Episode 4

A child is born on Christmas Day into the middle of a gang war. Trish, Nidge's wife, gives birth, and the gang gathers in festive spirits around it while John Boy Power and Fran Cooney are still trying to kill each other. The series later makes John the name of Nidge's son, after John Boy, a small detail that carries the shape of what is coming. The birth is not decoration: it is the hour's counterweight to the violence elsewhere in it.

Rosie comes home from London to Dublin and promises to give her relationship with Darren another try, which is the hope the episode gives Darren before it is removed. Mary Treacy is frightened by a masked figure lurking in her garden at night, and the audience is shown that the figure is Luke, whose fixation on her has grown since the previous episode. The series keeps him at the edge of the frame, and the effect is that the audience knows what Mary does not.

The war is still running. John Boy orders Tommy Daly to kill Fran, and Tommy is already under pressure from two directions: his friendship with Debbie and John Boy's increasing hold over Siobhán, his partner. He makes what looks like a watertight plan to attack Fran in a bookmaker's on a council estate. The hit goes badly wrong. Tommy gets away without being caught, but the attempt fails, and the episode gives him no victory to offset it.

When Tommy gets home the day goes from bad to worse. He finds Linda slumped in the bath with both of her wrists cut. She is the woman scarred by the pipe bomb Nidge planted on John Boy's orders, and Fran's wife. How she comes to be found by Tommy, and whether she survives, is not settled by the sources consulted, and neither the episode nor this record resolves it. The hour runs its two tones against each other deliberately: a birth in the Nidge household, an attempted suicide in another, and an assassination attempt that fails in between.

That construction is the episode's strength. The series' characteristic opposition of love and hate is compressed into one hour, and the Christmas setting is used for contrast rather than sentiment, with the dry domestic comedy of the Nidge household running underneath. The failed hit is also unusual for a gangster drama in that the plan is competent and still fails, which keeps the violence from feeling like a foregone conclusion.

The weakness is structural. The episode depends on the audience tracking four threads at once, among them the feud, Darren and Rosie, Luke and Mary, and Linda, and the sources give it the thinnest plot summary of the series-two records, which suggests the hour is doing more work than its own account can carry. No review specific to this episode was located, and the audience data for the run is series-level. Its place in the run is nevertheless clear: it is the first series-two episode where the two leads' private lives are set up to be destroyed, and the hour that puts Linda, Rosie, Luke and the feud into position for the final two instalments.