I Wanna Destroy the Passer By: Nihilism, Narcissism and Authority in Love/Hate Series Four (2014)

opening scene depicts a teenage boy, who will spend most of the series trying to kill gang leader, Nidge, showing his friends his gun. He points the gun at another boy and orders his friend to film it on his phone. Instead of shooting the boy, he guns down a passing cat. scene then cuts to Nidge, who we have watched throughout the arc of the previous three series develop from a sycophantic, ambitious underling to a cold-hearted amoral gang leader, now watching porn in the dark, in which a woman is submissive and her mouth is gagged. Clearly, the tone of the show is darker than ever. most likable and moral character in the show, Darren, has been killed as revenge for a killing he carried out to save Nidge. In the first episode of this series, Nidge drives to a graveyard and stands over Darren's grave. His emotions are opaque: although it is not clear if he feels remorse or sadness, he is clearly haunted by Darren's death. only remaining character with any moral standing (although clearly this is a relative concept in this world) is Tommy but he has been beaten so brutally by Nidge in the last series that he suffered brain damage. Told by Nidge that a group of Nigerian immigrants are responsible for the attack, the confused and damaged Tommy continues to work for Nidge. But Tommy has also been left distant and passive and when we first see him, his wife is watching over him as he sleeps and she wipes some blood from his ear. Tommy's wife Siobhan seems to have intuited what really happened to Tommy. She is repeatedly shown deep in thought suggesting that she is contemplating how to protect Tommy or perhaps even avenge Nidge's attack on him. boy who we see in the first scene, already a coldhearted killer, has joined forces with Lizzie, the dissident Republican gunwoman who killed Darren, and their sole mission is now to kill Nidge. Despite these threats Nidge emerges unscathed at the end of the last episode. Just at the point when the police are about to catch the whole gang bringing in illegal material, having surveilled them over the course of the series, Tommy passes out, with blood quickly dripping from his ears and mouth. head of the investigation faces a choice: wait just a few more minutes until the incriminating shipping container comes in and run the risk of Tommy dying, or ruin years of investigative work by calling an ambulance and thus alerting the whole gang to their presence. He chooses the latter, having built up sympathy for Tommy and his wife. This tough moral decision leads to Nidge and his entire gang getting off after arrest without charges. At the end of a series in which it seemed every force in the show was conspiring against Nidge, he emerges triumphant and suffers no punishment for his many crimes. Walking away together, free men despite all the murders and extreme forms of violence they have committed, Nidge says to Fran 'If I hadn't used Tommy I'd be inside now'. Nodding back ironically to the theme suggested by 'Turn, Turn, Turn' at the beginning of the series, Fran says The universe, Nidgey, the universe. Over the course of the fourth series, distance emerges between Nidge and Trish, his wife. She spends her days blowing his ill-gotten gains on clothes and pampering and she indulges him despite his bad behaviour. This forgiving and submissive approach only seems to make him more distant. At the same time he is getting closer to Janet, the brothel keeper he works with. Nidge's amorality is exposed to Janet when two of the women working in the brothel die from a heroin overdose: he insists they leave the bodies to rot in an apartment rather than alert anyone and risk police attention. After Nidge reveals his moral character, Janet's warmth towards him disappears. In a final moment of intimacy Janet reveals that her sister died when they were teenagers. deaths of the girls has brought back these painful memoriesfor her but has disturbingly not effected Nidge at all. …