Steal (Season 1)

This British crime thriller asks the question: what would you do with billions of dollars, or as Elon Musk would say, 1% of his net worth? Steal, Prime Video’s six-episode heist thriller, stars Sophie Turner as Zara Dunne, an employee at a London pension firm who gets swept into the biggest robbery imaginable. On the pod, we talk about why the series impresses in its early episodes and cliffhangers, how it compares to everything from Mr. Robot and Industry to Die Hard, where it sags, where it excels, and what the early reception looks like. Tune in, and welcome to Today’s Episode!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome to today's episode, the podcast, where we discuss the most recent installments of a different series every show. It is Tuesday, March 10th, the same day that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone or, you know, showed it off for the first time, the same day that I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered, and last year we were reviewing Daredevil Born Again. Now, how do I connect Daredevil Born Again, a superhero TV show, with Steel, a heist show that came out in January? But I watched all six episodes of it. So if you think about the cast there, Daredevil famously is, or at one point has his friendship with Karen Page. Yeah. Right. And Karen Page is a redhead. And Sophie Turner, at least when you looked at her as Sansa in uh in Game of Thrones, she was a redhead for like eight seasons. But the thing about Game of Thrones is that they changed everybody's hairstyles. Because I know Daenerys, brunette, right? Yeah. And then I think even uh the person who plays the mom, uh starting with the C. Are you talking about Cersei? Cersei. Oh, Cersei, okay. Also has dark hair. And then Sansa, I think, actually has blonde hair, and that's why she has blonde hair here. I think it was her actual hair color. So you're going with hair color.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Because you could just easily go with the MCU because both were in that and do it that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Everybody's men in the MCU at this point. But the show we're talking about today, what would you do if you had four billion pounds or five point five billion dollars? I have so much money, even though I guess would you go to Mars?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Well, yes, I probably would, but also private jet 100%. That's why I feel like everyone, that's the first purchase.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

I don't think you could take a private jet to Mars. You would have to at least put in some safety precautions, maybe a a suit. I mean, you buy a private jet. I'm not talking about a swimsuit either. But yes, yeah, you could buy you could buy plenty. You could buy a fleet, you could buy a giga yacht, you know, those things that uh uh Jeff Bezos has. You could buy a f like a ton of them, yeah. You could give everybody in the world or half of everybody in the world like one dollar.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

You could probably do you could probably get through a lot of verses of what they said to do in the billionaire song.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Put it all in Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Use it as a how-to.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah. There's a lot you could do with it. Basically, what happens in this show is that there's a theft of four billion pounds and it's from a pension management company. So it's taken from people's pensions that they're gonna get when they retire. So those retirement funds are completely So how do you make them likable if people are stealing from that? Well, in the first episode, these are thieves, so they're not supposed to be likable. Then at the end of the first episode, you find out that Zara Dune, the Sophie Turner character, is actually in on the heist. And so at that point, you then have to put some mental gymnastics as to how to root for a protagonist who is uh responsible for defunding or defrauding like all these people who are working honestly and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

About to retire and like get their money in the world. Including her mom.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Her mom was one of the people who the money was stolen from.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

You know, it reminds me a lot of Mr. Robot because I think that the F Society did that in the first season, right? They stole a ton of money.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

I'm so glad you brought this up. So let's talk about Zero Day, literally the TV show, or five nine. Yeah, the hack from Mr. Robot. Yeah, which is also coincidentally the date that this podcast was made, but yeah. Wait, oh, our podcast. That's so cool. Yeah, no connection, but that's awesome. Uh, let's also talk about the fact that the doomsday clock just ticked back, the doomsday clock being the thing where it's like a bunch of scientists get into a room and they say, This is how close humanity is to destroying itself. And because of AI this year, they went from like 89 seconds to 85 seconds to midnight, and it's the closest the clock has ever been, uh, knock on wood, uh, up until this point. So all of this stuff is kind of the the five-nine attack, the the zero-day attack, it's the same premise that the world needs a restructuring, or like all these rich, rich assholes are going to have karma hit them eventually, where everybody gets really mad and the monopoly of of finances just blows up. Yeah. And and so everything gets redistributed, and there's gonna be like this cataclysmic event that causes kind of the world to explode. But then whatever comes up next after that is just going to be hopefully better, you know, like a rebirth, a born again.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

