Episode 2

An undercover officer poses as a drug addict and buys from a dealer in a scene that includes a racial slur from the cover character, then lets himself be arrested and led away by D.I. Mick Moynihan, who is assembling a squad to bring down Nidge. Kieran O'Reilly's Ciarán Madden joins a team that also takes in Detective Terry and a young officer called Gav, and much of the episode's Garda business is operational: the squad works out of the station, and a running joke about a flaw in an unmarked car is used to humanise it.

Tommy, still in custody after his arrest, is questioned by Moynihan, who wants him to talk, but Tommy's mind is on a fizzy orange. He names Fran to the Gardaí, which leads to the arrests of Fran, Elmo and Ado. Fran resists interrogation entirely. Elmo is released without charge, a deliberate Garda move, and the officers then spray-paint rat outside his flat so that the gang will read him as an informer. Elmo understands at once how he will be seen and demands a charge sheet that never comes. Martin, the Garda who is Nidge's man on the inside, is arrested.

On the gang side, Nidge hides at the brothel with Janet while his wife Trish presses him about their son Warren's First Holy Communion. Debbie (Susan Loughnane) returns by ferry from a drug-muling trip with the cargo taped to her legs and hidden at customs by what the coverage calls the old dildo trick. Nidge and Fran press Andrew the dentist, whose practice they plan to use to import lidocaine; Andrew's sacked dental hygienist has already told the Gardaí about the men coming and going, and the Gardaí bug Nidge's car and Andrew's warehouse.

The revenge thread runs in the background. The Continuity IRA faction is impatient with Dano and wants the killing of Nidge done, and Lizzie reminds Dano that the matter is personal to her too. Lizzie and Wayne follow Trish and then Nidge to the hospital where Nidge's mother has been admitted after a stroke, but the attempt is not made. Fran is beaten in a pub toilet by Noely Hughes, whose partner he has been sleeping with; the brawl costs Fran two front teeth, and a later attack on his van leads to his re-arrest.

The episode's defining move is the manufacture of Elmo as a rat. The Gardaí commit a moral offence, turning a gang member into a man his own side will kill, and the series lets it drive the rest of the run without comment. Its weakness is already visible too: the police characters are defined by process and a running car joke rather than by character, and the imbalance with the gang is plain.

What distinguishes the hour is that it turns the show into a surveillance story and gives the opposition a procedure of its own. It is also the episode that made the Kieran O'Reilly casting public: the performer playing Madden was a serving detective in the Garda National Drugs Unit, and his appearance drew an internal Garda investigation, said to concern leave he took to film. Commissioner Martin Callinan said there were issues that need to be addressed and that a superintendent outside the Drugs Unit would review how O'Reilly came to be involved, while the Garda Representative Association said it would watch the outcome.

The episode drew over 800,000 viewers, but reception here is limited. Fan-vote data from the aggregator episode.ninja rates it the lowest of the six, and no contemporary episode-specific review was located; none has been invented to fill the space. The casting controversy, not the drama, dominated the coverage.