Episode 1

John Boy Power is watching a figure on his own security screens and no longer trusts what he sees. A year has passed since Stumpy shot Darren Treacy and left him for dead on the night Darren tried to walk away from the gang, and the second series opens on the aftermath of that failure rather than on a fresh crime. Darren has almost physically recovered, but he is living with post-traumatic stress and working as a gofer for Fran Cooney, a newcomer who deals mid-level cannabis, runs a loan-sharking operation and smuggles hooky cigarettes. His old girlfriend Rosie is in London; his brother Robbie is long dead.

The boss is coming apart in parallel. John Boy is haunted by the presence he keeps finding on the CCTV system at his apartment, an image the series ties to the death of his half-brother Hughie. Profits are down, the Gardaí are closing in, and the Criminal Assets Bureau's forensic accountants are seizing his assets and making ordinary business impossible. His plan is to get his money out of the country and retire to Spain, but the cocaine he is taking with increasing appetite is making him steadily more unpredictable.

The gang's centre of gravity has already moved. Nidge and his wife Trish are unhappy at home, and Nidge is running the day-to-day business while John Boy drifts through his own decline. That is the settled position at the end of the hour: John Boy nominally on top, Nidge effectively holding the organisation together, and Darren outside the core of it but not free of it, because what he owes has not been paid.

This is a set-up hour, and it is honest about being one. Its strand is the opening condition of the series, with John Boy losing his grip, Darren back in the trade he tried to leave, and the Gardaí and the Criminal Assets Bureau tightening. No case is solved and no culprit is identified, because this is a continuous serial rather than an episodic crime show and this record is its establishing movement.

The series structures the hour around Aidan Gillen, using the passage of a year to change John Boy without moving him. He remains the top man; what has gone is the judgement. Gillen plays the deterioration through small physical detail rather than speeches, and the CCTV strand gives the character an interior life the first series rarely allowed him. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor's Nidge is established in the position the run will escalate from, doing the actual work while the boss unravels, and Robert Sheehan's Darren is deliberately reduced, present and damaged and peripheral, which is the point: the original protagonist is held back so that the man who will replace him can take the frame.

That arrangement is why the opener works. By opening a year later, the series can change its lead without a scene of explanation; the decline is already established rather than shown. It is also the only series opener in the run that begins with the gang intact and the boss already failing, rather than with a death that resets everything. The weakness is the plot itself: as a set-up hour it carries almost no event. The innovation is that the subject is the business rather than a crime, with the asset seizure and the collapsing market acting as the antagonist in a way the first series never attempted.