If you want to go back to the city, you can that's how you can connect it to Daredo.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Right. But what I feel like the steel part of this show is we learn at the end of the show or the six episodes that that's what they're trying to sell, is that this is that event that there's this guy responsible who's like way into finances who decides if I take this four billion dollars, people are gonna get really mad. They're gonna look for where that money goes. And so what he did then was he put it on all these accounts of like these celebrities and these politicians who were corrupt, yeah, in the hopes that then the people would kind of bring them down. And then he returned all the money.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

He returned all the money.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

That's how the show ends, is like because we're talking about the full six episodes. The four billion dollars gets returned, but now the investigations have started. So what he's trying to do is he's trying to do an F Society 5-9 hack without keeping the money, he's he's going half measures on it. He's only doing it for the time that it takes for people to start looking into these other places, and then he puts the money back in. And is that is that Luke? Is that who you're talking about? Luke, Luke, wow, you're just like picking names out of like random, right? He's just the second name on there, right? So yeah, no, Luke is just another uh trade processor, he's got the same job that Zara does. Um, so like they work together in the trading firm.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Well, for because from what I understood, this was supposed to be at least I thought, a fish out of water story where Zara, she like kind of got looped in, but she didn't actually want to be part of the heist. Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

So we learned throughout the first three or four episodes how I think it's in the third episode where we get a backflash that shows us, but there's this group as that's been hired out, right? And they're a group of villains. For a while I thought they were MI5, but then I realized they're not. And they bring in this guy, Milo from Lock Lock Mill uh Capital. That's the name of the pension management company. And that guy then brings in Luke, and then Luke brings in Zara, and they're promised Zara and Luke are like a million or maybe like a hundred thousand uh pounds. Sorry, gotta convert. Uh and and uh Milo, I think is like given 20 million pounds.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Okay. Or something. So he's so he definitely has like a bigger job. I guess if he's hiring people, it makes sense, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Right. Like everybody's told a different number. And I guess it only took a hundred thousand for Zara to kind of throw away her morality and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do this. Because it's also kind of a a look at affordability in the world and how um it your protagonist, it doesn't, we don't really second guess it after a while. We're just like, oh yeah, she sh we kind of just understand where her mentality was at and we don't like lambast her too much for for doing that.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Well, it's kind of about the modern financial system and how like it moves money, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Right. But it's also about how like close we are to that cataclysm. If if we as an audience can sympathize with a character for selling out and kind of stealing this amount of money and just throwing it away, then that just shows that our society is at a point where people are sick and fed up of the idea of like crypto and the this enormous amount of wealth that is owned by just so few people. I'm starting to sound like Bernie Sanders, but like that is the truth because the main character here, we never at the end think, oh, she shouldn't have done that. We more think, oh, Luke should have held it together because he's the one when he starts to unravel, where the police start to really skewer him, he has to be kidnapped by the same people he was helping just to shut him up. And then from there it starts to spiral.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Right. And I'm glad you said that because Satorus Nickyus, he's the one that created this show. He also wrote it like the entire and he also produced the entire series. This is the first show he made, and he said the idea came to him because he used to work in the financial district. He observed how companies that move tons of money through desktop computers had like way more than banks, usually. And so he always thought to himself, like, what would actually happen if just one day, you know, because it wouldn't even be like Robert.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

