The Nidge weasel is back, everybody, yeah?
Love/Hate returns to our screens on RTE on Sunday night as the fifth series kicks off, but before all that we should get reacquainted with Fran, Tommy, Siobhán, Darren and the main man, Nidge.
Note: This article is comprised entirely of spoilers!
Season One
Meet Darren. You could just swim in those eyes. He’s bleedin’ gorgeous he is. Meet Dazzler’s brother Robbie, just released from prison. Exit Darren’s brother Robbie, just released from prison, killed on the side of the street.
Meet Tommy. Tommy is supposed to pick Robbie up but is having some sexy time with Darren and Robbie’s sister Mary instead. He misses Robbie, who ends up dead, and this is going to cause a whole mess of trouble later in the series.
Enter Nidge. Nigel. Nidge has just bought a gun and is taking tutorials off of YouTube. He’s a bit of a scamp, a lovable rogue type, which can only lead us to scream the words CHARACTER and ARC in your ear.
For now he’s not the big cheese though, that title goes to Aiden Gillen’s (cough *too smart, smarmy and softly spoken to be a convincing Dublin gangster* splutter) John Boy Power.
He will piss you off in every scene he chews and slithers through.
What else? Oh yeah, Darren’s ex Rosie is having a baby for Stumpy – a piece of s**t – who hangs around with Hughie (Brendan Gleeson’s son Brian).
Then what happens?
All sorts of to-ing and fro-ing over who killed Robbie, while the Darren-Rosie-Stumpy love triangle gets tiresome fast. Hughie leaves us. John Boy gets paranoid. Stumpy tries to kill Darren. The end.
Season Two
A year has passed. Darren has recovered and is working for Fran. Enter Fran, an affable crook with a Ronnie Drew husk, who gets into business with an increasingly paranoid John Boy.
The group’s kingpin is getting high off his own supply, while Nidge is making moves on Fran’s wife Linda – all the while pretending to be happily shacked up with his own wife Trish.
John Boy blames Stumpy when a drug mixing factory is seized by the Gardaí, and enlists Darren to kill him off. Exit Stumpy (who’s no loss to the show). John Boy then turns his attention to Fran and gets Nidge to firebomb his house, with Linda inside.
Elsewhere, Tommy’s missus Siobhán (played by the lovely Charlie Murphy) is having panic attacks when making illicit, overseas money runs, while he’s getting a little bit too friendly with John Boy’s heroin-addicted girlfriend Debbie (the unconvincing Susan Loughnane).
Debbie’s drugs are being supplied by Aido, which pisses John Boy off to the point that he enlists Dazzler to shoot Aido in the head. Little does he know that Darren and Nidge have other ideas – Darren shoots and kills John Boy in a city centre pub instead.
Rosie dumps Darren for the last time, realising that dating a hit-man is a bit of a mood killer. Badum tish.
Oh, and there’s also a thread about Mary and a stalker that just makes us sad and tired.
Season Three
Nidge is in charge. He initially plays the diplomat when one of his gang is shot by the Continuity IRA, but things soon get more than messy with the introduction of Git and his son Dano (Jason Barry).
Paddy’s Night sets the tone for the entire series as something goes VERY badly wrong – namely Git getting a little bit too friendly with Siobhán and Tommy not taking this at all well – and the fallout is huge as Darren kills Git.
Siobhán is shaken up and confides in her friend Donna. Donna is threatened by Nidge to keep her mouth shut, but she goes to the police anyway and all the lads – except for Fran and Darren – end up in custody.
Nidge is chasing his tail, trying to convince Dano that he had nothing to do with his father’s death, and Tommy gets caught in the crossfire when he admits sleeping with Dano’s wife Georgina. Nidge had designs on her himself, so he beats Tommy to a pulp.
Darren makes the acquaintance of Lizzie. It produces a spate of ‘will they?/won’t they? hit the sack’ articles on Mother Internet, until she decides to kill him instead.
AND THE WORLD GOES F**KING SPARE.
Season Four
A cat gets gunned down…
AND THE WORLD GOES F**KING SPARE.
…and then a tiger kidnapping goes wrong, thanks in no small part to Tommy’s brain injury (Club Orange/Fanta sales sky rocket thanks to Killian Scott’s character).
With Darren gone, the show loses some of its heart, while the key storyline – the extortion of a dentist – is less involving than previous series. Nidge spends most of his time driving around looking agitated, while Fran drinks a lot of homemade poitín.
The crew are being tracked by Detective Moynihan and his crew, with the net finally closing in during an unconvincing final episode.
The last we see of Nidge, he’s going apes**t in a jail cell having handed himself in.
Season Five
We’ll see, won’t we?
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