Episode 6

With the Gardaí closing in, Nidge plans to leave Ireland, and the finale opens on the season's action montage: Darren armed, a paramilitary unit with heavier weapons, Nidge in a bulletproof vest, and Ado still complaining about his budgie. Nidge is preparing to move to Spain.

He goes back to his own house to collect money and passports, keeping his cash hidden in the wardrobe under his wife's belongings. While he is there he meets Darren and gives him part of the money he owes him, to help finance Darren's own move to London. As Nidge leaves, his car is ambushed by Dano and Paddy; he is overpowered and loaded into the boot of Dano's car. Darren comes to his rescue and fights off the ambush, killing Paddy in the process.

The episode's turn is what Nidge does with the debt he now owes Darren. He goes north to Dundalk to meet Tony, the scene the Irish Times called a brilliantly acted, compelling, claustrophobic scene, to arrange a deal. The deal involves betraying Darren: to buy his own safe passage, Nidge names Darren as the man responsible for Git's death, shopping him to the republican crime boss. The ending follows immediately. Darren escapes the trap, but he is shot and killed by Lizzie, whose brother Paddy he killed while saving Nidge; RTÉ's own release states that Lizzie shot Darren in a bid to avenge the murder of her brother.

One thread is left open deliberately: Siobhán and Darren had been circling each other through the season, and that potential is ended by Darren's death rather than developed. The episode closes on a final exterior shot of Dublin, the press recap's last image a seagull over the city. Darren's death is the second removal of the show's original protagonist, after John Boy's death at the end of series 2, and it makes Nidge the sole lead of the remaining two series.

The finale belongs to Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. The Irish Times wrote that the episode, like the series, belonged to him, singling out his vacillation between his usual kingpin swagger and his terror during the meeting with the republicans in Dundalk, and his realisation that he is now owned by them and that the life he had known is over. The same review found the plot a disappointingly slight, simple big-crim-seeks-and-gets-retribution story that felt like a midseason series hiatus, not a finale, and judged Nidge's choice of Darren, over all his other men, an unlikely ending inconsistent with the character the series had built. It also said the women characters were sorely underwritten, singling out Debbie and the many graphic sex scenes as pointless in terms of plot or character. The weakness is the mechanism of the ending, not the performance.

RTÉ's own figures give the finale an average audience of 953,000, a 56 per cent share, a reach of 1,259,300 and a peak-minute audience of 1,074,440 at 10:27pm; a second figure of 970,600 circulates and cannot be reconciled with RTÉ's. The series-2 finale had averaged 616,000, so the third-series finale added 337,000 viewers year on year, and series 3 as a whole averaged 748,000. Series 4 was commissioned within weeks, on 7 February 2013, and series 3 produced the show's IFTA high-water mark of six wins, including Best Drama, Director, Script, Actor, Actress and Supporting Actress.

It is one of the show's three recommended episodes and the point on which the whole run turns. It kills the show's original protagonist in the closing moments, and does so off the back of a trade rather than a showdown, the least cinematic resolution the series could have chosen for its most sympathetic character. Every later series is the story of a Nidge who has already learned he can sell his closest friend.