Episode 2

Eric Kinsella collects his grandfather from prison and takes him straight to a pub whose owner he blames for the years he lost, and the welcome is a threat delivered in front of witnesses. Bren Kinsella (Francis Magee) has been released and has no intention of easing back in: within a day he has invited himself into Birdy's house, made a homophobic remark to Frank's face, and sent Jimmy out to fetch Anthony. The antagonist of series 2 is not placed across a negotiating table from the family. He is moved into the house, and into the bedroom of a dead child.

Michael (Charlie Cox) learns of the release from a reptile-shop clerk while buying with Jimmy (Emmett J. Scanlan), and the news lands on Jimmy's good mood like a dropped weight. Michael, Jimmy, Frank and Birdy meet and Michael states that he will not have Bren near the business and will not meet him. Amanda (Clare Dunne) is meanwhile at a fertility appointment with Dr Jane Kelly, who gives her a clean bill of health and then suggests that her urgency about another pregnancy is really about the death of her son Jamie; Amanda takes offence, says she is not there for counselling, and leaves.

At the Furry Bog, Bren is cordial and then not. He talks business as though he had never been away, checks with the bartender that the pub's cameras record the room, and when the bartender offers to switch them off, asks for them to be left running. It is the clearest statement of his method: he wants witnesses to his own power. Frank tries to leave early and is all but ordered to stay and be seen. Later, in the pub bathroom, Bren congratulates Jimmy on the reputation he earned by killing Con Doyle and then takes it away again, telling him he is embarrassing himself as Amanda's lapdog.

Ged Delaney, the pub owner Bren blames, is killed in a club bathroom while snorting cocaine, by a man coerced into the job through an existing debt. Nobody in the family doubts who ordered it, and the following morning Amanda finds Bren asleep in Jamie's room. Upstairs he does not deny it, tells Amanda to leave the discussion to the men, and asks her for walking-around money. The last scene is his: having taken Anthony out for a driving lesson and a shooting lesson, he shows the boy a photograph of Glen Wright and tells him Glen is the man who killed Jamie, then lets Anthony believe that avenging his brother was his own idea.

The episode's strength is that it does not stage Bren as an opponent but as a member, and every later scene is altered by his being related to everyone he threatens. It also gives the season its dominant performance: Magee plays the charm and the threat as one setting, and the scene in which he turns Anthony toward violence without ever giving a direct order is the most consequential piece of manipulation in the run. Its weakness is a reliance on coincidence; Michael's warning about Bren and Bren's arrival in Jamie's room land in the same morning, and the hour drags where it should tighten. What it establishes, though, is the idea the season is built on: the greatest threat to this family is inside its own house.