Turn Your Head and Coffin

Season 21, Episode 16

First aired 27 October 2016

We open Chez Daly, where Noreen has just arrived for the first time this season, and she’s giving Katy far more detail than she ever wanted about the bus ride over. Katy keeps trying to tell her she’s pregnant, but Noreen keeps interrupting, and finally Katy blurts it out, and about two seconds later, Dee bursts in and announces that she was able to book the hotel for a Christmas wedding. Oh, Dee, “shock pregnancy” trumps “wedding venue” every time. Noreen is overcome by emotion and tries to hug and kiss Katy, but she’s too busy freaking out that Dee would dare schedule her wedding for Christmas, because Katy will be as big as a house. Well, your sister-whom-you-don’t-get-along-with’s pregnancy certainly seems like something you would want to completely base your wedding plans around. Of course, Noreen learned to ignore her daughters’ pointless and constant arguing decades ago, so she brightly proclaims that she’s got to go congratulate Jason, and Katy’s like, “Err, about that….”

Over at the pub, Bloody Peatsaí has assembled the cast and crew of the play to announce the great news that they will be performing the play at an arts festival in Westport! And I do not know what or where that is, but the group seems moderately excited. Peatsaí sorry-not-sorry apologizes that unfortunately Tadhg will not be able to join them for vague and specious insurance reasons, and stops himself only about half a step before announcing that therefore he and Frances can share a hotel room. Bloody Peatsaí tells the group they can continue rehearsing at his house just as Mo appears, so she lightly hassles him about this thing he calls “my house,” and then Tadhg calls her aside to ask when she’s going to be getting rid of “Peatsaí Ponytail.” Snerk. He continues that he’s known Bloody Peatsaí since they were young assholes in short pants, and that Mo better get rid of him ASAP, because keeping Peatsaí around always turns out badly in the end. Obviously he’s standing right there listening to all this, which I’m sure won’t come back to bite Tadhg in the butt repeatedly throughout this episode.

Katy has told her mother that she and Jason are on a wee break, and Noreen proclaims that he better get his act together and un-break because he has responsibilities now. John Joe arrives for pointless grandfather talk, and Noreen proclaims this is a miracle. Yes, an Im-Mack-ulate Conception.

Speaking of, Mack arrives in the café to thank Máire for the engagement cake (?) she made him and Dee. He has a new haircut, incidentally, which seems to come and go throughout this episode, but when it’s there, it looks good. Máire is apparently in full-time baking mode these days, so he asks her if she’d be interested in making the wedding cake. She’s reluctant until he says he can always get Berni to do it, at which point Máire suddenly becomes all about wedding cakes, because the threat of Berni can motivate people to do all kinds of superhuman feats.

At Gaudi, Mo confronts Bloody Peatsaí about the money he promised to give her last episode when she demanded half the utility payments, and to be fair, I seem to recall it being more that Mo declared that he was going to give her money and he looked blankly at her. Anyway, to no one’s surprise he says he doesn’t have any money, and when she threatens him with a lawyer, he asks if Tadhg happens to have anything to do with this and then storms off in a slow-motion huff.

Famous thespian Frances is holding court at the pub when Peatsaí arrives to argue with Tadhg. He calls Tadhg a pig, and Tadhg calls him an idiot, and they insult various members of each other’s families. Tadhg says Peatsaí’s late wife must have been a simpleton to have married him, and Peatsaí decides that this constitutes crossing a line, so he spookily promises that Tadhg will pay and then vanishes in a cloud of brimstone and Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion.

At Gaudi, Katy is enumerating to Dee and Mack all the times and places they could get married other than New Year’s Eve in Ros na Rún, such as next summer inside an active volcano, or never in the fiery pits of hell. They ignore her, and Mack tells Dee that Máire volunteered to make the wedding cake. We are all completely shocked that Dee thinks this is a wonderful idea rather than snotting that she will be satisfied with nothing short of a solid gold wedding cake made by Gordon Ramsay himself and decorated with the Hope Diamond and the actual queen’s teeth. Katy, who you will recall was 100% against this wedding eight seconds ago, is now insulted that they didn’t ask her to make the cake, and there is back-and-forthing, and when Mack points out that Máire will make the cake for free, Katy proclaims in typical Katy fashion that Máire is a big doo-doo head whose breath smells like dog wee et cetera and then stomps off.

