Summary
Things are getting pretty complicated for the Irish in “Favors and Funerals”, with seemingly everyone pursuing their own agendas and willing to turn on those closest to them at a moment’s notice.
Gangsters tend to make a pretty big deal out of codes and honor and such, but if The Westies is proving anything, it’s that hypocrisy is the mob boss’s stock in trade. Consider everything that’s going on in Episode 4, “Favors and Funerals”. After Jimmy stole a healthy amount of cocaine from a Colombian racket, John Gotti is trying to get it back behind Big Paul’s back, Jimmy is trying to convince Sweeney to sell it, and Sweeney is explaining why the Irish shouldn’t be selling drugs — right while he, himself, is selling the product on the side. Everyone’s lying to everyone else. And the wrong people are paying a steep price for it.
Pat Murphy is a prime example. Not that Pat was necessarily a good guy himself, of course. But at the end of the previous episode, Keenan murdered him with Sweeney’s approval as a way to ensure that Danny kept out of trouble. At Pat’s funeral, Sweeney gives a grandiose speech about how much he loves the old neighborhood; later, Mickey has to remind Jimmy that not only did he kill Davey, he was also quite happy to kill Mickey, or at least have Jimmy do it, and has now signed off on Pat’s death. How much can Sweeney love the neighborhood, really, if he’s willing to kill everyone who grew up in it?
And the Danny thing didn’t even work! Danny, evidently a smart kid, put the pieces together and realised that Keenan beat him up for information about Pat right before Pat suddenly got killed, which necessarily implies that Keenan killed Pat. Needless to say, Sweeney would rather keep that quiet, so he tasks Keenan with shutting his son up. This excuses an effective bit of backstory, since we get to meet Moira, the sister of Keenan’s late wife (and Danny’s mother), Eileen. She raised Danny in Keenan’s absence, but is obviously losing her way with it. Keenan’s sincerity is palpable, but there’s too much water under the bridge for Danny to really hear it, so he instead goes back to Sweeney and basically blackmails him. If Sweeney gives him his “job” back, he won’t say anything to anyone about Sweeney ordering the hit.
Needless to say, Sweeney doesn’t take this especially well, and basically implies to Keenan that if he doesn’t get Danny to back off, he’ll have him killed. Keenan pulls some strings with Polk to get Danny arrested for drug possession — he plants the drugs on him — in exchange for agreeing to investigate the connection between Sweeney, the Gambino family, and the Starship attack. He’s willing to go behind Sweeney’s back and set up Danny, but he’s doing it to protect his son, which means he’s technically the character whose motives are the most consistent and the least self-serving, which admittedly is a bit like being the best-looking person in the burns unit.
You can’t make a similar claim about Sweeney, who comes off pretty terribly in The Westies Episode 4. Aside from his hypocrisy at Pat’s funeral, he’s also deeply hypocritical about the drugs. After banning Jimmy from selling them, he decides to sell them himself on the quiet, which almost immediately gets back to Gotti and, through the proprietor of an army surplus store whom Jimmy and Mickey have to shake down for protection money, to Jimmy. Sweeney’s more than happy to make sizeable charitable donations and accept awards from the Hibernian Club while leaving his lackeys from the neighborhood — the people he purports to care so much about — penniless.
The reactions to this are predictable. Gotti immediately brings in some muscle to take Sweeney out, and Jimmy, intuiting that the charitable donation came from the drug sale, weighs up his own options, clearly considering taking Sweeney out himself. This all comes together at the very end of “Favors and Funerals”, when it looks like Sweeney is going to get gunned down, but ends up being saved by Jimmy. They share a cosy conversation after, and it’s pretty clear that Sweeney knows that Jimmy knows what he did, so perhaps this is Jimmy’s opportunity to be brought into the inner circle?
He could do with some authority, since he doesn’t have much at home. Despite his consternation about Bridget working with Brendan, she nonetheless doubles down on helping him pull off his planned operation, even sans rocket launcher, since the target of that operation is a British operative who killed her parents. There’s clearly still a lot we don’t know about Bridget’s past, and I’m sure it’ll come to light in due course, but for now, the combustible dynamics are enough to ensure that things are going to blow up in everyone’s faces sooner rather than later.
