Kin review, episode six: All guns blazing in most exciting instalment yet
In Kin, episode six, Eamon Cunningham (Ciaran Hinds) turns up the heat on his rivals, but also has plenty problems of his own.
Kin episode six was the most dramatic and tension-filled yet, with two high-profile assassination attempts and a successful hit on one of the Kinsella family’s leading associates. With Eamon Cunningham’s (Ciaran Hinds) €500,000 bounty on the head of many members of the Kinsella clan, every career criminal in Dublin seems to be coming out of the woodwork for them.
Episode six was bookended by two dramatic assassination attempts - an attack on Michael (Charlie Cox) made more frightening by the fact it was carried out in the most public of settings. Another shooter even has the brawn to go for family patriarch Frank (Aidan Gillen), leaving him fleeing the scene to save his life with a family associate dead.
Eamon Cunningham may well be gunning for them, but in many regards the Kinsellas are at risk of imploding from the inside out.
In a desperate attempt to protect her surviving son, Amanda has been taking matters into her own hands - which also places her at a much greater personal risk both from the criminal underworld and the police who are watching the feuding families’ every moves.
Needless to say, Jimmy and Michael are not impressed at her growing role in what has traditionally been their affairs. And Birdy has some choice words for sibling Frank when she hears of plans for his son to give himself up.
“Kinsellas don’t hand themselves into the police,” she tells him. “Amanda mightn’t get that but you f**kin’ should. You don’t just give up your son.”
As the series goes deeper, Amanda has been transformed from the ‘criminal’s wife’ keen to keep her head down, to an increasingly central protagonist.
The men in her life have certainly underestimated Amanda’s ability to wield power. A face-off against Ryan Lincoln’s Kem shows she might even be starting to enjoy it.
She’s fierce and intimidating in the confrontation with the younger dealer, who she suspects of being a rat. “Look me in the face so you know I’ll mean what I’m saying. Who do you talk to - is it Eamon? I swear this is your last chance.” Eamon Hinds’ drugs lord has been one of the best characters in the series and tonight we got to know him better.
While the sometimes-ponderous pacing may have had its detractors, Kin has really given us the chance to get to know these characters. And the events of tonight’s episode set the stage for a gripping final two episodes.
