The following contains spoilers from Night 3 aka the finale of The Continental: From the World of John Wick, now streaming on Peacock.
The Continental itself barely survived the finale of its eponymous Peacock miniseries.
As the 3-“Night” John Wick prequel series came to a close, Winston (played by Colin Woodell) & Co. launched their attack on deplorable Cormac’s (Mel Gibson) hotel, using a masterfully executed plan to thwart his storming of the armory. Many punches were thrown, scores of bullets fired, and much blood shed as Cormac was hunted and dozens of resident assassins were deployed to fend off the threat.
Winston and Charon (Ayomide Adegun) zeroed in on a tweaked Cormac, who slipped out of his office via a secret annex; Miles and then his dojo-owning sister Lou (Hubert Point-Du Jour and Jessica Allain) slugged it out with, and then shot dead (with their hit man dad’s gun,) the twin Hansel (Mark Musashi), while Yen (Nhung Kate) engaged in an epic fight with Gretel (Marina Mazepa); and Jenkins (Ray McKinnon) from a seized perch across the street used his rifle to pick off the occasional baddie.
In the end, Lemmy (Adam Shapiro) was Team Winston’s only casualty, blown up by a grenade sent to the communications room he had commandeered. The bad guys, however, sustained numerous, oft-brutal losses. As for Cormac, he was in the process of speeding away in a private subway system — after setting in motion the hotel’s self-destruct sequence — when he was stopped by Winston. But Cormac was really and truly stopped, with a bullet to the head, by police detective Silva, whom we learned was a survivor of the apartment fire that young Winston and Frankie started, operating off bad intel from Cormac.
As morning broke, Winston found himself confronted on the hotel’s front steps by the Adjudicator, who rhetorically asked how he thought this power grab was going to go over with the High Table. Winston responded to that threat with a bullet to the Adjudicator’s temple, then retreated into what was now his and Charon’s domain….
TVLine asked executive producer Albert Hughes, who also directed the finale (as well as Night 1), to single out his favorite action sequence. And, to little surprise, his pick was Yen and Gretel’s 4-1/2 minute rooftop clash.
“The reason that it is so fun to me and so interesting is that it turns a trope on its head,” Hughes explained. “You know Dynasty and all those old nighttime soaps where the women would have a cat fight and end up in the water? This took that very sexist trope and turned it on its head, because these are two badass women.
“One of them,” Gretel, “you don’t know but then reveal what she can do with her body and contortion,” notes Hughes. “The other,” Yen, “you’ve seen kick ass through two episodes and she’s out for vengeance, and though they clash and do end up in water, it’s not the traditional cat fight.
“Because I was raised by a very powerful, crazy, good feminist woman who beat a bunch of stuff into us,” Hughes shares, “to see those two women go at it was a highlight for me.” (Watch that fight below.)
The Yen-Gretel fight was especially engaging because there was no obvious doubling for either Nhung Kate or Marina Mazepa.
“I think there was one [instance], from the first flip-down. I think there was a double for that, but nothing else,” Hughes ventures, before offering up a fun behind-the-scenes fact.
“Kate, the Vietnamese actress that played Nhung, does not like water. So going under water [for the fight’s explosive climax] was tough for her,” he says. “In fact, I think the hand coming up [holding the detonator] wasn’t her, because she hates water.”
Are there more small-screen, pre-John Wick stories to be told in this action-packed, assassin filled world of the Continental and its High Table cousins?
“Definitely,” Hughes is quick to asnwer.
“There’s of course the business side of it — Can they work out deals? Do they want another show? — and then there’s a creative side of me and Kirk Ward, the showrunner and writer who’s my partner in crime, like daydreaming. I don’t think I’m done with the ’70s, there’s more there, but there’s also the ’80s and this wonderful opportunity for the second British invasion — Duran Duran, Culture Club, you name it — and the American side of that music scene. Especially in the year 1984 and how special it was with the MTV generation, the Summer Olympics, Michael Jackson finishing Thriller and Prince coming in with Purple Rain, the Chicken McNugget being introduced…. It was a big year!”