Sydney,’ ‘Dope Thief’), Tom Hardy in ‘Havoc’

The spinoff from Down Under ends its second season with one of the international team’s riskier missions. A World War II commemoration ceremony is about to get underway in scenic Sydney when a stinger missile goes missing. Set the ticking clock for a desperate search before things blow up.

Series star and creator Max Thieriot puts on his director’s cap for the first of a two-part Season 3 finale, an explosive hour in which a conflagration at a gas station provides a fiery challenge for Bode (Thieriot) and Manny (Kevin Alejandro). In the second hour, a wildfire whipped by high winds moves dangerously close to Edgewater, threatening the care facility where Bode’s grandfather Walter (Jeff Fahey), a former fire chief, resides.

The gripping urban crime drama’s season finale opens with Ray (the excellent Brian Tyree Henry) reeling from tragedy, after his scam posing as a DEA agent to rip off low-level dealers backfired badly. With little left to lose, he works with rogue agent Mina (a fierce Marin Ireland) to find the mystery man who set up Ray and his partner Manny (Wagner Moura), triggering the season-long mayhem. As we’ve come to expect, the shocking revelation leads to more danger, culminating in a suspenseful showdown.

Professional tough guy Tom Hardy, currently roughing up gangsters on the Paramount+ drama MobLand, is in his ultra-violent element in a grueling, fast-paced action movie from director/writer Gareth Evans (Gangs of London). Hardy stars as hardened detective Walker, straddling a high body count when enlisted to help a crooked politician’s son who gets mixed up in a drug deal gone sideways. Before long, everyone’s after Walker, including the underworld drug syndicate and crooked cops. Hardy’s formidable co-stars include Forest Whitaker (Andor) and Justified alum Timothy Olyphant.

If this promising comedy-mystery fails to return for a second season — which seems increasingly likely since its exile to Fridays — it will have episodes like this to blame, which nearly fatally stalls momentum in the series’ whose-body-did-they-bury hook. The hour is bookended by a new tease concerning the night of the gala, when the garden-club quartet put a body under the ground. But most of the episode dwells in the land of sappy soap opera, including Birdie (Melissa Fumero) getting a surprise you’ll see coming a mile off, Alice (AnnaSophia Robb) squabbling with her awful mother-in-law (Nancy Travis) over a new addition to the family, Brett (Ben Rappaport) bonding with his ex when their kids are sick, and Catherine (Aja Naomi King) reluctantly selling her childhood home at the behest of her divorcing parents. With just a few episodes left, it feels like they’re stretching it, which no show on any platform can afford.

INSIDE FRIDAY TV:

• Gold Rush: White Water (8/7c, Discovery): Dustin Hurt made a killing last year with a 6-ounce, $70K nugget, and as the Gold Rush spinoff returns for a ninth season, he and his crew take their biggest gamble yet as they return to the Alaska wilds seeking more fortune.
• Dateline NBC (9/8c, NBC): The true-crime series reveals the sordid truth behind the 2019 murder in West Virginia of Michael Cochran, whose pharmacist wife Natalie was operating a Ponzi scheme.
• International Jazz Day from Morocco (10/9c, PBS): Jazz is an international language, as this concert special demonstrates. Jeremy Irons hosts a global showcase featuring Herbie Hancock and Dee Dee Bridgewater, with the entire cast performing John Lennon‘s “Imagine” in the finale.

ON THE STREAM:

• Babygirl (streaming on Max): The provocative film starring Nicole Kidman as a CEO who gets steamy with a young intern (Harris Dickinson) makes its streaming debut and premieres on HBO Saturday (8/7c).
• Jessica Kirson: I’m the Man (streaming on Hulu): The comedian riffs on annoying influencers, Sephora groomers and much more in a feisty stand-up set.
• Morimoto’s Sushi Master (streaming on The Roku Channel): The second season of the culinary competition challenges eight expert sushi chefs to show off their mastery of sushi platters, bento boxes, omakase service and more, with the celebrated Masaharu Morimoto joined by chef Phillip Frankland Lee to judge the results.
• WondLa (streaming on Apple TV+): The lavish animated fantasy based on Tony DiTerlizzi’s trilogy returns for a second season, with teenage Eva (voiced by Jeanine Mason) discovering that nothing’s what it seems in New Attica.