Grand Central Stations

Season 21, Episode 41

First aired 24 January 2017

We open at the hospital, where Katy is hooked up to so many machines her transformation into cyborg is nearly complete, and Jason is watching, and probably wondering who Mack is sleeping with right now. We cut quickly to the bachelor pad, where Gráinne is soaking her injured foot/ankle/aura and applying eye of newt and wing of fish to it. They try to pour poitín on it, but it seems this bottle has gone off, so David tells her he’ll head up to the still for more, and she brightly notes that the seaweed has practically healed it anyway.

Sadly, before we get an explanation of whether Gráinne is using the seaweed internally or externally, we return to the hospital, where the doctor is stuffing Katy’s interior full of Gráinne-brand kelp. It really helps draw the unconsciousness out! No, no, it’s only John Joe arriving to tell Jason he’ll sit with Katy if he wants to go see the baby. Jason doesn’t, and is evasive, and John Joe tells him, more gently than you’d imagine, that whatever happened between Katy and Jason and Mack and David Beckham, it’s not the baby’s fault, and he begs Jason to go see him, to hold him, and give him a reason to live. You know things are dire when John Joe is being reasonable and not drunkenly threatening to punch everyone and then pass out in a preschool’s sandbox.

At the pub, Áine seems to have decided Dee is her new BFF, and is giving her advice on being an aunt and boys and petty larceny and so on. Bizarrely, not only is Dee not rolling her eyes and shouting for whoever this kid’s parents are to come get her, she seems mildly interested in what Áine has to say. The Dalys have apparently all been possessed by aliens today, and it seems to be an improvement. Anyway, Áine complains that she wants to go see the baby but Tadhg won’t let her, so Dee explains that the baby is very very small, and that we should all pray for him. Áine seems unfamiliar with the concept of prayer, because the only TV she watches is Celebrity Autopsy and the only thing she reads is the racing forms, but she seems intrigued, especially when Dee brings God into it. Mo arrives, and the newly ordained Áine explains to her burgeoning flock that they should all be praying for the baby, NOW. Mo tells her there will be an all-you-can-kneel prayer buffet at the mass at Máire’s tonight, which Áine had not heard about, so she starts whining to Tadhg that she wants to go, and she is not swayed by his arguments that they can pray anywhere, such as at home, or nowhere.

Máire has almost finished transforming the B&B into a tiny cathedral awarded half a star by the AA, and she takes a break to complain to Laoise about what a terrible person Adam is, as one does. Peatsaí arrives with his contribution to the stations, a box of truly horrendous American beer, which shows that at a fundamental level, he hates all these people. She throws Peatsaí and his sinful, disgusting swill out, and then picks up her anti-Adam rant where she left off, asking Laoise to keep an eye on him, because he is a known pusher, being the one who transformed Niamh into a balloon-swallowing drug mule. Laoise is scandalized by this news and promises she’ll watch him, especially after Máire carries on for a while about how, ahem, innocent Fia is. Err, steady on there, Máire.

Back at the pub, Bobbi-Lee is on the phone with someone at the local radio station, arguing that they aren’t playing her new song enough, and eventually they basically hang up on her. Before she can ring the BBC to beg them to revive Top of the Pops and put her on it, Tadhg kindly tells her to shut up and work, and then they have a skirmish over which is more famous and beloved, Bobbi-Lee or salmonella. Meanwhile, Mack arrives and starts complaining to Mo about all the wedding bills that are coming due. It seems businesses in Ros na Rún are extremely unreasonable and want to be paid for the services they contracted with him for and then provided. Hateful! Mo then takes Tadhg aside and tells him he should apologize to Máire for embarrassing her by confronting thieving brat Fia in front of the priest, and goes so far as to point out that some might call that a mortal sin. She says this as if it will have any effect whatsoever on Tadhg, whose middle name is Sin, and who is not mortal anyway.

Back at the B&B, Máire has got Fia and Adam hard at work polishing the silver and brass, which is of course exactly the job you would give a thieving hooligan you have been carrying on for weeks about not trusting. Gráinne limps in to help, which leads to a debate about Western medicine versus homeopathy, and Fia sadly notes that at this point she’d try anything to cure Liam Óg’s reflux, because the drugs the doctors have been giving him aren’t helping at all, and are also causing him to grow a tail. Gráinne offers to give her some homeopathic herbs and spices, which will not only cure Liam Óg’s reflux but also make him tender and delicious, but Máire puts a stop to this line of conversation, announcing that no grandchild of hers is going to be made into a guinea pig by a bunch of hippies and beatniks, and she is unanimous in that.

