The Westies wraps up its first season with a finale that finally answers the question this whole show has been building toward: who actually runs the neighborhood when the dust settles? Episode 8 throws Mickey, Jimmy, Eamon Sweeney, and Bridget into one last collision course, and by the time the credits roll, the power structure of this Irish-American crime drama looks completely different.
Mickey Wants Blood, Jimmy Wants a Plan
The Westies Season 1 Episode 8 opens with Mickey learning that it was Sweeney who gave the order to have Sean killed. His gut reaction is exactly what you’d expect, grab the guns and go finish Sweeney’s whole crew right then and there. Jimmy, though, isn’t willing to throw everyone into a fight they can’t win. He talks Mickey down and makes the case for patience instead, arguing that the smarter move is to wait for the right opening and hit back when it actually counts. In his head, that opening runs through Castellano.
Across town, Sweeney himself is dealing with his own mess. Kicking Jimmy out of the gang is eating at him more than he’ll admit, and he vents to Eddie about how much Jimmy meant to him, practically a son, someone he taught everything he knows. Eddie doesn’t have much patience for the sentimentality. He reminds Sweeney that the decision was necessary, and if it were up to him, he’d already be cutting ties completely and gearing up for whatever comes next.
Bridget’s Confrontation With the Colonel Turns Violent
One of the episode’s most tense sequences belongs to Bridget, who’s summoned up to Colonel Markham’s private suite. She goes in with a knife tucked into her suspenders and murder clearly on her mind, but the moment she steps out of the bathroom, she’s staring down the barrel of a gun instead. Turns out the Colonel clocked her identity the second he saw the wig, he’s had people watching for Bridget (real name Sarah) for a while now, all thanks to some sloppy tradecraft from Father Michael O’Donnell that led straight back to her.
Then comes the gut-punch reveal: the Colonel casually admits that it was Brendan Cahill who originally sold out Bridget’s parents, trading their lives for his own freedom. For a second it looks like the Colonel is about to assault her, but the scene cuts away, and when it comes back, he’s dead, stabbed by Bridget in a moment of pure survival instinct. His agent finds him lying in a pool of blood shortly after, and just like that, Bridget becomes the target of a citywide manhunt.
Chaos Breaks Out at the Pub
While all that’s happening, Eddie and his men roll up to the pub expecting an ambush of their own making, except Jimmy’s crew is already waiting for them. The shootout that follows is chaotic and costly on both sides. Jimmy and Mickey manage to hold their ground, but not without taking a hit: Connor gets shot in the exchange.
When Bridget finally makes it home, fresh off killing the Colonel, she finds Connor bleeding out in the bathtub with a bullet still lodged inside him. She’s clearly shaken by what she just did, but there’s no time to process it. She confesses everything to Jimmy and then scrambles to bring in a doctor to save Connor. Meanwhile, Sweeney is grappling with losses of his own, longtime member Declan is among the dead, and it takes Eddie pushing him to keep his composure and let him handle what comes next.
Law Enforcement Smells Blood in the Water
Detectives Polk and Keenan show up at the pub in the aftermath and immediately clock that this was no ordinary bar fight. With Sweeney’s operation clearly cracking under pressure, Keenan sees the perfect chance to move in and exploit the chaos before it settles.
Once Connor is stabilized, Jimmy makes his next move: he calls Sweeney and proposes a one-on-one sit-down to hash things out, just the two of them at the body shop. It’s a setup, Jimmy knows full well that Sweeney is going to leak the location so Eddie can be sent in to kill him there. At the same time, Gotti stumbles onto the surveillance bug Polk planted, right out in the open on the ceiling, and Polk immediately turns on Keenan over the sloppy placement. Glenn, meanwhile, is on his way to meet with Jimmy, quietly locking in the double-cross against Sweeney.
Danny gets swept up in all of this too, picked up by Sweeney’s men without any idea what’s really going on. Sweeney wastes no time making him an official member of the crew, hands him a gun, and gives him one job: protect Sweeney by killing Glenn, who happens to be Danny’s own father.
Jimmy Cuts a Deal With Ruby Stein
Back at the body shop, Eddie walks straight into Jimmy and Mickey’s trap. They blindside him and tie him up, and this time Jimmy lets Mickey take his frustrations out on their prisoner. It’s the kind of scene the show’s leaned on more than once this season, but the stakes feel higher here given everything riding on the outcome.
Brendan shows up to check on Bridget, but she’s done playing nice. She confronts him directly about what the Colonel revealed and, now convinced he’s the real informant who’s been feeding information to the enemy, orders him to leave.
