Warning: Major spoilers for the final episode of Top Boy.
It has been a long time since Top Boy premiered on Channel 4 in 2011. We’ve seen a switch to Netflix, Brexit, a pandemic and a lettuce with the wherewithal to outlast a prime minister. Former stars Michael Ward, Letitia Wright and Sharon Duncan Brewster have gone from unknowns to starring in Hollywood movies, but one thing on the show remained the same. In the end, there could only be one Top Boy.
As the series reached its conclusion, whether it would be suave pragmatist Dushane (Ashley Walters) or the unpredictable barrel of neuroses Sully (Kane Robinson) was the question on all long-term fan’s minds. Ultimately, Top Boy left its best twist for last. Not only would Dushane die a distinctly un-ceremonious death, running away from his former best friend with a pitiful slice of the fortune he once had, only to slowly bleed out of a stomach wound in an alley. Still, Top Boy left its most brutal moment for last with an ambiguous figure blowing Sully’s brains out all over the interior of his Honda. With so many characters six feet under and the ones that remain with so many axes to grind, it begs the question: Who pulled the trigger and left us without a Top Boy?
But what seems most likely, and most shocking, is that the show ended with a 12-year-old richly developed anti-hero being executed by someone the audience neither knows nor cares about. The true tragedy of Sully and Dushane is that despite how they fought, hustled and sacrificed, their lives only truly mattered to one another. The heartbreaking truth that Top Boy left us with is that you can be robbed of your purpose, your loved ones, your profit, your reason for fighting and finally, no one, not even yourself, is convinced of your own humanity. A devoted audience has followed their journeys, but Dushane, and particularly Sully’s death, is just a blip in the cruel and nihilistic world that rendered these once towering men so small. It’s a brutal but artful final moment that recalls that controversial ending to The Sopranos, where ambiguity allows us to fill in the gaps and contemplate the empty futility of our protagonists' entire journey.
No one killed Sully. Everyone killed Sully. But most importantly, Sully had already lost all reason to live and, even without a faceless figure pulling a trigger, could never end up on top.
If not Jaq, the most obvious choice would be a figure from the Irish gangs led by a bone-chilling Barry Keoghan. The appetite for violence was there, and from the moment the show announced its presence with a shipment of severed human heads, the safety of Sully’s own skull was in jeopardy. It’s possible that a rival from another London gang seeing an opportunity to clear out the power vacuum and expand into the Hackney territory, or that Dushane’s former paramour Shelley or even Jaq’s girlfriend Becks would decide upon enacting a little vengeance, or even that Stefan changed his mind. Sully may have disassociated emotionally, but he wasn’t short of people who felt intense hatred towards him.
But then, who the hell was it that coated the windshield in crimson brain matter? If it was a person that the audience was accustomed to, then the best money was on Jaq, who had been pushed to the brink by the deaths of her friends and her sister’s addiction, and in the final season, seemed to believe in a future outside of the Summerhouse estate that had previously eluded her. But most of all, she has a reason to survive, forging actual loving relationships, and Sully’s continual existence meant hers wasn’t assured. But anyone with a Netflix account and fast reactions to hitting the pause button will be able to see there appears to be a crop of short blonde hair and a male build, albeit one too blurred and brief to scrutinise properly.
If it wasn’t going to end with Dushane and Sully plunging daggers into each other’s hearts simultaneously, the final six episodes floated a few possibilities. Young Stefan confronts Sully but ultimately chooses not to avenge his brother and best friend. But plenty of characters still had reasons to want to see Sully dead. Not that he cared much, staring straight down Stefan’s pistol as he asked him, ”How does it feel?” only to respond, “To be honest, Stefan, feeling left me a long time ago.”