Episode 4

The fourth episode opens where the last one left off: Fran's sidekick Dean is bloodied and beaten beside Nidge, who has turned him and extracted what he knows about Fran digging up Noely Hughes's mother's grave and urinating on it. Nidge promises to buy him a drink.

The hour then runs several strands. Patrick and his family visit the grave of a two-year-old child, and he and Brandon later have a father-and-son conversation about leaving the caravan for a house for their safety, though the sources consulted do not establish who the child at the grave was. Siobhán sits with the still-comatose Tommy; Aido visits Pottsie, whose eye Fran took. Nadine, Aido's partner, is sleeping with his driver Scotty, and Nidge finds out and uses the knowledge to assign Scotty to the next run as a troublemaking move. Elmo has sold most of the gnomes and the delivery is nearly clear. Tommy opens his eyes. Nidge comes home to Trish and the boys, checks Warren's homework and admires his drawing of giraffes.

Nidge wants Patrick dead and needs a new gunman, so Aido is sent to a house party to recruit Packy, a recovering addict who owes the gang a drug debt and has turned religious. Packy initially refuses, saying he has changed his life, then is talked back into the fold. Siobhán, now genuinely torn between revenge on Nidge and her feelings for Pauley, overhears Pauley and Elmo arranging a rendezvous at the zoo and passes the information to Moynihan. She tells Pauley she is not going back to Tommy. Nidge visits Noely Hughes in Mountjoy, tells him Fran desecrated his mother's grave and asks him to pass on a further, personal insult to Fran: that Nidge and Fran's late wife Linda had a sexual history. This is the move that produces the finale's prison-shower vengeance.

Three reversals follow. Packy approaches Patrick with a gun; Patrick's vest stops the round, but the shot catches Brandon in the head. Patrick has his men string Packy up while he takes Brandon to hospital, and Nidge, hearing of it, realises his own family are now targets and flees the house with Trish and the boys. High on drugs and together on a balcony, Pauley proposes to Siobhán; she is about to accept when she refers to the zoo, and he understands that she has betrayed him. She pushes him from the balcony to his death. Scotty is revealed to be an undercover Garda officer inside the gang. Patrick cuts Packy's throat at the halting site after Packy begs for his life, and the episode cuts to black.

The strength is velocity: three major reversals land in one hour without any of them feeling unearned, because each follows from a decision made earlier in the season. It is also the only episode in the season in which a woman commits the decisive act of violence, and Charlie Murphy carries it. The weakness is compression. The hour must kill Pauley, wound Brandon, kill Packy and exposé Scotty, and Pauley's death, the most shocking of them, gives the character only moments to understand his own end. No viewing figure and no national newspaper review was located; the blog review judged it among the most intense hours of the show, while criticising the crew's incompetence. It is the hour that makes the finale's bloodshed inevitable rather than arbitrary.