Episode 5

The penultimate episode begins with the reckoning from the previous hour, as Darren rages at Nidge for beating Tommy. From there the plot's engine is Donna's report: her information reaches the Gardaí, and two detectives, Paula and Terry, connect it with the disappearance of the dissident Git Loughman.

The Gardaí bring the gang in for questioning, including Siobhán and Trish but not Darren or Fran, and every one of them refuses to talk. The episode's press recap notes the detectives working from a wall of photographs of the gang, and treats it as the series' procedural moment.

Dano learns of the questioning and draws the conclusion: he realises Nidge and the others were responsible for Git's death and plans to have Nidge killed, against the wishes of Tony, the northern envoy. That is the decisive turn, in which the organisation that has been investigating Nidge finds one of its own acting without authorisation, and it pays off in the finale. Running in parallel are the gang's domestic and low-level threads. Janet throws Debbie out of the brothel for using drugs, then relents and takes part of her earnings instead; Debbie tries to move back to her mother's house and steals her mother's purse instead. Lizzie discovers that her brother Ray has died in his sleep, an ordinary death that leaves her and Paddy; no source consulted gives the cause. Fran shaves Donna's hair as punishment for speaking to the police: Your hair will grow back. Your face won't.

The strength is the convergence, bringing police, paramilitary and gang to the same knowledge without a single killing of its own and holding the tension with questioning rooms and a haircut. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor's Nidge has no scene of physical violence to match the previous episode; his performance is that of a man watching other people assemble the truth about him, and the hour's lightest furniture, Nidge's hairline and Dano's pigeons, sits in the recap before the threats. The weakness is that it is the shortest episode of the season and its B-plots, Debbie's expulsion and her stolen purse, sit unevenly against the murder plot.

It is the only episode of series 3 in which the Gardaí act on their own information, through detectives Paula and Terry rather than through a member of the gang, and it breaks the season's pattern by having the decisive move made by an antagonist acting against orders. The thematic line is one the show returns to, that the gang's weakest and least powerful members, Debbie, Donna, Ray and Elmo, absorb the consequences of decisions made above them. IFTN reported that the fifth episode reached over a million viewers with an average of 720,600 and had streamed more than 34,000 times on the RTÉ Player, in a report that does not date the episode in its visible text. No review specific to the episode has been located. It converts three separate suspicions into a single fact and sets the finale's two-part movement, Nidge's escape to Spain and Darren's death, and it is the last hour in which Darren and Nidge are still on the same side.