In Steal’s ending, Zara and Rhys confront the real mastermind of the heist that was conducted at Lochmill Capital. How did things come to that? Well, Zara, Luke, and the rest of the office arrived at their workplace like they did throughout their careers there. But that day went very differently, because Lochmill was attacked by a bunch of robbers, who had altered their faces with prosthetics, and they stole around 4 billion pounds. The following day, Zara and Luke found out that those robbers had transferred 5 million pounds each to both of their accounts to keep their mouths shut about their involvement in the heist. While Luke buckled under the pressure of being investigated by Detective Rhys, Detective Ellie, Financial Crime Investigator Darren, and Intelligence Service Agent Fitch and was subsequently kidnapped by the robbers, Zara kept her cool and began working with Rhys and even the MI5 to clear her name. In the meantime, Luke convinced one of the robbers, Sniper, to come away with him and get a share of his 5 million pounds, because Sniper wasn’t getting paid by his boss, London, as he had left fingerprints at the crime scene (the kidnapping). Sniper re-abducted Luke and took him to Zara’s house to force both of them to give up their respective payouts. What happened next? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Milo, Sniper, and the Robbers Died
Zara and Luke’s 5 million pounds were stored in cold wallets. What is a cold wallet? It’s an offline storage device where you can keep your money in the form of cryptocurrency. It’s locked with a passcode, and I guess it can’t be hacked into. Tech experts will know what that is anyway, but that explanation is for normies like me who learned about this technology through Steal. Zara wanted to keep her money and also keep Sniper from killing her and Luke. So, she convinced Sniper to leave her and Luke’s cold wallets alone and go for Milo’s cold wallet instead, because it had 20 million pounds in it. In the meantime, Rhys, who had been suspended for taking on this case to pay off the debt he had piled up because of his gambling addiction, called up Darren and told him to meet him at Lochmill so that he could check out if his hunch about Kate and Milo, employees of the company, being involved in the heist was correct or not. Coincidentally enough, that’s when London and the robbers got another task from their master. Going back to Milo’s house, in addition to Zara and Luke, Sniper held Milo hostage and got his hands on his cold wallet. However, since the passcode was stored somewhere in Lochmill, Zara got busy convincing Sniper to take them there together. As Sniper was deliberating, Milo attacked Sniper and got stabbed to death instead.
Sniper then proceeded to take Zara and Luke to Lochmill, and since Rhys was waiting for Darren outside the building, he spotted them and went after them. London and the robbers found Milo’s dead body at his house, and hence, they went to Lochmill too, supposedly to look for Sniper and Luke. A full-on shootout ensued, Sniper ended up killing all the robbers, and Rhys got injured. Then he went for Zara, and the show’s plot armor kicked in, thereby allowing Zara to kill Sniper with Rhys’ taser. In the meantime, Luke had managed to call the police, and as they took care of the situation and tended to Rhys’ wounds, Luke and Zara were confronted by Fitch and Ellie, who had arrived there by tracking Rhys’ phone. Sniper could have walked out of there with more than 20 million pounds in his pocket, but just because he tried to kill Luke after he had already given him the passcodes, he ended up being the biggest loser of them all. I mean, his colleagues didn’t have the chance to score so big. So, the fact that they died was not a big deal. However, Sniper had the golden opportunity of making it big, and he ended up getting nothing because of his bloodlust, his penchant for betraying people, or his underlying sexism that caused him to underestimate Zara.
Darren Was The Mastermind Of The Heist
Myrtle, one of the employees at Lochmill, informed her bosses that the 4 billion pounds that had been stolen during the heist had been returned to their bank accounts. Zara had received her new identity and passport from MI5, but she was in two minds about using it to get away from London without knowing who masterminded the whole heist. When she conveyed that sentiment to Luke, he advised her to “take the W” that the MI5 had given them and put this whole affair in the rearview mirror, because that’s what he intended to do. Before leaving the city, though, Zara paid Rhys a visit to tell him about Sniper’s allegation that her “police friend” knew something about the mastermind. Zara assumed that he was talking about Rhys, but he essentially told her that he didn’t have the means or the expertise to pull off such a “complex” heist. On that note, they parted ways. Zara went back to Lochmill to pick up her stuff, which was when she learned that all that stolen money had been returned. She was confused as hell, but she didn’t stop to figure out how that rendered the whole heist pointless. As she was heading out of the building, Rhys reached there and took her to the room that Darren was sitting in, and accused him of being the mastermind. After beating around the bush for a while, Darren admitted that he was the one pulling the strings attached to the robbers, Milo, Luke, and Zara. Why, though?
