Episode 3

Amanda Kinsella proposes to sell part of the family's drugs at a loss in order to cover the payment owed to the Batuks, and loses the vote in her own boardroom. That meeting is the spine of the episode: Bren on one side, Amanda on the other, Birdy silent while Bren counts her vote as his own, and Jimmy (Emmett J. Scanlan) abstaining in public and betraying his wife's confidence to his father within the hour. The family that has spent two seasons acting as a firm now has a governance problem, and the language of the hour, price per kilo, share, balance sheet, is the language of a company.

Earlier, Frank (Aidan Gillen) and Dan collect a hidden drug stash from a scrapyard garage, the bricks concealed inside pipes and loaded into a white van, and Frank updates the family that the goods are in. Michael (Charlie Cox) and Amanda take them to a buyer, Wayne Madigan, and are shown into an empty classroom at a preschool called Little Sprouts to wait. Amanda names her price at 40,000 a kilo; Wayne counters at 25,000, lets them know he is aware both of the Batuk debt and of their part in Ged Delaney's murder, and sends them away with nothing.

At Delaney's funeral, Kevin Delaney and Eddie Lucas agree to strike back, and Kevin insists on doing the job himself. A spotter is placed in the Furry Bog, and Nikki (Yasmin Seky) notices the man at the door and tries to talk Viking out of going near him. Viking walks to the bulletproof glass and taunts him; Kevin fires, and the ricochet off the glass kills him. It is the season's neatest piece of structure, a man killed by his own bullet against a window the family had installed, and it is the series' habit of brief, off-centre violence turned into an argument: in a trade where everyone is armed, the gun comes back.

The other cliffhanger is quieter. In the pub office, over cocaine, Jimmy tells Bren that Kem is a police informant, an admission that hands Bren a weapon and does not end anywhere good; and Nuray telephones Amanda to say she is coming to Dublin in person to collect the payment. The hour's last scene belongs to the Gardaí: Detective Paul Breslin brings Paddy Hughes a piece of paper found on Beady Donovan's jacket that carries Amanda Kinsella's fingerprints, and Hughes pins it to an evidence board already carrying photographs of the family. The police have stopped being a backdrop.

The vote is the episode's strongest scene and the fullest expression of the season's idea, that the Kinsellas are a firm whose loyalty is on the balance sheet, and Frank's collapse is well seeded: the head of the family fetches the drugs himself and then vomits, blaming an ulcer. The weakness is that almost everything is left running; Kem is exposed and Delaney is dead, but the debt, the Garda case and Bren all carry forward, and the pace complaint made against both series applies here. Its significance is that it starts the two engines of the back half, the order to kill Kem and the fingerprint that links Amanda to a shooting.