In the first episode, it plays out a lot like Inside Man, right? But if you remember Inside Man, that mid-2000s Clive Owen uh movie, he knew the ins and outs of that bank and he knew exactly what he wanted. He didn't go in there trying to steal like um everybody's cash, he knew exactly what accounts he was looking at. And that's because, again, Inside Man, he had people that he had been like they weren't new to this situation, right? So the fact that we find out at the very end that the person who is responsible for this is actually the guy who is uh trained to catch these people, um, and that he's the one who was brought onto this investigation to look over and try to track down where the money went, it should come to know as no surprise that he's the one who'd who would like mastermind it. Is he anonymous? No, he's brought in, he comes in a little later, I think, in the second episode. And I don't predict that it's him until I think the last, the very penultimate episode. Okay, so that's where the cop calls him and says, Hey, I'm heading over to the lock mill um management company because all the robbers are heading back there to destroy some evidence and catch this guy named Morgan, who used to be a part of their their crew, but then ended up turning on them because he wanted more money. And just a note there, I think this is a really dumb like ploth hole that they should have just promised all the people responsible for the crime millions of dollars. Because the only reason Morgan turns on them is because he's not getting paid that much. And it makes virtually no sense why they wouldn't have, like, if they were going to give Sophie Turner's character, Zara, five million when they had promised her only a hundred thousand pounds, that they wouldn't fork up the sniper dude who is clearly always used to playing the villain because I I also recognized him from Limitless. But like that, that he would uh not be entitled to more money himself.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Yeah, because uh yeah, I mean that that definitely tracks with what you're saying. It reminds me also a lot of Tower Heist. I know that that was a comedy, but that was also about people's pensions whose money got stolen, and that was part of and that also had to do with ice as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

The problem with the show though is because you said this is written kind of with the overall arching message that like money has become so intangible that it doesn't really take, it doesn't really matter as much anymore.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

And according to Sortirius Nickyus, again, the creator of the show, this is like 100% like everything that they did once they realized that the money was stolen was was uh like actually correct.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

But you were saying But what I'm trying to say is like the first three episodes did a really good job grounding the series. The first episode, filler kill, probably my favorite, is where you see the armed robbers, they go in there, they they they beat up some of the staff, really like they punch the guy's nose in, it looks like he might be dead. The when they realize that they're caught, like they also beat up that dude. Um, and and uh they pull out Zara and Luke, and they're having to make phone calls while Milo and the other CEOs are having to sign off on paperwork. So they like, yeah, go through every mechanism that they would need to in order to steal this money. It felt really thought out. Yeah, second episode. Oh, no, that's what you just said. Second episode, very much also very tense because at this point, Luke starts to freak out. Now, you can wonder why he's doing that if he if he knows that he's gonna be okay, if he has the money, but for some reason the police have gotten into his head, so they're tailing him. And then at this point, the robbers go in after him to quiet him up. And so we think that they're there to kill him, and there's this huge action scene that takes place where he's running through his apartment building at the same time that Zara's trying to break into the apartment building while the police are also watching from the outside.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

So that's what people mean because I saw that Luke is in survival mode the whole time in this series. That's what a lot of articles are saying.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

The second episode, he absolutely is. After that, Luke is kind of just like hanging out because the armed robbers do get him and then they drug him and then they drag him to their lair, and then they just keep him there until he convinces Morgan, who again sniper, uh to just kill off a bunch of the people who are keeping him hostage, and then uh steal his like cold wallet with all his Bitcoin or whatever on it. So, like, that's the way they paid uh Zara and Luke and um Milo is that they gave them like a certain amount in Bitcoin in the cold. Oh, okay. So it's it's always Bitcoin, isn't it? Well, it's the way that the it's untraceable. Uh and uh my point being that after the third episode, you really hit a wall. Um, Zara's character, she continues to be on the run because MI6 gets involved and they say, hey, we don't really want to disclose too much about this$4 billion operation. We don't even want the police to figure out too much of what's going on. Um, more so because they just don't want to look bad. And they also know that that money that's been stolen and where the accounts that it's going could also look very suspicious. They're trying to avoid the thing that the main mastermind is trying to expose. So that they're telling everybody to shut up. So they're looking for uh uh uh Zara to basically give them a lead on where the bad guys are so they can take care of them before the police get to them, and then use the person who's in charge of the police force who we haven't talked about at all, but that's the DC guy from um uh uh from Queen's Gambit. He was also from Strike Back, the Great Bodies and Books. Jacob Fortune Lloyd, right? Yeah, yeah. It's funny that he's in a series about stealing money and his name is Fortune Lloyd, but uh they give him a gambling addict addiction, and he is going to be the scapegoat for the police to say that they they screwed up the investigation because no one's expecting to get the billions of dollars back. Like what happens at the end.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

But my question is more like a so you're saying it hits a wall at episode four, but I feel like if MI6 is getting involved with a main character, wouldn't that make like the tension just continue to rise?

