Episode 6

Nidge Delaney moves to fill the vacuum before the body is in the ground. The finale opens on the aftermath of John Boy Power's killing, with Nidge reassuring the gang that it will be business as usual; the takeover plotted in secret is now simply the new arrangement. The series has already changed its lead, and this hour is the business of making that change stick: a funeral to attend, a will to contest, and one more killing to get through.

Emotions run high at John Boy's funeral, where the gang gathers to bury its former boss. John Boy's father attends, and the family is represented by his daughter, Kayleigh. At the funeral John Boy's solicitor Dave promises the remainder of John Boy's fortune to Kayleigh, which Nidge does not accept, and the dead man's money becomes a contest between the will and the new boss's intentions. RTÉ's reviewer describes the first formal meeting between the two men as the scene in which the new leader lays down the terms. What Nidge actually does about the money is not described by any source consulted.

Away from the funeral, the private reckoning runs. Rosie Moynihan cannot shift the belief that Darren was responsible for Stumpy's death. Unable to accept what her former lover has become, she ends the relationship. Darren is devastated and tries to win her back, but he has a larger problem: his sister Mary has finally understood how far Luke's psychosis has gone. She finds Luke lurking in her bedroom at night, and, exhausted by the fear she has been living with, she orders Darren to deal with him.

With Nidge's help, Darren sets a trap. He lures Luke to an isolated forest, where he and Nidge execute him and bury him. RTÉ's reviewer compares the sequence to the forest execution in the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing, and notes one detail that distinguishes it: Nidge reloads during the killing, prepared to fire a second time. The episode, and the series, close on a montage, with Darren in a taxi heading for the airport and the other characters in their changed positions, and then on Nidge at home, his face reflected in the screen of a violent video game, with John Boy's reign replaced by his own.

The finale's strength is that it completes the transfer of the show's centre of gravity. The funeral, the will and the forest killing are three different kinds of ending run in one hour, and none of them is the farewell the audience expected. It is Tom Vaughan-Lawlor's hour: RTÉ's reviewer wrote that Nidge delivered what we long suspected, and described him moving from charming to conniving to menacing to casually ruthless inside one episode. Finbar Furey's single scene as John Boy's father is the funeral's emotional centre.

The weakness sits in the emotional counterweight. The Darren and Rosie strand, which the finale has to carry against the takeover, is the run's weakest material; the academic review called it banal, so the break-up lands as plot rather than feeling. What the sources do not settle is the solicitor: Wikipedia names him Dave and has him promise the fortune to Kayleigh, the cast table credits Ger Carey as Dave, and IMDb's billed list does not carry the solicitor at all. Whether this part is the same as the Pat billed in the season opener is not established. The reception was strong regardless; series two averaged 530,000 viewers at a 31 per cent share, and Love/Hate won seven awards from ten nominations for the run at the 9th Irish Film and Television Awards in February 2012.