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Trollheart · 06-04-2015, 03:02 PM

Episode Three

One of John Boy’s big drugs shipments has been intercepted by the Guards and Fran is not a happy man. However there were two containers and one has got through. John Boy decides all of this is his --- Fran’s got impounded. He says that’s how it is and nobody is going to dare to contradict him or point out the very clear fact that this was all one shipment and Fran should be due some of the gear that escaped the attention of the Gardai. John Boy has already lost money, and he doesn’t intend to share any of his good fortune with his partner. In an unusual move, he pays Darren for the hit on Stumpy, which was supposed to have been part of what the young lad owed John Boy.

When Fran learns that one of the containers got through without being seized, he’s rightly angry and believes he should be getting his cut. Nidge discovers something distressing in the shower, but he has to rush to join Tricia, who has gone for an ultrasound. Darren, wracked with guilt over the killing of Stumpy, goes to see his mother, who has of course no idea that the young man who stands on her doorstep offering his condolences, and who she invites in to look at baby pictures of her son, is the very man who pulled the trigger that ended his life. Disconcerted with what he sees as blood money from John Boy, Darren gives it all to Stumpy’s mother. Nidge heads to a tryst with Linda, and she confides in him that she --- or Fran --- one of them anyway is unable to give her a baby. So his talk of his son-to-be really cuts her, not that he cares.

There’s a confrontation when Fran appears at the pub where John Boy and the gang are drinking, demanding his cut of the drugs.But he’s outnumbered and has to slink away, as they all laugh. He’s back soon enough though, and armed. John Boy is hit but only in the shoulder. The brief partnership is obviously dissolved in the most violent of manners. Fran is now an enemy. After Mary gives Darren an old kettle she had for Luke, remembering that he had said he had none, the young transient is so delighted that she remembered that he immediately takes it as a sort of love token, and begins to form ideas that, were Darren to be able to see into his friend’s mind, would probably get him more than a severe kicking. John Boy comes up with a savage plan to draw Fran out of hiding. He tells Nidge to throw a pipe bomb into his house, and he specifies that it must be when Linda is there. He wants a body. This is no idle warning, no empty threat: he wants to hurt Fran, and knows how to do it.

This will have massive repercussions for Nidge, though he does not know it, in season five. But for now, although he doesn’t really want to do it he knows he has to, and to him it’s just really another fuck-hole lost; he doesn’t care a scrap about Linda --- we saw that when she started getting upset about not being able to have children. he is, and always will be, only ever interested in himself. But he doesn’t want to do it, and he seeks advice from Darren, who tells him that if he has to bomb the house he must make sure to do so when Linda is not there, and to hell with John Boy. He can always say he thought she was there. What’s John Boy going to do? Have another hit taken out on her? Once Fran’s house is bombed he’ll come out of hiding, and that’s the whole point of this. Isn’t it?

But he goes ahead. To be honest, he must see her there as he walks up to the window of the sitting room and she’s watching TV. The explosion leaves her with severe facial injuries, and she can see from Fran’s reaction that he’s more concerned with how she now looks --- she’s also had to have her breast implants removed, as they had been punctured and the silicone was leakign into her bloodstream --- than how she feels. He never once touches her, apologises (though he must know it’s because of him she’s lying in a hospital bed and could have been lying on a slab) or offers any support. It’s like one of his favourite toys has been broken, and now he doesn’t want to play with it anymore. Nidge and Trish have to move to a safe house in case of retribution, which does not go down well with his wife.

Now as far as Fran is concerned all bets are off, and he will go after John Boy, Nidge, their families, anyone connected with the gang. He’s actually ready to die if he can take JohnBoy with him. But again it’s not about revenge for Linda; it’s a case of wounded pride, tit (sorry) for tat and a chance to get his own back for this attack on, literally, his own front door. John Boy sets Tommy the task of eliminating him, while Darren gets word from Rosie that she is on her way home. Debbie continues to spiral into a nightmarish descent into drug dependency, and John Boy continues to believe the ghost of his brother is haunting his apartment.

QUOTES
Nidge (looking at the ultrasound): “It’s like Alien!!”
Tricia: “Would ya shut up?”
Nidge: “It is!”

Luke: “How much is in there?”
Darren: “Dunno. A couple of grand at least. It’s blood money is what it is.”
Luke: “Sure it’s only money.”

Nidge: “Don’t you think we should cut him in on a quarter though?”
John Boy: “What am I now? Vincent de Paul? You give him your money if you feel so bad about it. You gonna do that? No, you’re not, ya fucking prick. You’re a great man at telling me I should be giving shit away… Stupid fuck! I mean, who are you to be telling me what to do with my money anyway? Christ, Nidge: you slow or what?”