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Like her her version, she just goes to like a safe house, then she sleeps with the police guy, and it's kind of just her running around making her own decisions and then attending work. Um, and it just I guess figuring things out at like a snail's pace. It's not like it just becomes terrible, but it's not until the last episode where it becomes diehard again. They go back to lock mill, whatever, uh the building where the heist took place. All the robbers show up again trying to stop Morgan, Sniper, from stealing the cold wallets, the remaining cash, and killing off the police guy and Zara and Luke and all and the remaining uh people who are still alive. That we get this huge gun battle, and it seems like they didn't spare any expense. And then you get the final twist that the mastermind was the person running the investigation to begin with. Um, and so the last episode does kind of bring it all together. However, like it does waver in episode four and five, and it promises something within the first three episodes that I don't think it quite delivers on, which is just like an intensely more thought-out mystery as to why or who. Like the fact that he just returns the money at the end and he's like, oh man, no one was supposed to get hurt. And the fact that you kind of like, as much as I enjoyed Zara's character in the first few episodes, because it did seem like her decision making made a lot more sense as it went on. Every time they tried to pull a twist, like when she had used a fake cold wallet on her mom to get the money back. And later on, when she was like, Oh, I was supposed to be the scapegoat too, like they felt so predictable.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Well, it also seems like just in terms of of a cliffhanger talking about like bringing the money back. I know that, like, probably in real life an investigation would be open and they would try to figure out who, but it if all the money has been returned, it doesn't really seem like because I heard that this had like potential for being a season two, it doesn't seem like that would be that interesting because it seems like almost the uh the the crime has been not committed, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Well, yes and no, because what ends up happening is that the police guy who was going to be used as a scapegoat, he does lose his job. And so I think he does get so he loses his job, and Zara, she almost dies because of Morgan, like killing everybody, killing all the armed guards in in that uh final episode. But that's when they realize who the mastermind is and they confront him and they say, We're going to turn you in. Oh, was he the guy with glasses? Because I did see some of the finale. He okay, he's like the you said money heist, but yeah, he looked like a cheap version of the professor from Money Heist. And the only hint we had gotten earlier that he may be the dude is like when he got super mad at this other billionaire and he was like, I've worked so hard to get where I am, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, no, he spells it out for everybody. That's another thing that the series does in the last three episodes, is a lot of just explaining. But he tells them, like in no uncertain terms, this is why I did it, this is how I did it, please let me go. And I will give you the remaining 20 million or whatever, or actually, I think it was like 10 million in this cold wallet. And so he literally hands them the cold wallet and they say to him, they're like, Well, like, I think Reese says, Don't take it, and then it seems like she might for a second, and then they leave the building and it's then revealed that they didn't take it, but they also didn't turn him in. So they didn't the reason they didn't take it though was because she still she she was able to sneak out another cold wallet with 20 million dollars uh or million uh pounds in it. Uh and so she was like, I've got this money from the heist, but he doesn't know that I have this money from the heist, so he'll never be able to hold it over our shoulders, but we're also not going to be turning him in so he can continue doing this. That's the part that left it a little cloudy, is like they were giving him kind of a conundrum of like, you either turn yourself in or we'll turn you in, but then they just left the building. So that's why I was a little confused when it left when they whether the series ended.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah, it seemed like they were almost leaving room for season two, so that he's either going to die or he's gonna be the person that he's not gonna die.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

