Episode 2

The second episode begins with Git Loughman's body buried deep underground by Nidge and Fran, and spends its hour on the lie that burial demands. Git's son Dano is suspicious about his father's disappearance and confronts Nidge, determined to find out the truth, and Nidge plays for time, knowing Dano will keep searching.

The plan Nidge and Darren concoct is to make Elmo the scapegoat. Nidge takes a double dose of pills supplied by Darren to get through the meeting, and the negotiation is played as black farce, the two men trading threats, Dano's including having Nidge taken out back in the shed to be mutilated. Nidge convinces Dano he is more than willing to use Darren's friend Elmo as the scapegoat, so that Darren will kill both Elmo and his cousin Gary to avenge the fallen Git.

The assignment goes wrong in the way the episode turns on. Darren is to kill Elmo and Gary, but he meets Elmo, and in the scene the reviews single out, Elmo realises what Darren has come for and begs. Darren lets him walk away, then carries out the hit on Gary and Gary's wife in a darkened housing estate; the couple's baby is left crying as the blood dries on the walls. Laurence Kinlan's Elmo is the hour's emotional surprise, and the beat is the one both RTÉ and the Irish Independent pick out. RTÉ's reviewer made the double killing the centre of the hour: the violence, god, the violence. Last night's bloody mayhem was far more chilling than Git's grisly end.

Around that, Tommy continues his affair with Debbie; Darren acquires an admirer in Dano's cousin Lizzie, who helps with the hit on Gary alongside her brothers Ray and Paddy; Nidge's attraction to Dano's wife Georgina becomes harder for him to control; and Siobhán, living with what Git did to her, tries to keep quiet about the attack while Tommy tries to persuade her not to attend a sexual health clinic. By the second episode Darren's tally of killings stands at three, as RTÉ noted.

The episode's strength is the scene in which Darren spares Elmo, a moral beat the surrounding violence does not offer. Its weakness is that the shock rests on the killing of an innocent couple while the plot depends on Dano being, in RTÉ's phrase, none-too-bright, which asks the audience to accept an antagonist who cannot see what is in front of him. It is the series' clearest statement of the cost of the gang's disputes falling on outsiders, and it converts Git's death into an ongoing lie Nidge must maintain. It also gives sustained room to the new republican strand, and it was the production's first test of how far the Sunday-night slot could go after the complaints over episode 1.

The episode drew an average of 670,800 viewers and five complaints to RTÉ over its aggressive content, and it was prefaced with the standard warning for strong language and scenes of sex and violence. RTÉ's own reviewer treated it as stronger than the opener. It is also where Darren and Lizzie first connect, the woman who will eventually kill him.