WAR Episode 4, Ending Explained
War is HBO’s latest must-see show: a gripping courtroom drama that’s been creeping up our streaming charts in the last few weeks and will likely become appointment viewing for TV fans as we move towards the final, nail-biting episodes.
The eight-part series (which has already been greenlit for a second season focusing on a new case) has so far been one lean, mean legal battle, packed with fine performances, and with London in its bones. The focus of Season 1 is the increasingly bitter separation of a once A-list actress, Carla Duval (an excellent Sienna Miller), and her more recently minted CEO husband, Morgan Henderson (played by Dominic West, acting at the peak of his debonair bad boy charms). Backing each side up are a teams of coolly ravenous lawyers — and amongst them a handsome and ambitious upstart from a working class background who is attempting to play both sides.
With Episode 4 of the first season of War now released, let’s take a closer look at what went down and what that climactic scene means for this addictive show going forward.
What Happened in WAR Episode 4?
Fans who’d been hoping for a mid-season banger this week (just me?) have had to make do with what boiled down to a pretty meaty hour of character development and background padding. Episode 4 is titled "Sing" and it’s all about the lawyers, pretty much: specifically Serena (Phoebe Fox) and Nicolas (James McArdle) of Taylor and Byrne and the question of whether they will risk it all on this one volatile case, not least with their first child on the way and a swanky looking townhouse to maintain.
“Sing” is structured around the final days of arbitration, with Sinjin (aka St. John, played by War MVP and The Force Awakens alumni Pip Torrens) kicking things off by bringing a paltry offer of $45 million and a whole bag of Nic’s old traumas to the table — it turns out that Cathcarts' most cut-throat employee was Nic's superior during his graduate days, when the younger (and far hairier) man had to learn to get through a stress-induced speech impediment by learning to sing, resulting in the nickname Singer and the title of this week's episode. Naturally, the sight of his old tormentor across the table brings that pesky stammer back.
After poor Nic fails to rise to Sinjin’s challenge, he and Serena receive a justified telling off from Carla in a glassy London eatery that afternoon, leaving Nic to lick his wounds for the evening. Back at T&B, however, a bit of good luck is brewing: Molly (Bone Temple’s Emma Laird) manages to tempt Saeed (Shaheen Jafargholi) to come on a night out where he ends up going home with the E.A. of Michael Anker — a billionaire who (as he finds out after a few lines in a bathroom cubicle) is trying to acquire Morgan's company, Zephyr. More useful still, Saeed also discovers that they’re planning to move Morgan's assets so as to keep them off the table during the settlement.
When a still half-cut Saeed informs Nic of this the next morning, he leaves the room by delivering a line about not underestimating him; which Nic (having quickly worked to block Morgan’s asset transfer) repeats verbatim on his visit to Sinjin’s office that evening, his stammer under control and his confidence restored. The result: more war.
How WAR Episode 4 Ended
First of all, as was always going to be the case given that we have roughly four more hours of this show to get through, no settlement is reached in Episode 4, despite a nine-figure offer from Morgan’s team. Instead, Nic, Serena, and Carla each decide to bite the bullet and go to trial. This means plenty of press, stress, and public scrutiny for the characters and lots of juicy monologues for us — and hopefully more screen time for Carla’s son Gabe (Aran Murphy, or as his friends call him, Cillian Murphy’s son).
For our handsome mole Johnny, for the most part Episode 4 was a relatively quiet day at the office, but he does get a flourish of stuff to do in the final few minutes. First, after almost being caught snooping in Bernard’s (Steve Furst) office, he’s asked by the bestubbled, hangdog T&B financial advisor to drop the trial agreement off to Carla’s house (uh oh). Before that Freudian inevitability, he also manages to sneak a copy of Bernard’s projected income numbers and send them off to his slippery benefactors at Cathcarts.
The last scene shows us Johnny and Carla together in her living room, where they continue to discreetly flirt with each other and eventually give in to a kiss. After a second or two, Carla pulls away (at least for now) and signs on the dotted line. We are going to court.
What To Expect Going Forward
For Johnny, the question that hangs is whether these feelings for Carla might eventually make him think twice about his weekly pastime of sticking multiple daggers in her back — along with the one he's currently planting in his posh but pleasant girlfriend Bella's (Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda).
For Carla, I say more power to her — not least with the inevitable reveal that Morgan has been continuing his affair with Ms. Flora Monroe (Rose Williams). After a rocky week for Nic and Serena, I'm happy to report that their family-to-be looks stronger than ever, if not necessarily their financial foundations. I might be projecting, but one of the most interesting things about the show is that it’s yet to fully take a side, with dodgy tactics and equally shaky morals being shown by both parties — but you have to say it's getting increasingly hard to imagine the writers leaving Nic and Serena on skid row.
What we’ve yet to see are the private lives of the killers at Cathcarts, which is why the brief scene at the midway point here, in which Saeed spots Sinjin being rejected by a younger man at the club, feels so significant. If I had to guess, a Sinjin-focussed episode will be with us in the next two weeks and it will likely be the best in the series — at one point in "Sing", we get a nice interaction between Sinjin and the perennially rose-cheeked David (Miles Jupp) in which the latter drops a quote from Keanu Reeves: “The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.” At time of writing, this is also the title of Episode 6. Watch this space.
