“The hack of him - he’s like he’s off Strictly.”
This was Nidge in the second episode of the new series of Love/Hate shaping his way into the backroom den of his newest enemy, Dano. The fact that he had four zimmos on board may have explained the lad’s breezy, near-gurning air but since taking over as capo of Dublin’s brigand crime gang, Nidge the impish fool has given way to a kind of flinty badness.
Nidge (the superb Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) was finally facing the music after last week’s little misunderstanding with Dano’s dad, IRA man Git. We saw this king scumbag gruesomely offed – not so much clipped as creamed all over the storage room floor of a seedy club with a blow to the face with a beer keg.
That attracted 17 complaints to the RTÉ switchboard and before episode two, we were once again given our warning of “strong language and scenes of sex and violence”. Of sex there was nada, the language we’re used to, but the violence, god, the violence. Last night’s bloody mayhem was far more chilling than Git’s grisly end. We saw a double murder of a completely innocent man and woman in a lonely, darkened housing estate with a brutish electricity pylon looming in the foreground. Their baby cried as the blood dried on the ceiling and walls.
Our shooter was Dazzler, a boy whose killer looks render his killer instinct slightly unbelievable. Some people sniffed that series one of Love/Hate was more Westlife than Westies. Series two and now series three have proved them utterly wrong and anyway, who said scumbags had to be ugly?
Last night’s double-clipping puts Dazzler’s body count at a scary three and we’re only two episodes in. I’m no fan of Robert Sheehan as an actor but there’s something about the blank-faced way he carries out the dirty work that hits the right note. And how did we get to the point where a young family was wiped out? Well, like most things on Love/Hate you can trace it back to glowing nexus of casual evil that is Nidge.
Back in that backroom den, after getting a dig, a head butt and a stiff drink, Nidge had convinced the none-too-bright Dano that he didn’t know anything about his dad’s “disappearance” and he was more than willing to use Darren’s pal Elmo as a scapegoat and well, it made sense that Darren would do the deed and off both Elmo and his cousin into the bargain to avenge the fallen Git.
Here Stuart Carolan’s masterly script was at its most Scorsese (and indeed Miller’s Crossing) when Darren accidently bumped into his target and we were treated to a scene of slowly-enveloping tension and sadness that revealed some of the realities of consorting with crims. Elmo somehow knew that Darren’s appearance on his patch was not coincidental and he sobbed pathetically as his fate dawned on him. Dazzler, a bit like Gabriel Byrne giving John Turturro a reprieve in Miller’s, took pity and told him to get the hell out of dodge. However, we have a feeling that the broken Elmo will be back.
On the domestic and (dare I say) romantic, front, the love is just as messy as the hate. We saw Tommy (the strong silent Killian Scott) both comforting and warning his recently raped partner Siobhan (the great Charlie Murphy) even as he continues his tortured affair with prostitute Debbie in the gang’s brothel. Darren, meanwhile, is just trying to kill the memory of ex Rosie by well killing people and wily old opportunist Nidge, a man who thinks consequences is a board game for posh twits, clearly fancies Dano’s missus.
As for the baby-faced Fran (Peter Coonan), the man who did a Mr Wolf from Pulp Fiction and cleaned up the mess that was Git’s remains last week, well, last night he was relaxing on the driving range, knocking ‘em 400 yards out and assuring Nidge that if he could only get his putting down, he could turn pro. But out there somewhere in the dark outer reaches of North County Dublin there is a shallow grave holding a very dark secret.
In the same way the Mafia were fans of The Sopranos and Goodfellas, we wonder if Dublin’s network of rival gang fraternities watch Love/Hate after a long week of bloody mayhem and crime. Oh, and if anybody out there still thinks that perhaps this show isn’t real, try turning on the news, reading the papers or talking to anyone who has to live among these kind of people.
Alan Corr
