Episode 3

With Fran held in Mountjoy and still plotting from inside, Nidge sets out to have him killed by other prisoners. Two candidates are to hand: Noely Hughes, who knocked out Fran's tooth in an earlier series, and Pottsie Kenny, the brother of Nidge's driver Aido. Nidge asks Aido to arrange it through Pottsie, which appals him. Fran, meanwhile, fashions a weapon from a razor blade and a toothbrush. When Pottsie and his friends jump him in his cell, the fight goes badly for them: Fran takes out Pottsie's eye. He is patched up and tells the investigating officers to go and see the other fella. Nidge's response is to promise Aido money for the eye.

Pauley hands over the first delivery under the Terence May deal: drugs and ecstasy tablets hidden inside garden gnomes. His instructions to Elmo are confusing in the extreme, with brown eyes and a blue hat meaning gear and blue eyes and a blue hat meaning yokes. Elmo sells most of the gnomes and buries the remainder in a hole in the ground, an arrangement that will cost him later in the series.

Siobhán's double life deteriorates. She and Pauley are circling each other in earnest; after an ecstasy tablet Nidge spots them together at the Pappin and calls her a disgrace. Later they end up on the pub roof, where Siobhán nearly falls and passes out. Moynihan meets her and tells her that what she is doing with Pauley is messed up; Pauley then turns up unannounced at her house, clearly suspicious of her. Aido, given ecstasy in place of the hit he was asked to arrange, dances while his partner Nadine leaves with another man. Nidge begins wearing a bulletproof vest and tells Trish that people are trying to kill him.

Aido and Elmo kidnap Dean and take him to the stables where Elmo buried the shipment. Nidge threatens to put Dean into a silage pit filled with horses' piss and shite, and Dean breaks. He tells them that Noely Hughes is locked up in Mountjoy with Fran and, crucially, that after Noely knocked out Fran's tooth, Fran dug up his mother's grave and urinated on it. Nidge is delighted: he now has the instrument of Fran's humiliation and, he hopes, of Fran's death. The episode ends quietly, almost every principal shown sleepless, a woman singing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" over the closing montage, and Patrick saying his prayers.

The interrogation of Dean is the episode's clearest storytelling: a man talks because he is frightened, and what he says is worth more than what he did. Placing Fran inside a cell and making it a battlefield is new for the show, and the hour hands Nidge the vest the whole finale turns on. The weakness is that it is thin on plot movement, with several scenes existing to set up later episodes rather than to deliver anything in themselves. No viewing figure and no national newspaper review for the hour were located; reception rests on a recap and a blog that judged it muted while conceding it set the plot for a Nidge and Fran war. It makes the feud mutual and irreversible, and gives Nidge the information that determines the finale's most controversial scene.