Episode 2

A consignment is being cut and bagged in a hotel room when the operation collapses from the inside. Tommy and Ado are working on the batch of cocaine to be distributed when they are struck down by a bad hit of their own product, and while they are incapacitated the Gardaí raid the room. The consignment is lost. John Boy Power draws the only conclusion he can and fixes on Stumpy as the informer, since Stumpy was elsewhere when the raid came.

Darren Treacy, still trying to get clear of the life and now in debt, plans an ATM robbery with Luke's help. The robbery is carried off, and he uses the money to make a part payment against what he owes John Boy, hoping the debt will buy his exit. John Boy does not want the money. He wants Stumpy killed, and he wants Darren, who is under his skin and still under his control, to be the one to do it. The order is framed as the price of freedom: kill Stumpy and the account is settled.

Darren is caught between the debt and the fact that Rosie does not know what he has already done and is about to do. At the end of the episode Stumpy is dead. The episode does not confirm that Stumpy was an informer before he is killed; John Boy's suspicion is the whole basis for the order, and no source consulted establishes that Stumpy had actually been turned. What the hour settles is narrower and worse: Darren, who wanted out, has been made to kill again, and John Boy has shown himself willing to spend his own people. Darren gives the money from the hit to Stumpy's mother rather than keep it, a gesture the series treats as atonement. That killing is the thing he hides from Rosie, and it is the fact she turns on in the finale.

Two domestic threads run alongside the job and become the series' two standing threats. Mary Treacy shows Luke an unexpected piece of kindness, and the disturbed young man misreads it as something more, beginning the obsession that builds across the run. Nidge slips away to meet Linda, Fran Cooney's wife, in an affair the episode plays partly for comedy and that will return as a vulnerability. John Boy, meanwhile, drugs and interrogates one of the men caught up in the failed operation.

The episode's strength is the killing it finishes on. RTÉ's television critic Donal O'Donoghue called it a nerve-tingling assassination, and the series never again makes an audience watch a character be pushed into a murder quite so methodically. The order matters too: this is debt collection rather than revenge, which makes it colder and more characteristic of the series than a revenge killing would be, and it moves the show's violence from gang feuds to internal discipline. O'Donoghue reviewed the hour under the headline question about whether Love/Hate was the best Irish drama of recent times, calling it the best indigenous drama of 2011.

The weakness is in the margins. The episode carries continuity slips, including a hitman's car registration plates changing between shots and John Boy being let into the home of a former solicitor, which the reviewer dismissed as small fry but which a modern viewer will notice. It is also the hour the series' own broadcaster treated as the moment the show found its feet, with Gillen's declining boss, Vaughan-Lawlor's Nidge and the introduction of Peter Coonan's Fran all earning their place in the frame.