Episode 4

The leaders of Dano's organisation send an inquisitor down from the north to assess Nidge, and the pressure on him builds. The envoy is Tony, a northern fixer new to the series, who arrives with the organisation's own methods and works from a diagram of the network to read the gang's relationships.

Nidge's lies begin to catch up with him. Increasingly concerned about Siobhán's depression, Tommy breaks off his relationship with Debbie, but he has a new problem: Georgina, Dano's wife, has become obsessed with him and keeps calling and texting. He admits the affair to Nidge, and Nidge, who is himself drawn to Georgina, beats Tommy badly, his worst violence of the series to this point. The Irish Times later described the beating of Tommy as quite the most vicious thing it had seen on television that year; the weapon is not settled by a first-party source, with the same review pointing to a golf club while other accounts differ.

Separately, and more consequentially for the season, Donna is persuaded by a friend to report Siobhán's rape to the Gardaí, and her report is the thread that sets the police inquiry in motion in the following episode. The episode also gives its attention to the gang's other lives: Debbie's day working in the brothel is shown in montage, and Ado, now in Mountjoy, is visited and discussed by the crew. Much is made of the gang's status anxiety and its ordinary pleasures even as Nidge's position narrows.

The strength is the beating of Tommy and the decision to make Nidge's worst act in the season a crime of jealousy rather than of business, which changes how the audience reads the character for the rest of the run; his violence here is motivated by jealousy as much as by discipline. Seán McGinley's Tony gives the season a new kind of menace, an authority that questions rather than orders and one that Nidge cannot lie to indefinitely. The weakness is the brothel material, which the Irish Times later called pointless in terms of plot or character; the episode's attention to the trade as work, with hours and humiliations, is present, but the montage is where it overreaches.

The episode introduces the season's outside authority and its informer thread in the same hour, the two mechanisms that end the series, and it is the hinge of series 3: before it, Nidge is managing a lie among friends; after it, he is answering to a state and a paramilitary leadership at once. The Gardaí enter only through a woman's decision to report rather than through detection, which keeps the gang the institution at the show's centre. It departs from the first three episodes by having no killing at all, and by letting the antagonists be an absent northern leadership and a woman who decides to talk. No review specific to this episode has been located; one audience-facing ranking site names it the worst of series 3, a fan-aggregate judgement rather than criticism.