Episode 6

Nikita Murphy is booked and processed while Viking races to the pub to plan, and the family's first assumption is that an arrest arriving straight after Kem's killing can only mean a police informant. Bren (Francis Magee) suspects Jess Duggan and orders Jimmy to bring her in. That is the business of the hour, but its real turn is elsewhere: the season's antagonist stops threatening the firm and starts threatening a child. Bren lures his granddaughter Anna into Birdy's flat on the promise of a present, gives her a necklace, helps her put it on, and asks her to dance.

Amanda (Clare Dunne) pulls Anthony out of school to find out how far he was involved in Kem's death; he denies it, then admits he had little to do with the killing and that the evidence was burned. She and Michael (Charlie Cox) exchange what they have, that the Eddie Lucas meeting points to Wayne Madigan as the Batuks' main man and that Anthony was present at the killing, and agree to strike first. Amanda also learns from her solicitor, Lauren Bridges, that the Gardaí could have been monitoring her bank accounts, legally and without her knowledge, for some time. Nikki, with the family's solicitor beside her, shows signs of cracking under interview.

Bren sends Viking and others to retrieve Kem's SIM card from the rubbish and then uses it to make a threatening call to Jess Duggan. Nellie Wright, at the compound, takes a hidden pistol and orders Glen Wright to go after Michael Kinsella, telling him the price on Michael's head is the largest; Glen is reluctant, and his partner Clayton Finn points out in an amusement arcade that he does not have to go through with it. Frank (Aidan Gillen), drinking with Birdy, admits he has thought about leaving the family business, and Birdy says she feels left out and doubts Bren will ever let either of them go.

Amanda takes Michael to her meeting with Wayne Madigan and does the talking, explaining that fenethylline is made with support from the Syrian government and has become one of the country's biggest exports, and proposing a partnership; Wayne agrees on condition that he meets her contact. Michael and Amanda drive home discussing the meeting, and are waved down by a horrified Birdy, who has just taken Anna out of the flat. Her line names the season's real subject, that Bren is doing it again and this time it is Anna.

The episode's strength is its last five minutes, which arrive after fifty minutes of quiet groundwork and put the season's most important decision in the hands of a woman who holds no formal power in the family. It is also the hour that turns Bren's threat from the boardroom to the bedroom without a single violent set piece, and Maria Doyle Kennedy's Birdy is its most changed character, finally seeing clearly what the men around her will not. Its weakness is the two-family structure, which means the hour changes channel repeatedly and the Wright strand is carried almost entirely by Glen's reluctance. What it does is make the finale's deaths feel necessary rather than theatrical.