Darren (talking to Nidge about his dilemma): “I don’t see what the problem is here. Just wait till she’s out and bomb the place.”
Nidge: “Nah. He’ll know.” (John Boy)
Darren: “How will he know? He’s God now is he?”
Nidge: “No. No, but he might be the other fella!”

John Boy: “You know in Sicily they write everything down. Don’t even trust the Pay-As-You-Go. That’s how they never get caught.”

John Boy: “Don’t give this to someone else. You take control of it. And don’t be coming back to me if all you did was wreck the gnomes in their front garden. I want blood on the floor. Think you can do that, Nidge?”

Fran: “Anyone who’s anything to him (John Boy) is fair game now.”
Dean: “They’ll have contracts out on you.”
Fran: “I’ll be on the move 24/7. They’ll want to get up very early to catch me out.”
Dean: “And how are we gonna get him?”
Fran: “I’ll do it meself. I don’t give a bollocks who he has protectin’ him. They don’t wanna end up dead takin’ a bullet for that scumbag. They’ll take his money but they’ll duck under the table if anything happens . And I don’t care what happens. I’d die a happy man if I could get him first. I would.”

Fran the man

We see Fran cutting up meat for his dogs, blood and all, and from the cold fury with which he attacks the meat it could be John Boy’s corpse he’s hacking up. To be honest, it could quite easily be human meat, the body of someone who pushed him too far, owed him money or just looked at him the wrong way. He’s obviously adept with the meat cleaver he uses, and you’d have to accept that it’s been employed in other than butchering animal carcasses.

Mirror, Mirror
When Nidge accompanies Trish to the hospital they decide that they want to know the sex of her baby, and are told it’s going to be a boy. Nidge is delighted --- “I knew it! Another little Nidge!” --- but there is hurt and disappointment in his wife’s eyes. Having to live in a harsh man’s world, and knowing that the chances are that Warren will one day end up participating in “the family business”, it’s clear that she had been hoping for a girl. A girl is less likely to be pressed into the service of the gang, less likely to be pulled into the dark world Nidge inhabits and which casts a cloud over Trish’s life every day. Also, a little girl would have been just the thing she needed to take her mind off what her husband does, and give her someone to lavish her love on. Not that she doesn’t love Warren, but a mother and her daughter have a very special bond, one it now seems Trish is not due to forge.

When Darren goes to visit Stumpy’s mother, he’s perhaps struck by how little she seems to know of the life her son led. She talks about “all his little friends” coming round to the house, and how some of them were at the funeral. How would she feel if she knew that almost all of them considered her son a rat, and that one of them decreed a hit on him, and that the man sitting smiling in awkward sympathy across the table from her is the man who put the bullets into his brain that took his life? She talks about the alarm system Stumpy had installed in the house, almost immediately prior to his murder. The irony couldn’t be clearer: he could protect his mother but he could do nothing to protect himself from the gang once it was decided that he had betrayed them, whether it was true or not.

FAMILY

It’s funny in a twisted kind of way that as Nidge gets stripped, preparatory to having sex with Fran’s girlfriend, he starts talking about the baby that’s on the way, sharing his thoughts about the woman he is about to cheat on with the woman he is cheating on her with. Talk about ironic! It’s also a really good touch that, as Linda confesses she would love to have a baby and waxes all thoughtful about it, Nidge glances at his watch! He’s only short of saying “C’mon willya? I’ve places to be, and Fran will be back in an hour!”

MONSTER BEHIND THE MASK

For a man who sneered at him at the end of season one, “What do you think I am? An animal?” when Darren tried to ensure that John Boy would not go after his sister while he was away, the gang boss is quite ready and willing to perform the most heinous deeds to achieve his ends. Earlier he warned Stumpy not to run, as if he did “Who’ll take care of yer ma?” pointing to the very clear threat that his mother would become a target if they could not get Stumpy himself. And now he calmly and with a smile arranges for Fran’s wife to be killed, or at least very seriously injured. It doesn’t matter a thing to him that Linda has nothing to do with the gang, has done nothing to them, and if he knew Nidge was screwing her that would mean nothing either, except he might not trust him to carry out the bombing.

John Boy is perfectly willing to sacrifice an innocent --- a woman, who has done him no harm and whom he may have passed the time of day with at some point, or been introduced to --- in order to flush out Fran and allow him to get his revenge. When it comes to his agenda, and his wishes, people are just pawns to John Boy, to be moved, taken, sacrificed as he sees fit. It’s all a game to him, and he’s intent on being the winner every time. So now, who’s the animal, and was Darren right to fear for Mary’s safety?