Based on what I understood from Darren’s explanation of his motivation, without the help of subtitles, the heist was about hurting the one percent that hoarded most of the wealth of the world as they watched the rest of the 99 percent of the population suffer. So, Lochmill handled the pension accounts of the ordinary folk and the tax haven accounts of the “extraordinary” people. The 4 billion pounds was just the money in the pension accounts, which had been returned by Darren, and the rest of the undeclared money that belonged to the millionaires and billionaires that Darren had stolen during the hack had been stowed away in cold wallets. Since that tax haven money could attract financial investigation, neither Lochmill nor its owner was going to alert the authorities about it, which allowed Darren to use it for the good of mankind. And my honest reaction to that is: yeah, sure, I guess. Darren is a genius, and he’s rich. But since he’s fictional, he has supposedly preserved his spine. And he wants to use his expertise and reach to change a system that prioritizes the rich over the poor. The heist has put the spotlight on the country’s economic system, and that’ll hopefully prevent the rich from evading taxes. Once that tax money is injected into the infrastructure, health sector, education sector, and every department that’s there to serve the public, society will be able to achieve some form of equality. That’s Darren’s theory, and even he doesn’t know if this gamble, which he has played by sacrificing quite a few lives, will pay off.
Rhys Didn’t Fall Into Darren’s Trap
In Steal’s ending, Darren offered the slush fund money of a millionaire named Gould (he’d like to be called Sir Toby Gould, though) to Rhys in order to keep him from reporting his work to the authorities. Zara suggested to Rhys that he not take that money, because if he did, he’d be an accessory to Darren’s “crime,” thereby putting him in Darren’s debt forever. Yes, Darren said that if Rhys took that money, he wouldn’t bother him, but we know very little of Darren. What’s the guarantee that he’ll not puppet Rhys when the time comes? That’s right, there’s no guarantee. Yes, Rhys will be able to use that money to clear his gambling debts and other bills. However, the thing about gamblers is that the more money they have, the more they gamble. So, taking that money would only exacerbate Rhys’ issues instead of solving them, thereby making that another reason for him to not take that cold wallet. Eventually, Rhys and Zara walked away from Darren and that money, hoping to never cross paths with that cyber-Robin Hood ever again. After exiting the Lochmill Capital building, when Rhys expressed his regret about not taking Darren’s offer, Zara pulled out a trophy from the box full of her stuff from her workstation, and pulled out Milo’s cold wallet from its base. After the shootout and before meeting Ellie and Fitch, Zara had stashed that cold wallet in the trophy, which originally housed the passcodes.
Zara hadn’t hoped for the person who packed all her stuff to include the trophy. However, once she saw it was in there, she found the confidence to persuade Rhys to not fall into Darren’s trap. There’s no saying what Zara would have done had the trophy not been in that box. That said, call it luck, fate, or destiny, the “good guys,” by which I mean Zara and Rhys, got the money they needed to fix their lives. To be clear, Zara let the cops get their hands on her 5 million pound cold wallet so that she could have Milo’s 20 million pound cold wallet. Now, will they actually “fix their lives” or waste them on, as Zara said, “something exciting”? The show doesn’t reveal that, but I have a feeling that if Zara and Rhys don’t use that money for the betterment of society, Darren will come for them. They are free to solve all the financial problems they have, but if they become the kind of people that Darren hates, then they’ll face his ire. Even though I have labeled Zara and Rhys as “good guys,” we all know that they have a tendency to do illegal stuff. Money has never made someone a better person—Darren being the exception that proves the rule—and I think Zara and Rhys don’t have it in them to be the exception as well. If Steal gets greenlit for a second season, I think we’ll see the three of them duke it out with their wits. What are your thoughts on the same? Let me know in the comments section below.
