Episode 5

Love/Hate spends its penultimate hour pretending to be a different episode. John Boy Power, whose paranoia has been doing slow work on him since the opener, gives Darren Treacy one last job: kill Ado Kenny, and the account is closed. That arrangement is the trap. The episode is built so that the audience equips itself for the murder of a crew member and then watches the target change at the moment of the act.

The build-up is the collapse of John Boy's control from the inside. Siobhán Delaney has a panic attack at Dublin Airport while carrying money on John Boy's instruction, and what she does with the package exposes Tommy's position in the organisation and puts him in grave danger. John Boy's own thread finishes the job on him: he finds Debbie taking heroin, interrogates her, and forces her to admit that Ado is her supplier. The confession turns one of his own crew into a target, and it gives him the occasion to settle the debt Darren still owes.

Darren is conflicted about whether he can kill again, and argues it out with Nidge rather than simply accepting the job. What he does not know until he acts is that Nidge has been waiting for exactly this moment. With Luke as his accomplice, Darren goes to the place he is meant to shoot from. Wearing a mask, he raises the gun and turns it on John Boy instead. The killing is a double-cross he and Nidge had been planning in secret; Darren was never there to kill Ado. The hour ends with the leadership left open, Nidge positioned to take it, and a ghostly appearance of John Boy before the credits.

The construction is the episode's strength. The misdirection is cleaner than the series usually allows itself: the reveal is held to the act rather than the scene before it, which is why the killing is the run's most-remembered turn. It is also the hour in which the show changes leads, removing its star mid-run and handing the series to a supporting character for good. Aidan Gillen's departure is the headline; RTÉ's reviewer wrote that his presence would be missed and that even with sometimes ropey lines he kept the show on the road. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor's Nidge moves from lieutenant to leader without a scene of open ambition, and the reviewer called him a jerky marionette who in fact is pulling everybody else's strings.

The weakness is that the promised war never arrives. Fran has been imprisoned earlier in the hour, so the confrontation the run has been building resolves in a single killing rather than a showdown, and the reviewer flagged the gap between the anticipation and the outcome. How early the coup was planned is also unsettled: the episode summary has it long in preparation, the broadcaster's review has Nidge giving Darren a nudge during the hour, and the academic review has Nidge deciding it is time for a change of leadership. The accounts agree on the fact and differ on the timing.

The reception is the strongest of the run. This was the most-watched episode of series two, an average audience of 659,000 and a 41 per cent share against a series average of 530,000, and the Evening Herald ran the killing as news. RTÉ's critic reviewed it as Goodnight John Boy! and closed on the line that the king is dead, long live the Nidge. The ghostly cameo before the credits is carried as a reported detail from the broadcaster's critic alone.