And then there’s Nidge.Though he agonises over the bombing and even confides to Darren that he doesn’t want to do it (though he stops short of telling him why: Nidge doesn’t trust anyone, and won’t give them any ammunition with which to cripple him) he still goes ahead, knowing that he is at best maiming and at worst causing the death of the woman he’s having an affair with. Of course, we don’t ever once think he’s in love with Linda --- he’s already told us that he “doesn’t give a fuck about anyone, not even Trish” --- Warren is the only one he cares about. But given that he’s screwing the woman you would think there would be some small scrap of emotion there. And in fairness there probably is, but when it comes down to a choice between his life and hers --- he probably feels John Boy will have him “clipped” if he fails him, and we would not be surprised ---he’s prepared to sacrifice her, just as his boss has said.

Darren, on the other hand, as Mary has pointed out, really is not cut out for this life. Though he can be a cold-blooded killer when it’s needed (and truth to tell, he probably relished the opportunity to settle the score with Stumpy on one level) he later feels terrible about it, so much so that he goes to Stumpy’s mother and tries to comfort her, eventually giving her the blood money he got from John Boy for killing her son. You can’t help but think this is not going to end well for Darren. He’s already living on borrowed time, and the one thing you can’t have in this criminal gang is a heart. It will eventually get you killed.

Chasing the Dragon
One fatal mistake everyone (except, it seems, Darren) make here is to “sample the merchandise”. If you’re going to sell drugs it’s probably best to keep a clear head, but everyone from John Boy down indulges. We even see here that his lawyer takes a snort when invited. This sort of handing over of control to the drug has already resulted in one of the operations getting busted because the guys were too stoned or high to get out when the Guards arrived, is slowly killing Debbie and is messing up John Boy’s head. We’ve seen Nidge partake and although I can’t remember, I think Fran does too.

When your life may depend from day to day on having your wits about you, it’s probably counterproductive to be messing with the shit, but then again, when it’s all around you and everyone is doing it, avoiding it may become a harder task than it would seem. Nevertheless, in the end it will be instrumental in bringing down everyone, from the highest to the lowest.

