You got good morals.
What's good morals?
You know what good morals is, bruv.
It means you'll always be there for your family…
and for your brothers.
And you'll never let them down.
In this season of Top Boy,
many of the characters are walking tightropes,
both outside and at home.
While some appear calm on the surface,
internally they're at war,
living lives of quiet desperation.
They are wrestling with their own sense of morality
in a lifestyle and a wider society
where empathy can cost
and even kill.
Amid these tensions
and their long, intense days,
they try to find their way through.
My name is Aniefiok "Neef" Ekpoudom,
and in this video, we'll be exploring
right and wrong in Top Boy.
In the early half of the season,
we're reunited with Sully.
He's at war with himself.
After the traumas of seeing Jason burn to death
in the previous season,
we find him
as he is distancing himself from the roads.
He moves into a barge on the Thames,
slowly attempting to pull his life back together,
piece by piece,
but those years still haunt him.
Fuck! Hey!
-You're fucking early. -My bad, bro.
He is seeking to recover from the hangover of a life
where he lived on the edge for so long.
But as Sully peels back the layers
and tries to find space to recover,
he is forced to confront his past actions.
The guilt of murdering Dris
is eating at him from the inside.
You done Dris, didn't you?
Come on.
Don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Don't lie to me, man.
You killed him.
Tell me you didn't kill him.
Look me in my eyes
and tell me that you didn't do it.
Dris was my friend.
That's not denying it, is it?
He scrambles to try and make things right,
easing the guilt he feels
by offering Mandy, Dris's girlfriend, money.
My life is different now.
I don't want this.
It's a cruel lesson:
our actions can define us,
the world may always see you as who you once were,
no matter how far you try and outrun it.
And so he must sit with the consequences
of who he used to be.
It's not a situation unique to Sully.
Throughout the season, we find many of the youngers
wrestling with their own morality.
Either through home traumas
or life on the roads,
they have suffered
and they're trying to survive the day
the best way they know how.
Cracks only appear when they are confronted
by other members of the community.
I know what you make him do.
You use him in the streets.
I know.
I don't make him do nothing.
I don't know what you're talking about, man.
Jamie has an awareness of that desperation,
and it allows him to show sympathy
for the decisions Ats made.
He recognises the vice Ats was locked in,
even if that vice cost Jamie his own freedom
and tore him from his family.
He used to come here and spend time with us,
like watch TV with us,
eat with us, bro, stay with Stef.
You used to help Stef with homework,
help him with shit that I couldn't, bro.
So I'll be real, like…
I'm not even trying to hear that.
Whatever he did…
what Dushane made him do…
the youth was family.
Family is Jamie's guiding light,
his North Star.
Everything he risks is for them.
And in their situation,
where he is relied on as the primary provider,
any idea of what is considered right or wrong
pales in significance
when the stakes are Stef and Aaron.
I didn't ask for this…
to be the mum and dad to you and Stef.
Fam, it's hard.
Proper hard, bro.
Man, for all of us.
I know you've been tryin',
and I've been tryin'.
But I need you to know, Aaron, yeah?
Everything that I do…
and all that I care about
is the two of you.
You and Stef,
that's it.
Ats was a foreshadowing,
and before long
the same desperation that plagued Ats
eventually confronts Jamie too.
He finds himself in a vice,
either kill his best friend Kit
or uproot his siblings and flee to Cardiff,
costing Aaron his degree
and Stef any sense of stability.
-He keeps true to mantra… -Bro!
…prioritising family
over anything and everything.
Hauntingly, that decision
to look out for his siblings over himself
ultimately costs him his life.
Jamie! Jamie!
Jamie shows that there is more here
than the individual.
Our actions never exist in isolation or a vacuum.
We are all products of an environment,
moulded by our surroundings.
In Top Boy, a coldness is threaded
through the city they inhabit,
flowing from the top downwards.
This youth.
One of ours.
He got shanked up bad.
Fourteen years old.
Someone shanked the life out of him,
left him in a fucking skip.
You believe that? Like he meant nothing.
First we see Amma, Ats's mother,
forced to leave the country
while still grieving for her murdered son.