Berni welcomes Mack to the café and then of course says a bunch of inappropriate things about how the baby will call him “Uncle Mack” and isn’t it nice to have such a nice nephew who isn’t your son, probably, and so on. The subject turns to the café, and the conversation they had the other day about the business model that gave us all a chance to go get a snack, and Mack tells her she deserves better, and that he wants to sell his share of the business. Berni is shocked, because most of the time she, like us, forgets he is involved in the café in any way!

At the bachelor pad, Gráinne is carefully putting what appears to be crack rocks into a plastic bag, and even though we know it’s some homeopathic thing, she does look very suspicious as she does it. We then cut back to the hospital, where Katy awakens from her coma and is confused to find herself alone, having been abandoned by both Jason and whoever applied a full face of makeup to her while she was unconscious.

Gráinne has delivered her herbal whatnot to Fia and Adam at the B&B, and it’s confusing because it appears she and Adam exchange little plastic bags of something, and I have no idea what he would be giving her in a tiny baggie in this situation. Anyway, there is hushed talk of how they’ve got to keep this a secret from Máire because she disapproves, and just then DI Laoise, who’s been eavesdropping at the door, bursts in like Wonder Woman without the wonder. Máire wanders in immediately thereafter looking for her emergency supply of holy water, so Gráinne leaves, but of course Laoise is standing there smirking as if she’s Eliot Bloody Ness. She chases Gráinne out into the street and confronts her about giving “drugs” to “kids,” and how she should be ashamed of herself, pushing that stuff on innocent thieving criminals like Adam and Fia. Then, in the kind of silly mix-up plot this show usually avoids, Gráinne refuses to clear everything up in one sentence by saying “Oh, there’s been a misunderstanding: it’s homeopathic,” and instead gets huffy and snots to Laoise that everybody is doing it these days, and maybe she ought to try it to see if it helps with her being a total bitch. Gráinne storms off, and Laoise immediately whips out her phone and calls the Gardaí. Oh, dear.

Jason has finally ventured down to the NICU and is holding the baby, which is played by an actual baby in this scene, and not by a doll or a satsuma with a face drawn on, so fair play, show. He grimaces in a confusing, ambiguous way, so either his icy heart is starting to melt, or he’s just realized he’s 5 seconds away from an unexpected poo.

After the break, Tadhg and Áine arrive at St Máire’s Church of the Holy The Shower Doesn’t Work So You’ll Have To Take A Bath, and he asks Máire what time the pope is arriving. Snerk. Yet another theological discussion breaks out, and eventually even Máire tires of it and switches to insulting Tadhg repeatedly, so he decides to cause a little mischief by sneakily taking the centerpiece of Máire’s mass, the, err, holy chalice she got from a gift shop in Knock, and hiding it behind the curtains.

Gráinne is home alone guzzling poitín and soaking her ankle when a cop arrives to investigate her suspicious activity. She’s half-drunk and surly, and shouts that she’s never been suspicious a day in her life, and then proceeds to act extremely suspicious, especially when she shouts at him not to touch the dozens of pills strewn across the kitchen table and then grabs him and drags him away from her magic herbs while screaming. Of course, this earns her a surprise trip down to the station, where we will hopefully find out whether the drug-dealing cell and the drunk tank are two different things, or combined.

Back at Our Lady Of Sorry We’re Out Of Bread, it seems we have moved to the party phase of the stations, as Peatsaí is standing very close to Sally and telling her about the sexiest mass he ever went to, and then corrects himself because every mass he goes to is sexy due to his mere presence. She is giggly and titillated, but then mercifully the camera pans to Laoise catching Fia dropping tablets into Liam Óg’s bottle. Fia explains that it’s homeopathic nut vomit or similar she got from Gráinne, which gives Laoise instant diarrhea face.

Jason is wandering down the hospital’s Corridor of Doom looking completely shell-shocked, and then we return to the B&B, where Tadhg has been sent upstairs to bring some chairs down. He hears Máire bringing Father Éamonn into the room to set up the confessional, which of course seems like great fun to him, so he hides in the bathroom to eavesdrop. Our first customer is Áine, who’s here to ask forgiveness for her father, who she explains is a nasty piece of work, and she worries God will ignore her prayers for the baby because her father is a bad person. Father Éamonn explains that that’s not how it works, and that they can say some prayers for the baby, and also a prayer that Tadhg will become a nice person. I think a prayer for world peace would be more reasonable, but OK. Áine thinks this is a good idea, and we cut to Tadhg looking stricken in the bathroom, because this wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought it would be.

