Episode 1

A man who was due to testify against Eric Kinsella is chased through a supermarket car park and shot dead inside the shop, and with the witness gone the case against him collapses in an afternoon. That is how series 2 of Kin begins: not with an arrest or a plan, but with a killing already arranged and a court already bought. The pursuer driving the chase car is Isaac Kemela, known as Kem, and the assassination is the family's answer to the trial that threatens Eric, better known as Viking (Sam Keeley).

Amanda Kinsella (Clare Dunne) is driven out to an abandoned waterfront site by Rory Hayes, where three Garda cars deliver a handcuffed Viking; the two strands of the season, the family that runs the business and the family member who must stand trial, are brought to the same empty ground. Nuray Batuk (Öykü Karayel), who runs the Batuk cartel's business in Dublin, flies in with her cousin Hamza and joins a convoy of SUVs. Frank Kinsella (Aidan Gillen), meanwhile, is in decline: his house untended, his authority gone, and visions of the overdose that nearly killed him at the end of series 1 returning uninvited.

Amanda works two money transfers in parallel. At a meeting she tells a contact that payment is expected by the close of business; at a bodega counter she and Jimmy (Emmett J. Scanlan) hand over two duffle bags of cash and walk out with an account number. In court, Viking's barrister asks the judge to drop the case now the eyewitness is gone; the prosecuting barrister does not object, and Viking is released into his family's keeping, greeted by Birdy Goggins (Maria Doyle Kennedy) with a new car and a duffle of money in the boot.

The money, it turns out, buys less than the family hoped. When Amanda, Frank and Jimmy meet Nuray, she tells them the payment covers only the cost of the meeting. Her brother Cenk died in the crossfire when Michael Kinsella shot Eamon Cunningham at the end of series 1, which makes Michael a target who cannot be bought off, and the Kinsellas must now carry Cunningham's inherited debt of 70 million. Amanda offers a further 20 million to have the bounty on Michael lifted; Nuray refuses, and gives them four months to pay.

Michael (Charlie Cox), in hiding since series 1, is dropped in the countryside and walks to a secluded house. That night two gunmen enter; he escapes through an attic window, draws them into the open, blinds them with spotlights and kills both, then burns the bodies and the car. At Birdy's celebration meal, Amanda leaves the table in pain and is found to be 13 weeks pregnant, with no heartbeat on the scan; she goes into surgery, and the loss is not discussed at the table. The hour ends on the parole board granting Bren Kinsella his release, so that the season's two pressures, the debt and the patriarch, are both set running in the last thirty seconds.

It is a setup hour, and it should be judged as one: almost nothing is resolved, and the plot it lays down, the trial dropped and the debt accepted, is an invoice rather than a story. What it does very well is to move the series' centre of gravity to Amanda, who spends the hour negotiating for the family and losing a pregnancy alone, and to establish that the Kinsellas' problem is now structural, a liability they never incurred and cannot refuse. Where it is weak is pace; a reviewer once called the show the Plodfather, and this hour would not answer the charge. It remains the cleanest statement of what Kin does and does not do well: an expensive, character-first crime serial in which the emotions are domestic and the arithmetic is the plot.