Episode 1

Nigel Delaney travels to Spain to ask a man he does not trust for the money to rebuild an operation that has already been dismantled around him. The fifth series opens with Nidge no longer the aggressor. D.I. Moynihan's sting at the end of series 4 has cost him his business, and Terence May, an Irish gangster living in exile, tanned and unhurried, agrees to fund him while making clear the terms of the relationship: "Someone's going to whack you." Terence attaches insurance. His nephew Pauley Lawless returns to Dublin with Nidge to watch the investment.

The hour cuts between the Spanish meeting and Dublin before and after it, a time-shift the Irish Independent's Pat Stacey noted directly and the Daily Edge recap found confusing. In Dublin, Fran Cooney is living rough in a mountain lair with his sidekick Dean, keeping a human finger bone in the fridge. He is arrested by Moynihan over the murder of the dentist Andrew Reddin and strip-searched with Dean. Nidge confronts him in an underground car park, threatening him with a man named Misha and a baseball bat, and Fran promises money and swears on his dead wife Linda's grave that he will comply. Nidge lets him live.

Nidge takes over a pub, the Pappin, as a more defensible base and moves his family into it socially. Trish has changed her hair; Nidge greets her with an insult and she answers it. Their son Warren has head lice, has his head shaved and is jokingly called Mini Nidge. The nits become a plot point: when Nidge later meets Patrick Ward to make peace and asks whether Patrick's son Brandon has them too, Patrick takes it as an insult to his parenting and threatens him.

Patrick, the Traveller pipe-bomber, has returned to Dublin determined to kill Nidge, blaming him for the failed attack of series 4 that endangered his family. Nidge is ambushed by Patrick's men with bats and slash hooks and escapes only by hiding in a hedge, bloodied. He offers Patrick ten thousand euro to settle the feud at a pub meeting; Patrick refuses, telling him to "buy yourself a headstone." Siobhán Delaney, Nidge's niece, is now Moynihan's informant, meeting him drunk and at short notice to say that Pauley has arrived from Spain, while her partner Tommy lies comatose in hospital. Pauley is introduced to the gang at a party in the Pappin and begins circling Siobhán. Lizzie, Darren's killer in series 3 and recently released, is preparing a hit of her own and is shot dead at her door on Nidge's orders before she can act. The episode ends on an uneasy drink between Nidge and Fran, both pretending to be reconciled while each plans the other's death.

The episode's strength is that it starts from defeat. The most powerful man in the show spends the hour negotiating and apologising, a more interesting position than series 4 left him in, and the Spanish scenes change the show's geography by putting an over-boss on screen and making Nidge answerable to him. The weakness is the volume of set-up and the fractured structure, which makes the first half harder to follow than the material needs; Stacey also found the female roles thin and one killing gratuitously unpleasant. As the last series opener of the run, it is the clearest example of the show's method: remove a character the audience knows in the first hour, then spend the season paying for it.