Episode 4

Jimmy Kinsella is sleeping with another woman and boasts about it to the taxi driver on the way to his brother Michael's house. That is how the season's halfway episode opens, and its subject is stated at once: this is an hour of betrayals, and almost all of them are domestic. Jimmy (Emmett J. Scanlan) needles Michael about the affair with Amanda until he is told to leave; Bren forces Frank to swear allegiance to him and to Birdy; Hazim undermines Nuray; Wayne Madigan takes a Batuk offer behind the Kinsellas' backs. The debt is still the clock, but the hour is about disloyalty.

Amanda (Clare Dunne) runs the money. She meets Rory Hayes outside the bodega, is introduced to Rory's cousin's young son, Shane, then takes the latest payment inside to be converted. The teller works through the process and the contact, Zehab Can, takes her aside with a new offer: an amphetamine developed for the war in Syria, sold cheap with supply on demand. Later she delivers the transfer details to Nuray in person, works out that Nuray means to fly home as soon as she can, and is promised a return next month for the next payment. Once she has gone, Hazim criticises Nuray's handling of the Kinsellas and compares her unfavourably with her father and her dead brother.

Bren and Viking find the farmhouse stash gone, learn that Rory collected it on Amanda's orders, and go to Rory's home and beat him badly as a warning against working for her; his wife Katlyn tries to intervene, and Amanda loses her driver. Michael (Charlie Cox), drinking heavily, visits the now-sober Jimmy to say what he thinks of his behaviour, and the argument reveals that he is still having panic attacks; one hits him on the way home after he is stopped by Winnie Areoye, who blames him for money she found among Anna's belongings. At the pharmacy, collecting his medication, he falls into conversation with the pharmacist, Molly, who gives him a leaflet for a yoga and meditation class and reminds him that his dosage can be raised but that the side effects rise with it.

Kem tracks Glen Wright to a grocery store and reports that the man is living in a guarded compound with his mother. Bren ignores the detail that the only opening is when Glen runs errands, and orders a night-time stakeout, then privately tells Viking to take Anthony with him. Michael ends the hour with Amanda, warning that Bren will move against her; she says he already has, by frightening Rory into retirement, and when she learns that Bren knows about Kem the episode closes on her worry. It is the episode that gives Amanda a credible opponent inside the family, Michael an untreated illness, and the season's second half its stake.

Its best scene is the quietest: Michael's first conversation with a stranger about symptoms he cannot account for, in an hour of betrayals the one honest exchange, and the one that lasts. Its weakness is that it carries an enormous amount of information, the fenethylline offer, the trial delay, Hazim's deal with Wayne, the stakeout, without resolving any of it, and the summary-of-events shape is where the show's pace problem is most visible. It is also the hour in which the series swaps local heroin for a war-economy amphetamine and moves its lead from muscle to a man with a body that is failing him.