Pádraig has gone to fetch Gráinne at the station after the unfortunate misunderstanding and they now arrive in the pub. He’s surprised that she didn’t call David instead of him, but she makes up an evasive and suspicious excuse about his phone being switched off and also a bird ate it. Anyway, she’s furious, both at the rude garda and at noxious Laoise. You can tell she’s seriously pissed because she actually makes a fist and waves it around while talking about what she’s going to do to Laoise. Pádraig then does the thing he always does, where he pretends to try to calm the person down because he just can’t stand drama, but you can tell from his face that of course he thrives on drama and is eating this up, because the gay drama gene is powerful and will not be denied. Just then Laoise bursts in apologizing, and Pádraig is all, “Ooh, shit about to go down!”, and even stirs the pot a bit—“So, it was her!”—but sadly for him, instead of grabbing a fistful of Laoise’s hair and pulling her to the ground shrieking, Gráinne sees this as a financial opportunity, and tells Laoise she can make it up to her by giving her a job in the polytunnel. She’s going to be disappointed when she finds out they grow very little seaweed in there.

Tadhg is still hiding in the confessional loo when our next customer arrives, and it’s Sally, which he’s very happy about because she promises to be more lurid and less existentially depressing than Áine was. It seems Sally has been a widow for a long time, and she’s made a new, erm, “friend,” and they’ve become very close, and, well, this is difficult to talk about, but she TOTALLY WANTS TO SEX HIM UP. Surprisingly, Father Éamonn is like, “Gurrrrl, getcha some!”, and tells her that no one will judge them and they won’t be hurting anyone, so, dot dot dot. Tadhg loves this, of course, and Sally is also very pleased, because she was planning on getting freaky with Peatsaí as soon as possible either way, and now if Máire tut-tuts about it, she can announce that she’s got the Church’s permission.

At Gaudi, Dee tells John Joe that she’s glad the baby is OK-ish and Katy might survive or whatever, but she can’t play happy families or forgive Mack and Katy for what they’ve done. He tells her she’s got to find a way to live with it for her own sake, because anger is a poison that will destroy her from the inside. Dee doesn’t respond, because it’s very rare for John Joe to calmly give rational and helpful advice, and she’s clearly just as confused by it as we are.

Tadhg finally leaves the confessional en suite just in time for Peatsaí and Sally to arrive, and he gives them an oo-er look before going downstairs. Sally closes the door, makes a bit of casual conversation about tea so as not to seem like a complete hussy, and then literally throws herself at Peatsaí and begins sucking his face off. Just imagine what would be going on if Bobbi-Lee had unbuttoned Peatsaí’s shirt down to his navel to show off his bosom!

Downstairs, Máire and Laoise are in a panic looking for the holy chalice. Well, Máire is in a panic, and Laoise is vaguely interested in the sense that if Máire goes mental over this, it will make life tiresome for the next few days. In the audience, such as it is, Berni tells Mack that she’s got some money set aside, and she can give him €25,000 for his share of the café. Bloody hell! It’s a good thing Bobbi-Lee didn’t know Berni had this kind of cash lying around or else TG4 would’ve had to find money in the budget for another murder scene. Anyway, Mack is very happy with this, because he and whomever he is married to by the time the check clears will really be able to use that kind of dosh.

Mass begins, and Máire has to tell Father Éamonn that they can’t find the chalice. Amazingly, Adam and Fia have not been blamed for this at all, at least not on camera, which is a little disappointing if I’m honest. Anyway, Tadhg chooses this moment to produce the chalice from behind the curtains, and surprisingly does not blame someone else, such as our friend Topknot. Everyone gasps, Máire calls him the Antichrist, Berni calls upon God to smite him and so on, and a furious Áine tells him that now no one will say a prayer for the baby, and that he’ll never be kind. She runs off, and he chases after her, and this really would’ve been a perfect time for Bobbi-Lee to stand up and sing a few songs from her new CD to the captive audience.

Jason returns to Katy’s hospital room, where she is beside herself with worry about the baby. You know, her usual selfish behavior, all, “I’m worried about my baby.” Jason is beaming from ear to ear, and happily tells her the baby is doing unbelievably well. They put the baby on his chest so he could hear Jason’s heartbeat and voice, which was clearly a major bonding moment for Jason, who happily tells her that the two of them are the only people in the world this baby knows, and that he’s their brave, beautiful son. Awww.

NEXT TIME: It seems the show has given up on showing us previews of the next episode! I expect it’s because it’s being broadcast live now, so they can’t show us a preview of things that haven’t happened yet.