Before that, the two share a telling moment upstairs, when she stares into his one-way mirror as the Jackal watches from the other side. Bianca can’t see the Jackal, of course, but she can see herself — and in this scenario, she’s her own worst enemy. She had the chance to quit, to stay with her family, to leave this life behind, and she chose instead to try to finish the job. Was she manipulated into it by her boss? Of course, but it’s made clear in the few hours she tries to play happy housewife that she’s been conditioned against that life. She can’t be happy cooking and “folding things,” as she tells her husband in his classroom. She can only be happy if she catches her prey — if she wins the race — or so she thinks.
Jackal, meanwhile, can see Bianca through the glass, he just has no idea who she is. All he sees is another obstacle between himself and his family. After all, he also had the chance to sit this one out. He could’ve skipped this “one last job” and run off into the sunset with Nuria (úrsula Corberó) and their son. Instead, he goes back to work, and even though he completes the impossible assignment, he doesn’t get paid. He doesn’t even get a thank you. He gets the opposite: terminated.
Or so they hoped. That the Jackal survives sets up a Season 2 where he will once again seek revenge on the powerful people who wronged him. “I know you don’t like an unpaid debt,” Zina (Eleanor Matsuura) says to the Jackal, alluding to when he hunted down and killed another former employer who refused to pay the tab. “There’s someone I have to find first,” the Jackal replies, before walking away, presumably to make things right with Nuria before settling up with Timothy Winthorp (Charles Dance).
With Bianca dead, who will chase the Jackal in Season 2? Most likely another hitman, hired by Winthorp as protection — as a barrier between the billionaire and the man he’s promised millions. This time, if the Jackal hopes to win, he’ll need to better understand his opposition — and himself. The Jackal wasn’t born. He was made — by society, by capitalism, by the environment we all share — and Bianca’s fate implies that every killer’s time eventually runs out; that those with power and money will always treat those without it as pawns, pitting them against each other in a game the kings and queens are technically playing, but it’s a game they can’t lose. Only the pawns can lose, which poses another query, one the Jackal will have to figure out for himself:
If you’re wholly committed to a game you’re designed to lose, is quitting the only way to win?
“The Day of the Jackal” Season 2 has been renewed. Season 1 is available on Peacock.
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