Episode 5

The hour opens with Nidge in bed with Janet at the brothel and a flashback to the pipe bomb that maimed Linda Cooney, the device Nidge planted in an earlier series, with Linda and John Boy Power surfacing in the memory. Linda was not killed by the explosion; she took her own life afterwards, and the flashback covers the bombing, not the death. Nidge's relationship with Janet has cooled since the brothel deaths, and her warmth towards him is gone.

Fran hangs around the gang's secret lidocaine warehouse, needling Andrew about the gold teeth he asked for and asking about the shipment. Andrew has meanwhile told the watching Gardaí about the lidocaine plan, so his usefulness to the gang is already spent.

On the Garda side, Moynihan's team closes in on one of the conspirators, and the operation pressures Andrew, humiliating him into agreeing to inform on Nidge. Siobhán, frantic about Tommy, agrees to work for the Gardaí after they tell her that it was Nidge who beat Tommy into a coma. The Gardaí thus have two potential informers inside the gang's orbit, and the surveillance plot becomes personal rather than procedural.

The gang's own business is now grimly domestic. Debbie, back on heroin and back on the game, dies with a friend from a bad batch of the drug, an end the coverage greets as a sudden death and asks whether it was accidental or arranged; no source states that Nidge arranged it. Ado and Nadine are seen preparing drugs at the scales, and Nadine is signed up as a drug mule and sent to the airport. Wayne drinks shots with a mate while the older men drink pints, and Elmo tests his nerve. In the episode's most public stunt, Keith Duffy of Boyzone appears as a gym owner who buys drugs from Ado.

Because Nidge has come to believe that Patrick, the pipe-bomb maker from an earlier series, is a loose end, he takes Wayne to kill him. The attempt fails: Nidge fires at Patrick's back and misses, and he stops Wayne from pursuing Patrick with a penknife. Wayne's assessment, that you would need a hunting rifle for that monster, closes the scene. The episode ends with Nidge back in bed with Trish, who tells him she will mind him.

The flashback is the hour's strength: bringing Linda, John Boy and Darren back for a single memory sequence gives the series' history weight at the moment its present is most degraded. The weakness is that the episode is almost entirely set-up. There is no self-contained movement, the attempts on Patrick and the deaths are preparations for the finale, and the hour resolves nothing of its own.

It is the episode in which the show removes two of its remaining women, killing Debbie and sending Nadine to the airport as a mule, and in which Siobhán turns, giving the next series its engine. It drew 872,200 viewers, up 166,200 on the previous week, with a 52 per cent share, the boost coinciding with the Keith Duffy casting. No episode-specific critical review beyond the ratings and casting coverage was located.