06-04-2015, 03:02 PM	#536 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,996	Episode Three One of John Boy’s big drugs shipments has been intercepted by the Guards and Fran is not a happy man. However there were two containers and one has got through. John Boy decides all of this is his --- Fran’s got impounded. He says that’s how it is and nobody is going to dare to contradict him or point out the very clear fact that this was all one shipment and Fran should be due some of the gear that escaped the attention of the Gardai. John Boy has already lost money, and he doesn’t intend to share any of his good fortune with his partner. In an unusual move, he pays Darren for the hit on Stumpy, which was supposed to have been part of what the young lad owed John Boy. When Fran learns that one of the containers got through without being seized, he’s rightly angry and believes he should be getting his cut. Nidge discovers something distressing in the shower, but he has to rush to join Tricia, who has gone for an ultrasound. Darren, wracked with guilt over the killing of Stumpy, goes to see his mother, who has of course no idea that the young man who stands on her doorstep offering his condolences, and who she invites in to look at baby pictures of her son, is the very man who pulled the trigger that ended his life. Disconcerted with what he sees as blood money from John Boy, Darren gives it all to Stumpy’s mother. Nidge heads to a tryst with Linda, and she confides in him that she --- or Fran --- one of them anyway is unable to give her a baby. So his talk of his son-to-be really cuts her, not that he cares. There’s a confrontation when Fran appears at the pub where John Boy and the gang are drinking, demanding his cut of the drugs.But he’s outnumbered and has to slink away, as they all laugh. He’s back soon enough though, and armed. John Boy is hit but only in the shoulder. The brief partnership is obviously dissolved in the most violent of manners. Fran is now an enemy. After Mary gives Darren an old kettle she had for Luke, remembering that he had said he had none, the young transient is so delighted that she remembered that he immediately takes it as a sort of love token, and begins to form ideas that, were Darren to be able to see into his friend’s mind, would probably get him more than a severe kicking. John Boy comes up with a savage plan to draw Fran out of hiding. He tells Nidge to throw a pipe bomb into his house, and he specifies that it must be when Linda is there. He wants a body. This is no idle warning, no empty threat: he wants to hurt Fran, and knows how to do it. This will have massive repercussions for Nidge, though he does not know it, in season five. But for now, although he doesn’t really want to do it he knows he has to, and to him it’s just really another fuck-hole lost; he doesn’t care a scrap about Linda --- we saw that when she started getting upset about not being able to have children. he is, and always will be, only ever interested in himself. But he doesn’t want to do it, and he seeks advice from Darren, who tells him that if he has to bomb the house he must make sure to do so when Linda is not there, and to hell with John Boy. He can always say he thought she was there. What’s John Boy going to do? Have another hit taken out on her? Once Fran’s house is bombed he’ll come out of hiding, and that’s the whole point of this. Isn’t it? But he goes ahead. To be honest, he must see her there as he walks up to the window of the sitting room and she’s watching TV. The explosion leaves her with severe facial injuries, and she can see from Fran’s reaction that he’s more concerned with how she now looks --- she’s also had to have her breast implants removed, as they had been punctured and the silicone was leakign into her bloodstream --- than how she feels. He never once touches her, apologises (though he must know it’s because of him she’s lying in a hospital bed and could have been lying on a slab) or offers any support. It’s like one of his favourite toys has been broken, and now he doesn’t want to play with it anymore. Nidge and Trish have to move to a safe house in case of retribution, which does not go down well with his wife. Now as far as Fran is concerned all bets are off, and he will go after John Boy, Nidge, their families, anyone connected with the gang. He’s actually ready to die if he can take JohnBoy with him. But again it’s not about revenge for Linda; it’s a case of wounded pride, tit (sorry) for tat and a chance to get his own back for this attack on, literally, his own front door. John Boy sets Tommy the task of eliminating him, while Darren gets word from Rosie that she is on her way home. Debbie continues to spiral into a nightmarish descent into drug dependency, and John Boy continues to believe the ghost of his brother is haunting his apartment. QUOTES Nidge (looking at the ultrasound): “It’s like Alien!!” Tricia: “Would ya shut up?” Nidge: “It is!” Luke: “How much is in there?” Darren: “Dunno. A couple of grand at least. It’s blood money is what it is.” Luke: “Sure it’s only money.” Nidge: “Don’t you think we should cut him in on a quarter though?” John Boy: “What am I now? Vincent de Paul? You give him your money if you feel so bad about it. You gonna do that? No, you’re not, ya fucking prick. You’re a great man at telling me I should be giving shit away… Stupid fuck! I mean, who are you to be telling me what to do with my money anyway? Christ, Nidge: you slow or what?” Darren (talking to Nidge about his dilemma): “I don’t see what the problem is here. Just wait till she’s out and bomb the place.” Nidge: “Nah. He’ll know.” (John Boy) Darren: “How will he know? He’s God now is he?” Nidge: “No. No, but he might be the other fella!” John Boy: “You know in Sicily they write everything down. Don’t even trust the Pay-As-You-Go. That’s how they never get caught.” John Boy: “Don’t give this to someone else. You take control of it. And don’t be coming back to me if all you did was wreck the gnomes in their front garden. I want blood on the floor. Think you can do that, Nidge?” Fran: “Anyone who’s anything to him (John Boy) is fair game now.” Dean: “They’ll have contracts out on you.” Fran: “I’ll be on the move 24/7. They’ll want to get up very early to catch me out.” Dean: “And how are we gonna get him?” Fran: “I’ll do it meself. I don’t give a bollocks who he has protectin’ him. They don’t wanna end up dead takin’ a bullet for that scumbag. They’ll take his money but they’ll duck under the table if anything happens . And I don’t care what happens. I’d die a happy man if I could get him first. I would.” Fran the man We see Fran cutting up