Frances is haranguing Tadhg over his fight with Peatsaí, and Tadhg tells her that Peatsaí should consider himself lucky he didn’t get worse considering that whole “locking Tadhg in the community center with fake coffins” thing. He’s all out of breath and panicky while recounting this story, and tells Frances that he’s selling the undertaker’s business to John Joe because coffins are just way too creepy, and she seems decidedly displeased with this news.

Over coffee at Gaudi, Mack tells David that money is very tight right now what with Dee’s extravagant spending and the ring and his new haircut and all. It seems he’s even had to apply for a loan, presumably using David’s ring as collateral. David excuses himself as Katy arrives, and Mack confronts her about her efforts to sabotage the wedding, and asks if she’s jealous that he’s marrying Dee. Of course, when someone is jealous, which Katy obviously is, the last thing you want to do is tell them they’re jealous, so she is furious and vows to destroy the earth and so on. He leaves, and David reappears to pay the bill, and when Katy makes a snotty scene about how generous he’s being with his five euros, he tells her that he’s happy to help out his impoverished friend Mack who has had to apply for a loan to pay for this wedding Katy doesn’t want to happen. Well, I’m sure she’s not going to take this news and run with it.

Jason and Peatsaí are playing with the soundboard over at the community center when Frances arrives and shoos Peatsaí away so she can tell Jason about Tadhg’s plans to sell the undertaker’s. She rants that none of this would’ve happened if that scoundrel Eoin hadn’t locked Tadhg in a coffin and set the building on fire, which comes as news to Jason, who asks if she’s sure Eoin did it on purpose. No, he accidentally nailed his father in a coffin and then set the building on fire, stupid. She tries to tell Jason that Tadhg didn’t tell him because he didn’t want to ruin his relationship with Eimear, but of course he sees through this and recognizes that Tadhg didn’t tell because he’s embarrassed. I love how much drama Eoin is causing without even being on this show anymore. She asks Jason to buy the business to keep it in the family, but he says he can’t because he’s already got too much on his plate at the moment, such as the huge fight he will have with Mack sometime in the next 1-8 months. She frets that she doesn’t know what she’s going to do, and then we see that Peatsaí has, of course, been standing in the doorway listening to this whole conversation, and is positively oozing with glee. At least I’m going to hope that’s glee.

After the break, there’s a quick scene in which Noreen tells John Joe how happy she is and predicts that there will be a second wedding soon when Jason and Katy make up, but he is skeptical.

We then cut to the community center, where Peatsaí has called an emergency meeting of the cast and crew to tell them the breaking news that Eoin nailed Tadhg in a coffin and set the building on fire over a year ago and now Tadhg is terrified of coffins. Frances stupidly waits for him to finish the story and then springs up and says it’s all a lie, but by now the genie is out of the bottle, and I hope somebody uses one of the three wishes to give Peatsaí a new wardrobe.

Dee confronts Mack in the street and tells her that Katy has told her everything. He’s confused, and almost spills the beans about the pair of them sleeping together himself, but before he can pull the pin out of that particular grenade, he realizes Dee is talking about the loan, and she’s cross because he didn’t tell her about it. Also, maybe it’s the lighting or something, but it totally looks like his hair has become uncut since the last time we saw him.

