Love/Hate rewatch, few questions :D

hatrickpatrick

Didn't want to bump the ancient zombie thread and figured there might be a few people rewatching (or indeed watching for the first time) in quarantine, so making this one!

A couple of things have come to mind (I'm at the beginning of S3 on the rewatch) which I remember bugging me the first time around and I'd assumed would become clearer on a rewatch, but haven't so far! Questions in spoiler tags in case others have only just started the show for the first time:

Season 1 spoiler:

How exactly did Darren figure out that Hughie was the one who shot his brother Robbie? From the rewatch, the timeline seems as follows: Hughie spreads it around that Jimmy Byrne shot him, the lads interrogate Byrne and let him go after he seems genuine in his denials, Hughie kills Byrne anyway to send a message, and Darren somehow extrapolates from this and the fact that Hughie initially told him Byrne did it, that Hughie was the one who did it.

Seems very tenuous, am I missing something else which hinted at Hughie being responsible? Never quite figured out how he made this assumption based only on that sequence of events.

Season 3/4 spoiler:

Elmo reappears at the start of Season 3 after spending a year abroad and thus sitting out Season 2. He gets into a fight with Git Lockman and thus the lads frame him for Lockman's disappearance to spare everyone else, resulting in Darren's botched hit on Elmo (where Elmo figured out that Darren is going to kill him, confronts him, and Darren can't bring himself to do it) and the death of Elmo's cousin and his family.

At the end of Season 3, Elmo is the one hired by Nidge along with Aido, to set Darren up on the instructions of Tony from the CIRA. At the beginning of Season 4, Elmo is fully in on the tiger kidnapping, and is then briefly targeted by the gang as a potential rat thanks to some mind games played by the detective taskforce working to disrupt the gang's operations.

Isn't it a bit odd though that Elmo remains so fundamentally loyal to Nidge & co despite (a) being unfairly framed and an attempt on his life being made on Nidge's orders, (b) his cousin and cousin's family murdered on Nidge's orders, and finally (c) being unfairly targeted as a rat, even though this was a Garda psy-op? I could never figure out after all that, why he's such a loyal enforcer throughout Season 5. I'd have assumed anyone put in that position would have told the gang to go f*ck themselves if approached with an offer to rejoin, I mean they wrecked his family to save their own asses!

Anyone who remember the show in detail have any thoughts on this? I thought it was an extremely well written and well directed show so these aren't snide criticisms, just genuine musings I've had about the show for years. As far as I can see, these are the only major plot holes in an otherwise perfectly crafted show, the season one thing with Hughie in particular never made any sense to me and the time jump and extrapolations required between the end of Episode 3 and the beginning of Episode 4 were very, very jarring. But maybe that's just me?