KIN – Season 1 Episode 8 – SPOILERS

Amanda (Clare Dunne) arranges a meeting with Eamon Cunningham (Ciarán Hinds) to negotiate an end to the war. The two of them meet in an airport lounge on the other side of airport security, a place both feel reasonably safe. Eventually, Amanda asks what is the minimum settlement he will accept and Eamon says he will accept getting his drugs back and the death of one of the Kinsellas, he doesn’t care which. Amanda tacitly accepts the terms. Eamon then flies to Spain to see his family.

Amanda returns home and makes her choice, telling Frank (Aidan Gillen) that Cunningham wants Viking (Sam Keeley) dead as a condition of the agreement. Frank is upset about this, and in his ensuing tirade uses the ‘c’ word several times. He then inhales too much cocaine and collapses, bleeding from the nose. Aidan Gillen is a fine actor, and he plays the part of Frank well, but it is unfortunate that the writers chose to make the only gay character on the show incompetent, and misogynistic.

Viking gets another visit from Nikki (Yasmin Seky), and he asks her to give Kem (Ryan Lincoln) some money to arrange a hit on the only eyewitness the prosecution has against him. She agrees to do this, but she does not know that Kem was collaborating with Cunningham, was found out, and is working for Amanda now. She might have agreed to the plan just to humour Viking, who is not doing well in prison.

Amanda tells Jimmy (Emmett J Scanlan) there’s something she wants him to do, but he’ll need to miss the monthly mass for Jamie to do it. Jimmy is amazingly cooperative, and timidly says he’ll do anything Amanda wants. This is a big change from the Jimmy of the last few episodes, who kept telling his wife that she should know her place and should run everything by him before she does it. Earlier, Jimmy told his brother Michael that it would have been better to have found out about his affair with Amanda when it happened, so that he could have moved on and found someone else. Jimmy is thirty-something. Why he can’t do that now?

The task Amanda gives Jimmy is to kill Con Doyle (Keith McErlean). Kem arranges to meet Doyle at a remote location, saying he has more information. Jimmy ambushes him there and hesitates, but does finally shoot him (using, of all things, a six-shooter).

Michael (Charlie Cox) has the task of killing Cunningham, should he not agree to terms. When Cunningham gets off the plane in Spain, he is met (unexpectedly) by two of his supplier’s people, who take him to see their boss. On the way through the parking garage, Michael, who seems to enjoy the occasional homicide, shows up without a mask on, shoots the two minions in the back and confronts Eamon, who tells him that the war is over and that Amanda and he have an agreement. Michael says “she lied”, and shoots Eamon in the eye. All this in a public parking garage that likely has at least some surveillance cameras.

While all this goes down, Amanda is at a memorial mass for Jamie with her parents and her son Anthony (Mark McKenna Jr), listening to the priest go on about turning the other cheek. She meets her parents there, and her mother (Rachael Dowling) suggests to her that it might be time for her to come home. “You just don’t get it, do you, mam,” says Amanda. “I’m a Kinsella now.” It seems that getting away from her parents may be as important to Amanda as protecting her son.”

The result of all this death dealing is that Birdy (Maria Doyle Kennedy) is the likely heir to the Kinsella throne, but whether she will have any actual power is questionable. Both Jimmy and Michael (who might be arrested for these latest shootings in Spain, as he took few precautions against it) are in thrall to Amanda, and Viking is in prison. Birdy’s brother Bren (Francis Magee) is also in prison, and will apparently be there for a long time, so Birdy seems to have no one who is loyal to her.

Even if Michael is not arrested, it would seem that he still has little hope of a relationship with his daughter Anna (Hannah Adeogun), and he is taking an anticonvulsant for epilepsy. Does Amanda plan to take over Cunningham’s operation, or go into competition with it? How might Cunningham’s supplier feel about that?

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KIN Seasons One and Two can be streamed on BBC iPlayer, and on SBS in Australia.
KIN is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.