Meanwhile, Berni has of course raced directly to the pub to express her concern to Tadhg about his newfound necrophobia, and make a big production out of how caring and sharing she is, and to make it all about herself, because she can’t imagine what it would be like to have your own son try to kill you. Tadhg hilariously shoots back that he’d imagine it’s probably a lot like when Cathal tried to kill her, which is making this all about Berni a little too much for her liking, so she storms off in a huff. Frances and Jason arrive and she tells Tadhg that Peatsaí has found out about this and so the word is out, so Tadhg rants that Eoin must’ve told him. He and Jason start ranting about the various ways in which they would totally kill Eoin if he weren’t in Dubai, and Frances clarifies that Peatsaí actually overheard her telling Jason about it. Tadhg tells Jason to mind his own business and tells Frances to keep her mouth shut and then stomps off. Every scene this episode seems to end with somebody storming off.

Just to switch things up a bit, the next scene begins with Mo storming in to the café to confront Peatsaí about all the trouble he’s stirring up, and to demand that he, his antics, and his ponytail be out of her house by the end of the day. He protests that he’s got nowhere to go, tells her he hasn’t been completely honest with her (SHOCK!), and asks her to please sit down and prepare herself for a giant load of blarney.

Mack arrives Chez Daly, where Noreen tells him she thinks he’s done the right thing with the loan and that Dee, who has huffed off to Galway for the night, will get over it. She goes to make a cup of tea, which leaves Mack and Katy alone to argue some more, because we haven’t had enough of that lately. He tells her to mind her own business, and she semi-threatens to tell Dee about how they slept together, and he turns it back on her by informing her that maybe he’ll tell Dee, because she might not marry him, but it would completely destroy her relationship with Katy forever, and is that what Katy wants? Of course, she will have to give that some thought.

Back at the café, Bloody Peatsaí is spinning a tale of woe and deportation to Mo. He tells her that after his wife died he ended up in Saratoga, the famous horseracing and alcoholism capital of New York, where he developed a drinking problem and a fatal case of Hawaii-itis. One night he got drunk and started a fight with some cops or something and got deported back to Ireland the next day, and it was terrible, because the inflight movie was Zoolander 2. Mo is sympathetic, so he delivers the crowning blow by telling her that—sob!—now he can’t even go back and—choke!—visit his wife’s grave. We aren’t sure how much of this is true and how much of it is a mix of Angela’s Ashes and the Pogues’ back catalog, but Mo buys it, and says they’ll go out and find him a job tomorrow. Of course, just last episode she was moaning that she can’t find a job, but it’ll be a breeze to go out and find Peatsaí one, apparently. Ponytail model? He assures her he doesn’t need a job, because while he may not have a penny in his pocket right now, he’s got a huge stash of money, and just needs her help to get his hands on it. She is dubious, and tells him she doesn’t want to get caught up in his schemes anymore, and he promises her this is legit. I can’t wait for him to tell her about how he’s a Nigerian prince who needs €50,000 wired into his offshore holding account in the Cayman Islands so he can get his money out of a burning bank in Kabul. He leaves, and she dramatically takes her lawyer’s card out of her pocket and rips it in half. This would be more compelling if we thought it would actually take her longer than half a millisecond to track down the Mordecai Keane who is her attorney among all the thousands of other Mordecai Keanes in Ros na Rún who are also attorneys should she change her mind about all this.

Tadhg is standing outside thinking about how glad he is that he’s not trapped in a burning coffin right now when he sees Peatsaí walking down the street. He follows him into the community center, where he confronts him over this episode’s wide array of nonsense. He says Peatsaí needs to learn some manners, and he’s just the man to teach him. He challenges Peatsaí to a fight, which in Tadhg’s world takes the form of a 1920s boxing match. Peatsaí accepts, and immediately decks him with a right hook to the face, sending Tadhg crashing to the floor, where he lands in a very uncomfortable-looking position with bulging, possibly-dead eyes and a tremendous amount of blood pouring out of his nose. Well, I have to admit I didn’t see that coming.

Next time: Peatsaí, who does not appear to be in jail for murdering Tadhg, is tempting Bobbi-Lee with the lead role in the play, which of course she wants, but she also doesn’t want to jeopardize her job in the pub, where she gets paid to stand around and commit and/or be a victim of various crimes. He reminds her that she’d be doing it for her legions of fans, and that piques her interest, because “fans” is the one F-word that still has an effect on her.