Episode 5

Viking pulls the car over under the pretext of collecting a weapon, walks Kem into the woods, gives him a chance to explain himself and shoots him. The season's most damaging killing is staged as a private execution in daylight, without music and without a cut away, and it changes the man who does it permanently. Kem (Ryan Lincoln) had been the family's longest-running associate; he had begged off more work to stay clean, and he had a baby daughter. Viking (Sam Keeley) takes his phone and SIM, returns to the car, and finds Anthony already preparing to burn it.

The unsettling part is what follows. Viking disposes of the last of Kem's belongings in a public bin and tells Anthony what to say if the Gardaí question him; within a day he has recovered, sleeping badly for one night and then waking composed, comforting Nikki about the hit and talking her into a shopping trip. The police do their own normalising from the other side: Detective Paul Breslin tells the eyewitness's relative, Jess Duggan, the truth about the case and then sets about finding out what she knows. The episode's structure makes the viewer sit through the ordinariness of the day after.

Amanda (Clare Dunne) tells Jimmy she cannot share a house with a man she does not trust and tells him to move out, which marks the open end of the marriage. Michael (Charlie Cox) telephones the pharmacy and asks Molly for a drink, and their awkward evening ends at his flat. Amanda pays Shane, Rory Hayes's nephew, for surveillance photographs and intelligence on Nuray and Hazim, and takes them to Michael; scrolling through the pictures he stops at Nellie Wright and identifies her as the mother of the man who killed Jamie. Amanda says Bren's reading of the Batuks, that they will bleed the family dry, is probably right.

On the Wright side, Nellie argues that trust is no longer the question: the Kinsellas will retaliate for Jamie no matter what anyone does, so the family might as well strike first and be paid for it. Michael frightens a contact into luring Eddie Lucas to the reptile shop and negotiates with him for information about the Batuk meeting. The hour ends with a run of Garda vehicles into the drive at the Furry Bog, and the arrest is not the one anyone expects: it is Nikki, on suspicion of arranging the killing of the eyewitness. Viking, seeing her fear, tells her to call the family's solicitor.

The killing is the episode's best sequence because it is over in seconds and because it makes the family's own enforcer the instrument of its most damaging act. Its weakness is the police thread, which repeats what the audience already knows, and Nikki's arrest, which arrives as a twist the hour does little to prepare. What it does well is pair an execution with a day of domesticity, a date, a shopping trip, a mother recovering her son, and let the ordinary do the unsettling. It is also the hour in which Michael and Amanda's affair stops being subtext and Jimmy is put out of the house.