Episode 3

John Boy Power attacks Fran Cooney without touching him, by turning the Gardaí into an instrument of commercial sabotage. He tips the authorities off about an expected drugs shipment due in at the docks, a consignment that belongs on paper to Fran. The tip does two things at once: it costs his rival the shipment, and it throws suspicion away from John Boy's own real consignment, which comes into the country undetected while the Gardaí look elsewhere. The double-cross is explained through plot rather than dramatised, and its second purpose is easy to miss on a first viewing.

Fran realises he has been double-crossed and retaliates, and John Boy, furious, orders Nidge to pipe bomb Fran's house. Linda is inside. She is Fran's wife and Nidge's former partner, which puts Nidge between his old feelings for her and his loyalty to the man who gave the order. He is caught on the conflict, and he goes ahead with it anyway. Linda survives the bombing but is badly scarred, and she is told she will lose both of her breast implants.

The consequence is the rest of the series. Fran is left vowing revenge on John Boy, which forces Nidge and the rest of the gang into hiding while the situation is unresolved. The episode ends the run of business as usual: the two men are now in an open feud, and every later episode of the run is shaped by it. A parallel thread has Debbie pressing Ado to supply her with heroin, deepening her dependence on the gang's own supply chain; she is one of the gang's own, and her use is becoming visible, which is the thread that later comes back on John Boy.

The episode's strength is the bombing, and the way the series refuses to let Nidge off it. He is ordered to harm a woman he has been involved with, and he does it. That is the change the second series is really about, with the cost of the move visible on screen and no attempt to soften the decision. The violence here is instrumental and misdirected, a business quarrel falling on someone who is not in it. Peter Coonan's Fran is established as the series' second force, volatile but functional where John Boy is disintegrating; RTÉ's reviewer had already picked out Coonan's introduction a week earlier as a streak of mean to watch.

The weakness is in the plot's own logic. The audience is told the tip-off serves two purposes and has to take the covering of the real shipment on trust, since the second effect is never dramatised. No review specific to this episode was located; the reception evidence for the run is series-level, and RTÉ put the series average at 530,000 viewers at a 31 per cent share. The significance within the run is structural: this is the episode that converts the show from a portrait of a gang into a story about a gang war, and the bombing of Linda is the act that makes Fran's vendetta personal.

What is not settled by the sources is Linda's fate beyond this hour. This episode leaves her scarred and told she will lose both implants, while the next episode has her found in the bath with her wrists cut and a later feature describes Fran discovering her body. Whether she lives or dies is not established by the sources consulted, and it is carried into the next record rather than resolved here.