She's lived in this country for 19 years.
She's worked legally
right up until you people stopped her.
She's paid her taxes, she has rights.
This woman has just lost her one and only son
to a devastating knife crime.
Are you aware of that? Is that in your file?
Can't you see this is wrong?
Elsewhere, Summerhouse is undergoing massive change.
East London is rapidly gentrifying.
The tower blocks are coming down
and the residents are being moved out.
The looming forces of the council
and the private developers
are squeezing out the local community,
tearing families from their homes.
Residents are rehoused in far-flung places
like Bolton and Croydon.
And in an attempt to seize the remaining properties,
the developers make life hell
for the remaining residents.
The developers treat them as mere afterthoughts,
minor obstructions to the fruitful land
that they have been living on for decades.
Basic needs
and any care for human decency
is stripped away
as the developers ruthlessly pursue the valuable land
that sits under Summerhouse.
I can't believe they're making you guys still go.
Do they know about your mum's treatment?
They know.
Just don't give a shit.
Nobody is more a product
of their environment than Dushane.
He's grown up in Summerhouse
and has seen powerful institutions
wielding the fate of a community in their hands,
reaching out and grabbing for whatever they wish.
And so he does the same,
deciding to go for what he wants by any means.
Rather than trying to play fair in an unfair world,
he adopts their same behaviours.
His decision to link up with the developers
ultimately sees his relationship with his mum
come to a crisis point.
Want me to be honest?
I sell drugs.
'Cause people wanna get high.
Everyone does it.
And all of them politicians you watch on the news,
they all get high, you know.
That's life.
That's how it goes.
I mean, even the Prime Minister was on TV
talking about how someone gave him drugs.
Why ain't he in jail?
That man has no morals.
Don't try and use him to justify what you do.
I know you're using the money you've made
to tear down this community.
Empathy and compassion are a tightrope.
And for a man like Sully,
still half in and half out,
we are shown that love and understanding
can be dangerous.
Look, what it is, Delphine, is…
where I've been…
people ain't really that nice to you.
When his niece, Pebbles gets in trouble
with a group from Peckham,
he feels himself slowly being drawn back in.
Them men ain't gonna give a fuck!
I know, I've been them!
They is gonna want their shit back.
He starts to lose who he was becoming,
filtering back into old ways.
In confrontations, he tries to show reason
and a level of empathy,
a new man in a world that hasn't changed.
First with Rashaun…
-The fuck you doing? -Pebbles!
You took something from her that weren't hers to give,
but the people it belongs to, they're fucking serious.
And she might not have told… Look at me!
She might not have told you that.
'Cause she's fucking sideways, I know.
But I'm here being nice.
They come…
they ain't gonna be nice.
And then with the group in South London.
After reason fails,
he has to resort to violence.
What's wrong with this silly boy?
What's the point in all this?
I get it, you men are fucking embarrassed.
Pride and that.
But neither work.
In the end, trying to bargain
with the South London lot
and doing a favour for Pebbles
almost costs him his life.
Love can get you killed.
The incident changes him.
He scrubs away the promise of who he was becoming
and falls back into his old self.
As the compassion withers away,
a ruthlessness emerges in its place,
and it culminates with him
murdering Jamie in front of Stef.
It was a defining moment
for one of the most troubled characters in the series.
The promise of what he could have been is gone,
lost to the darkness.
Dushane is also changed by a traumatic event.
His mum passes away
while he is out on the roads.
Distraught by her death, he almost collapses.
Eventually, he heeds the words
of their final conversation
and steps in to secure the future
of the community in Summerhouse.
You gotta change the plans back to the way they were.
Tell mum,
she used to say…
"Summerhouse is more than numbers."
It's a subtle shifting of the dial.
By the end of the season,
both him and Sully
have inched slightly away from who they once were,
and Jamie has gone.
The season is an observation
of how young people caught in desperate circumstances
wrestle with morality and empathy,
sometimes to their own detriment.
We are shown that there are dangers
for doing the right thing,
but also freedom.
You do what you have to
to protect the people that you love.
The people you care about, your family.
And I love you for that.