With just one entry in The Continental on the books, viewers were left with so many questions – mostly the same questions as usual, about stuff like how money works in this universe and where all the cops are, but other stuff too, like why Charon has seen so little upward mobility in the last 50 years. Maybe he’s just grateful to have a job where he gets to meet cool dogs.
Then, there were the new questions – the mystery box full of purposely vague hints at what’s to come. Somewhere near the top of the list: Who are the Nihilists? We get a very, very brief reference to them in “Brothers in Arms,” with the foreboding implication that they may be a force to be reckoned with down the line. But what do we know about them?
Appropriately, at this point, nothing concrete. As we stated above, the only mention of the group comes from a fleeting wad of dialogue in The Continental’s debut episode. There’s been no talk of a faction called “The Nihilists” in previous John Wick media, despite the franchise’s usual giddiness at the prospect of giving cool names to stuff.
Think you know who The Nihilists are? We don’t believe you.
Here’s what we can piece together about the group going by the moniker “the Nihilists.” We know that whoever the Nihilists are, they’re either powerful or charismatic enough to convince Frankie that they’ll be able to pull him out of the lurch if he steals the coin press for them. That would put them in the crosshairs of Cormac, the proprietor of The Continental, a guy with enough clout and firepower to demand the respect of the professional assassin community.
Assuming that we don’t wind up with a third-act twist where it turns out that Cormac was secretly the leader of the Nihilists all along (we’re probably going to wind up with that) that means that the Nihilists now have two giant bullseyes on the backs of their disbelieving noggins: One from Cormac, and the other from Winston, who undoubtedly blames the group for getting his brother involved in this business to begin with, which is true as without their motivation Frankie would have never dared to steal from his boss.
There is also the fact that despite significantly altering Winston’s life, this prequel John Wick spin-off series is the first time the name of this mystery gang has been mentioned. The simple answer for their absence in the timeline where John Wick exists would be that they were erased by Cormac or just went obscure with time. The difficult answer? Maybe they now go by a different name or their existence in The Continental is just a front for something even more sinister.
Hopefully, there’ll be more information on the mysterious Nihilists as The Continental progresses, to go along with whatever super controversial thing Mel Gibson is going to say on screen. Even more hopefully, they’ll be under the command of Peter Stormare, and this whole thing is about to loop into a shared universe with The Big Lebowski that we didn’t realize we wanted until just now.
