Episode 3

The third episode is the season's pressure-valve hour, in which almost nothing is resolved and the danger comes from information moving to the wrong ear. Nidge struggles to remain on good terms with Dano while his web of excuses threatens to unravel, and two other people begin to talk.

Siobhán confides in her friend Donna about what Git did to her on St Patrick's Day, and Elmo, spared by Darren in the previous episode, has his own reasons for talking. The episode turns on Siobhán's fancy-dress birthday party at the gang's brothel. Tommy brings his baby; Nidge, worried about his marriage, gives Trish a tracksuit after she calls him a grumpy presence around the house; and Nidge makes repeated advances to Georgina, Dano's wife. At the party Donna, who has begun a relationship with Fran, tells him what Siobhán told her, and when Nidge learns Donna has talked he warns her off.

The affair between Tommy and Georgina becomes physical here: Tommy sleeps with Dano's wife while Dano is asleep upstairs. RTÉ's own write-up confirms the affair as the episode's central development, and records the opening of another thread, in which Darren turns up at Siobhán's birthday party and hints at something between them. Violence flares twice. Darren is chased by Gardaí through half-finished Celtic Tiger building sites and escapes by boarding a Luas tram; later a gunman on a bicycle fires several shots at him at close range and misses. Dano, meanwhile, knocks Elmo's partner to the ground with a punch that breaks her nose, the episode's most-quoted act of casual brutality.

Its strength is containment: almost everything that happens is information reaching the wrong person, and the episode trusts that to hold an hour, advancing the season through personal betrayal rather than a body. Killian Scott told RTÉ that the Georgina thread took him by surprise, and gave the fullest account any cast member offers of the show's domestic theme: the relationships are so dysfunctional, he said, that the characters are all off doing other things as a distraction from actually potentially engaging with our partners.

The weakness is partly one of evidence, since the surviving material is unusually thin and rests on a one-sentence encyclopaedia summary, a list-format press recap and a broadcaster interview; the violence against Elmo's partner is serialised in a single line and carries more weight than the sources acknowledge. A billing oddity goes unexplained: Stephen Cromwell is credited as Gary although the sources place Gary's death in the previous episode, and no source consulted establishes whether he appears again. The episode extends two threads the season will pay off, Tommy's affair with Georgina and Darren's closeness to Siobhán, which the series deliberately left dangling. It is the series' most domestic hour, in which the only deaths are averted and the damage is done in bedrooms and at a birthday party, and it is where the audience learns that the gang's own members, not the Gardaí, are the channel by which Nidge's secret will travel.