He's just a computer nerd.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

I thought that when you said that she didn't accept the money, they were doing it like she did it out of goodwill. But that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

No, that's what I feel like she was trying to impart or make it seem like to the other guy like we're above what you want with the slimy funds. But then she walks out and she's like, No, no, no, I still have this cold wallet, he just doesn't know about it, and then I'm gonna pay your gambling debts, and then I can be leave scot-free or whatever. Okay, so you like the first three episodes.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

It seems like you're saying that. In the last episode, the finale was also kind of action-packed. Episodes four and five, though, left more to be desired.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

No, it's just a very stupid show. If you think about it plot-wise, and like Luke freaking out, had he not freaked out, this whole series wouldn't have ended. Like it everybody would have just gotten their money, no one would have died. MI5 would have like just used the the police officer as the um as the scapegoat to get out of anything and just fire him. It's interesting. Why put a gambling addict in charge of a the most expensive heist worldwide ever? Because no one has ever stolen four billion pounds from a bank. And so you would think that they wouldn't just put someone with such a known problem. Like they try to treat it both ways with this guy. Like he's so he's so close to getting fired, anyways, and yet he's like a legitimate super detective.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Would you say it has the same problems that like modern crime TV shows do as well? What are the common problems of modern crime? Where it like either a character like you're saying has too many traits or it's slower. Like if you really think about the plot itself and deconstruct it, it doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Um, I mean that there's not a lot of shows or crime shows where it makes complete sense. I'd say Money High season one was probably closest to that, maybe one and two.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

The reason, the reason I asked it is because Soteris Nikis, I was really interested as to how he was able to make this show because he's only done like one short. He hasn't done a lot of movies, and uh the main reason I asked is because he was actually under the pen name Ray Celliston, he wrote a lot of crime mystery mystery/slash thriller novels. So I was thinking to myself that that might be the reason if there were these problems and he's making this type of TV show why they were there.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

If the show had been any longer, I think that would have been a real issue as they were just trying to string together plot, as it was with her just having a random affair with the police officer guy and then Luke getting away at the end. It just doesn't seem like Luke had a purpose because he just be I know he's the guy from Grand Turismo, so they were like, oh, we got uh Archie, what is it, Mad Madeque?

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Medecie, he he he shows up in like the most bizarre things because it wasn't just that he showed up in Midsummer, Bo is afraid. I even remember some women, Saltburn, those were all like Ariaster films, so like I only see him as like being a creepy dude.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

I was waiting for him to die because he really, again, just was her friend who then she found out betrayed her, and then so it seemed like she wanted him dead, but then they just resolved things at the end. So um it was a small cast, a small amount of episodes. There was enough fun there. The the heist was way bloodier than I thought it would get for this type of show. It seems like it was like industry ish, it was like slow horses, uh, the diehardness of the last episode, and of course, Mr. Robot, like we brought uh uh about. But overall, the show works. Um, and uh because of It not ever getting too complicated. I think you can even watch it from the corner of your eye and you wouldn't be that confused. Seven out of ten.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Seven out of ten? Okay. Well, the first three episodes, the ones that you thought were the best, were directed by Sam Miller, who has been nominated for three Emmys. The last three episodes, Hetty McDonald, uh, she was the one who to direct them, and she's most notably known for the Blink episode. She directed the Blink episode at Doctor Who, like back in 2005. But the reviews agree with you. Sophie Turner's acting across the board has gotten critical acclaim. Like there's not one place that said she did a bad job.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Zara's decisions after a while are just a little clueless. But the first few episodes are a lot of fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

It has a 7.1 on IMDB, 79% on Ron Tomato's. The Guardian gave the series four out of five stars and said it's breathless and hugely entertaining, a financial heist show. And then Robert, Rogereber.com gave it a negative review saying that they didn't like the plot, but they still love Sophie Turner. Steel leaves open the possibilities season two, gives Zara a better adventure, and we'll sign up. Cool. Uh thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

We'll see you on the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one.

unknown 23:05

Bye.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Bye.