Episode 2

John Boy Power runs his own drugs operation from a courtroom. He is detained on other business while the rest of the gang collects a consignment at Dublin Port, and he conducts the whole thing by telephone from the dock. Tommy and Darren scout the warehouse where the drugs are to be sorted, Darren spots the Gardaí watching it, and the plan collapses in a phone call. Nidge, driving the shipment, is told to keep the vehicle moving until somewhere else can be found.

Tommy finds the alternative through an old friend, JP, whose father owns a car dealership. The gang borrows the garage for half an hour and repackages the haul there for distribution across the city, and John Boy tries afterwards to persuade JP to let them use it again. The sequence is the episode's best, and it is deliberately unglamorous: a delivery, not a robbery, carried out at speed by men who look like they are at work, because they are.

Against this runs the family's grief. Mary consults a psychic, who tells her that Robbie is trying to free himself from his past, an explanation he says is common where a death has involved violence. Darren is having none of it. He confronts the medium and threatens him, then makes him tell Mary that her brother is at peace in heaven and all that other rubbish. The episode finds its comedy in small domestic things beside it: a clown at a child's birthday party, a neighbour putting his waste in the wrong bin.

Elsewhere, Darren and Rosie arrange to meet in secret to talk about where they stand, which confirms them as the serial's couple. Nidge proposes to Trish, and the moment is played as comedy, as he is for most of this episode. John Boy, for his part, throws a party at his apartment while Darren slips away to see Rosie. The hour ends with Darren following Jimmy Byrne and the Gardaí closing in on the gang's movements.

No culprit is established here. The episode does not resolve Robbie's killing; it points Darren at Jimmy Byrne, who is dealt with in the next episode, and it leaves the matter open.

The strength is the consignment. Darren's competence, not his grief, carries the sequence, and the show's argument about its own subject is made without a word of commentary: the trade is logistics, phone calls and borrowed space, and the money is in the bags, not in the theatrics.

The weakness is sourced and narrow. The Irish Post complained that too much of the action is conducted over the phone, which detaches the viewer from the drama, and that the deal does little beyond establishing John Boy as the leader, all of it buried under quickly edited and clichéd montages. What the episode does establish matters more than its plot. It introduces Hughie Power, the half-brother the first series turns on, and it shows what Love/Hate looked like before it was known for killing its leads.