Jimmy, for his part, goes to settle his debt with Ruby Stein, but he’s got a bigger pitch in mind too. With Sweeney’s days clearly numbered, Jimmy wants to take over the Javitz Center deal, which means he needs Big Paul’s blessing. On top of that, he’s sitting on a serious cocaine supply that needs laundering, and he offers to split the proceeds with Ruby if he’ll help make it happen. Ruby carries the proposal to Big Paul, and the two start working out how a new arrangement with Jimmy might actually function.
The Trap Springs on Sweeney
Jimmy’s next stop is Glenn, who’s got three kilos of cocaine ready to hand off. Afterward, Jimmy heads back to the bar to unwind, only to find Danny lying in wait for his father. Danny’s been tailing Glenn all day, and the confrontation between them is tense, Glenn tries to explain himself, but Danny isn’t hearing it. He manages to swipe Glenn’s gun before bolting.
Back with Eddie, who’s now heavily sedated on pills courtesy of Mickey, Jimmy forces him to make one last phone call at gunpoint: tell Sweeney that Jimmy is dead and get him to the warehouse. The call cuts out abruptly, which puts Sweeney on edge immediately, but he heads out with his men regardless. What follows is a full-blown firefight, Jimmy holds Sweeney at gunpoint while Mickey picks off the rest of his men from the rafters above.
The Big Sit-Down
With the fighting over, Jimmy and Sweeney finally have the conversation that’s been building all season. Jimmy lays out exactly how he plans to take over from Sweeney and strike his own deal with Big Paul. There’s real history behind the tension here — Jimmy has never forgiven Sweeney for the earlier moment when Sweeney spilled blood just to keep the peace with the Italians, and that wound clearly hasn’t closed.
How Does The Westies Season 1 End?
Sweeney tells Jimmy he loves him like a son, and Jimmy admits he genuinely looked up to the guy. But instead of pulling the trigger, Jimmy walks away, not because he’s forgiven him, but because he’s got a different plan. As he drives off, he leaves those same three kilos he got from Glenn sitting in Sweeney’s car. It’s a setup that plays out exactly as intended: Sweeney and Eddie both get arrested for drug smuggling, while Jimmy steps into the role of the gang’s new boss. Gotti gets left out in the cold once Jimmy cuts him loose, and the season closes with Jimmy and Mickey raising a glass to doing things their own way from here on out.
The Episode Review
The Westies closes out its first season with a finale that earns the word “explosive,” and honestly, it delivers on almost everything the show’s been quietly setting up since episode one. The Jimmy-Sweeney rivalry finally reaches its breaking point here, and the way it resolves, not with a bullet, but with a far colder and more calculated betrayal, says a lot about who Jimmy’s become over the course of the season.
Sweeney survives, which genuinely surprised me given how far the show pushed him toward the edge this episode. That’s clearly down to J.K. Simmons carrying the character with as much weight as he has all season, the show simply isn’t ready to let him go yet, and I don’t think it wanted to either. Instead, framing him for drug smuggling feels like the more interesting choice narratively. It keeps him alive as a loose thread for a potential second season while still stripping him of everything he built.
What’s less settled is where things stand between Jimmy’s crew and the Italians. Big Paul’s willingness to actually follow through on this new arrangement with Jimmy is left completely up in the air, and given how reckless Jimmy’s been all season, somehow always landing on his feet despite the risks, I wouldn’t bet on smooth sailing in a potential season two. Ruby Stein is another wildcard worth watching. He could end up being one of Jimmy’s smartest allies if he actually delivers on the profit-sharing arrangement, or he could just as easily become the next problem Jimmy has to deal with if he doesn’t.
The one storyline that does get a real sense of closure is Bridget’s IRA arc. Killing the Colonel closes out a thread that’s defined her character all season, and the reveal about Brendan being the actual informant recontextualizes a lot of what came before. That said, the show doesn’t tell us whether Brendan’s going to come after her for it, which leaves just enough uncertainty to make a second season worth chasing.
Taken as a whole, this finale doesn’t wrap every subplot in a neat bow, and honestly, I don’t think it’s trying to. It leaves Big Paul’s true intentions, Ruby’s loyalty, and Brendan’s next move all hanging, which gives a renewed season plenty to work with. The Westies has been inconsistent in spots across its debut run, but this closing episode plays to its strengths, tense standoffs, morally messy characters, and a finale that actually earns its shootouts instead of using them as filler.
The Westies Season 1 Episode 7 | The Westies Season 1 Episode Guide