meat for his dogs, blood and all, and from the cold fury with which he attacks the meat it could be John Boy’s corpse he’s hacking up. To be honest, it could quite easily be human meat, the body of someone who pushed him too far, owed him money or just looked at him the wrong way. He’s obviously adept with the meat cleaver he uses, and you’d have to accept that it’s been employed in other than butchering animal carcasses. Mirror, Mirror When Nidge accompanies Trish to the hospital they decide that they want to know the sex of her baby, and are told it’s going to be a boy. Nidge is delighted --- “I knew it! Another little Nidge!” --- but there is hurt and disappointment in his wife’s eyes. Having to live in a harsh man’s world, and knowing that the chances are that Warren will one day end up participating in “the family business”, it’s clear that she had been hoping for a girl. A girl is less likely to be pressed into the service of the gang, less likely to be pulled into the dark world Nidge inhabits and which casts a cloud over Trish’s life every day. Also, a little girl would have been just the thing she needed to take her mind off what her husband does, and give her someone to lavish her love on. Not that she doesn’t love Warren, but a mother and her daughter have a very special bond, one it now seems Trish is not due to forge. When Darren goes to visit Stumpy’s mother, he’s perhaps struck by how little she seems to know of the life her son led. She talks about “all his little friends” coming round to the house, and how some of them were at the funeral. How would she feel if she knew that almost all of them considered her son a rat, and that one of them decreed a hit on him, and that the man sitting smiling in awkward sympathy across the table from her is the man who put the bullets into his brain that took his life? She talks about the alarm system Stumpy had installed in the house, almost immediately prior to his murder. The irony couldn’t be clearer: he could protect his mother but he could do nothing to protect himself from the gang once it was decided that he had betrayed them, whether it was true or not. FAMILY It’s funny in a twisted kind of way that as Nidge gets stripped, preparatory to having sex with Fran’s girlfriend, he starts talking about the baby that’s on the way, sharing his thoughts about the woman he is about to cheat on with the woman he is cheating on her with. Talk about ironic! It’s also a really good touch that, as Linda confesses she would love to have a baby and waxes all thoughtful about it, Nidge glances at his watch! He’s only short of saying “C’mon willya? I’ve places to be, and Fran will be back in an hour!” MONSTER BEHIND THE MASK For a man who sneered at him at the end of season one, “What do you think I am? An animal?” when Darren tried to ensure that John Boy would not go after his sister while he was away, the gang boss is quite ready and willing to perform the most heinous deeds to achieve his ends. Earlier he warned Stumpy not to run, as if he did “Who’ll take care of yer ma?” pointing to the very clear threat that his mother would become a target if they could not get Stumpy himself. And now he calmly and with a smile arranges for Fran’s wife to be killed, or at least very seriously injured. It doesn’t matter a thing to him that Linda has nothing to do with the gang, has done nothing to them, and if he knew Nidge was screwing her that would mean nothing either, except he might not trust him to carry out the bombing. John Boy is perfectly willing to sacrifice an innocent --- a woman, who has done him no harm and whom he may have passed the time of day with at some point, or been introduced to --- in order to flush out Fran and allow him to get his revenge. When it comes to his agenda, and his wishes, people are just pawns to John Boy, to be moved, taken, sacrificed as he sees fit. It’s all a game to him, and he’s intent on being the winner every time. So now, who’s the animal, and was Darren right to fear for Mary’s safety? And then there’s Nidge.Though he agonises over the bombing and even confides to Darren that he doesn’t want to do it (though he stops short of telling him why: Nidge doesn’t trust anyone, and won’t give them any ammunition with which to cripple him) he still goes ahead, knowing that he is at best maiming and at worst causing the death of the woman he’s having an affair with. Of course, we don’t ever once think he’s in love with Linda --- he’s already told us that he “doesn’t give a fuck about anyone, not even Trish” --- Warren is the only one he cares about. But given that he’s screwing the woman you would think there would be some small scrap of emotion there. And in fairness there probably is, but when it comes down to a choice between his life and hers --- he probably feels John Boy will have him “clipped” if he fails him, and we would not be surprised ---he’s prepared to sacrifice her, just as his boss has said. Darren, on the other hand, as Mary has pointed out, really is not cut out for this life. Though he can be a cold-blooded killer when it’s needed (and truth to tell, he probably relished the opportunity to settle the score with Stumpy on one level) he later feels terrible about it, so much so that he goes to Stumpy’s mother and tries to comfort her, eventually giving her the blood money he got from John Boy for killing her son. You can’t help but think this is not going to end well for Darren. He’s already living on borrowed time, and the one thing you can’t have in this criminal gang is a heart. It will eventually get you killed. Chasing the Dragon One fatal mistake everyone (except, it seems, Darren) make here is to “sample the merchandise”. If you’re going to sell drugs it’s probably best to keep a clear head, but everyone from John Boy down indulges. We even see here that his lawyer takes a snort when invited. This sort of handing over of control to the drug has already resulted in one of the operations getting busted because the guys were too stoned or high to get out when the Guards arrived, is slowly killing Debbie and is messing up John Boy’s head. We’ve seen Nidge partake and although I can’t remember, I think Fran does too. When your life may depend from day to day on having your wits about you, it’s probably counterproductive to be messing with the shit, but then again, when it’s all around you and everyone is doing it, avoiding it may become a harder task than it would seem. Nevertheless, in the end it will be instrumental in bringing down everyone, from the highest to the lowest. __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018 Last edited by Trollheart; 01-05-2017 at 05:51 PM.