Episode 4

Rosie comes home from hospital having lost the baby. She tells Darren about the pain of the miscarriage, and she does not want Stumpy killed; she wants him to feel pain, and nothing more. Darren waits for Stumpy to leave his house and beats him, in the Irish Post's account with a pipe. Mary, meanwhile, finds Robbie's gun in the house.

Nidge goes to John Boy to tell him he is welcome at the wedding, and John Boy declines, because Mary, who is sleeping with Tommy again, is Trish's bridesmaid. Before the wedding, Hughie and Elmo attack Tommy and Darren, and Elmo is shot in the exchange. Hughie goes back to John Boy and proposes revenge at the wedding itself, but John Boy decides to attend instead.

At the reception Hughie makes a scene, exposing what Nidge did with a prostitute on the stag weekend in Prague and what Tommy has been doing, all of it in front of Trish and Mary. John Boy tells Nidge he intends to leave the country with Hughie until matters settle, and when Nidge presses to come with him he refuses, with a threat wrapped in politeness. It is the clearest demonstration the series gives of how John Boy holds a room.

Hughie then decides to hunt down Tommy, taking Elmo and his cousin Potsy. Driving around, he shows off his gun to Potsy and shoots himself by accident. As he lies dying, Elmo chooses to leave him rather than call for help.

Darren decides to leave Dublin and join Rosie in London. Nidge and Tommy act as pallbearers with John Boy at Hughie's funeral. Before he goes, Darren meets John Boy to shake hands and put an end to the trouble between them, and as he leaves with him Stumpy drives past and shoots him. He is left for dead. The shooting settles one thing and the episode is careful not to answer the other. Stumpy is the gunman, and no culprit is left anonymous, but Darren's survival is not established here. The finale ends on a cliffhanger and series 2 opens with him recovering from the wound, a year later. Where the record shows that no source establishes an outcome, the account stops at the shot. Stumpy is the gunman, and no culprit is left anonymous, but Darren's survival is not established here. The finale ends on a cliffhanger and series 2 opens with him recovering from the wound, a year later. Where the record shows that no source establishes an outcome, the account stops at the shot.

The strength is the closing minute. A truce is agreed and broken by a man who was never part of the negotiation, which turns the whole settlement into the setup for what comes next. It is the first proof that the show will not protect anyone the audience likes, and the pattern every later series follows.

The weakness is contested. One blog review held that the central quarrel, built over four episodes, is resolved by an accident, and called the cliffhanger false because the lead is not really dead; the Irish Post found the wedding cheesy, its soundtrack like on-hold music, and the sequence short of the spectacle it promised. The kinder reading is that Hughie's carelessness is entirely in keeping with a character established as coked-up and inept. Either way, this is the episode in which the comic Nidge of the opening weeks becomes the figure the series was built on.