The Westies Season 1 Episode 2 picks up right where the chaos left off, and this time Jimmy’s answer to their Vinnie problem is depressingly simple: make him disappear and hope nobody asks too many questions.
Jimmy’s Cover-Up Plan Kicks Into Gear
With tempers flaring and the crew on the verge of turning on each other, Eamon backs Jimmy’s plan and everyone agrees to play dumb about where Vinnie’s gone. Breen, one of Eamon’s most trusted guys, walks Jimmy and Mickey through the grim business of dealing with a body, bullet removal, dismemberment, all of it, operating by a mantra that’s as blunt as it is chilling: trash what you can, cook what you can’t.
The violence hits Mickey hard, and it’s here we learn something that reframes his character entirely: he’s a Vietnam vet, and cutting up a body is dredging up memories he clearly hasn’t dealt with. But in the middle of all this grisly work, Jimmy has a lightbulb moment. Using Vinnie’s severed hand, he pitches an idea to stage a jewelry store robbery and scatter Vinnie’s fingerprints all over the crime scene.
The plan gets more layers from there. Once the break-in is staged, Eamon can loop Keenan into the investigation, making it look like Vinnie’s gone on the run. Jimmy’s logic is that this takes the heat off their own crew while keeping the Italians distracted long enough for them to finish covering their tracks. The last step is for Jimmy to burn the hand once the fingerprints have been planted somewhere out of state. Eamon reluctantly signs off, but not without a warning: if this blows up in their faces, he’s handing Mickey and Jimmy straight to the Gambinos and letting the Italians deal with them however they see fit.
Keenan’s First Day Gets Complicated Fast
Across town, Keenan starts his new job under Polk, who wastes no time putting him to work digging into Eamon’s dealings at the Javits Center, financials, bid rigging, the works. Keenan doesn’t seem thrilled about the assignment, but his track record speaks for itself, and Polk clearly did her homework before bringing him on. She knows about his two tours in Vietnam, his background as a Force Recon Marine, and even his medal of valor with the NYPD. Somewhere along the way, though, he lost whatever kept him on the straight and narrow, and now he’s tangled up in the same corruption he was once trained to fight.
Keenan’s next stop is a local bar, where he leans on bartender Ray for information in a way that’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer, no surprise given his own history with drinking. It doesn’t take long before word gets back to Eamon, and Keenan is summoned to hear how Jimmy’s heist actually played out. The fake robbery went off without a hitch: Jimmy and Mickey hit the jewelry store, left Vinnie’s prints everywhere, and got out clean. The next move is getting those prints up to Boston to sell the story that Vinnie’s fleeing toward Canada, and Eamon’s got a contact there, Liam O’Shaughnessy, who runs Corktown Pub and might be able to help pull it off. Even so, Eamon isn’t fully convinced the plan is going to hold.
The Italians Start Closing In
On the other side of this mess, Vinnie’s wife Lina isn’t buying the silence around her husband’s disappearance. She confronts the mob directly, certain in her gut that Vinnie is dead, and the only lead she has is that he was last seen with an Irish woman named Erin. John Gotti takes the concern seriously enough to start looking into it himself, and that’s a genuine problem, because Erin actually witnessed Mickey walk Vinnie off at gunpoint. There’s history there too: Mickey clearly has feelings for Erin, which explains his emotional reaction back in episode one. He gives her an expensive piece of jewelry and offers to listen if she ever needs to talk, a small gesture that’s going to come back to haunt everyone involved.
Meanwhile, Bridget’s storyline takes its own turn when Brandon shows up again, still trying to pull her back into working for the IRA behind the scenes. That night, she finally comes clean to Jimmy about the shipment and admits she did it for the cause. Jimmy isn’t happy about any of it, especially knowing Brandon’s reputation for taking advantage of any opening he’s given, but he agrees to keep her secret between them for now.
The Boston Run Goes Sideways
When Keenan eventually shows up at Eamon’s, he’s openly skeptical the whole scheme is going to work and starts asking pointed questions about the jewelry heist. His instincts turn out to be right, because it doesn’t take long for John Gotti to hear about it, and alarm bells start ringing immediately. Vinnie hasn’t pulled a jewelry robbery since he was twenty, so the whole thing reeks of a setup, and Gotti isn’t fooled for a second. If anything, it only cranks up the tension.
Jimmy Roarke’s crew doesn’t exactly help their own cause either. On the drive up to Boston, they’re cracking beers, taking unnecessary breaks, and straight-up joking around with a severed hand like it’s just another day at the office. Somehow they still make it to Corktown Pub, trash the place with Liam’s blessing, and leave prints all over everything.
The drive back is where it all falls apart. Police pull them over, which is a serious problem given how much they’ve been drinking, and things go from bad to catastrophic when the officer discovers the severed hand packed on ice. Pat kills the cop on the spot and stages the entire scene, planting Vinnie’s fingerprints on the gun and leaving his license behind to make it look like Vinnie was the shooter.
Back at Eamon’s office, John Gotti shows up asking direct questions about Vinnie, and Eamon plays dumb right up until the crew rolls back in and he learns about the dead cop. Furious, he orders everyone to burn the hand to nothing and torch the car they used, desperate to erase any trace of what happened. Still, Eamon knows this kind of thing doesn’t just disappear, and he makes sure Jimmy understands the truth is going to surface eventually no matter how careful they are.
A Kidnapping Changes Everything
John Gotti tracks down Erin and presses her about Vinnie, and the moment he spots that expensive bracelet on her wrist, she’s forced to admit at gunpoint who gave it to her. It’s the break in the case the Italians needed, and the fallout is immediate: right after the hand is burned, Mickey is snatched off the street by Gotti’s men.
To close things out, Bridget discovers that Brandon’s stockpile of explosives and rocket launchers is aimed a lot closer to home than she realized. The IRA isn’t just operating in the background anymore, they’ve got New York directly in their sights.
The Episode Review
There’s an old saying about the best laid plans, and episode 2 of The Westies is basically a case study in watching one fall apart in real time. Jimmy and Mickey have proven, pretty conclusively, that they are nowhere near as clever as they think they are.
I’ll give them this much: as a scheme for a couple of low-level guys trying to cover their tracks, the jewelry store frame job isn’t the worst idea on paper. But Vinnie wasn’t some nobody, he was a respected underboss among the Italians, and staging a robbery in his name feels amateurish the second you think about it for more than five minutes. It’s no shock that Gotti sees through it almost instantly. Mickey, in particular, feels like the loose thread that’s slowly unraveling everything the crew has built, and watching this plan collapse has the queasy, inevitable feel of a car crash happening in slow motion.
What I found genuinely compelling this episode was Keenan’s arc. Playing both sides as a reluctant double agent gives him a different kind of tension than the rest of the cast, and I get the sense his role is going to expand significantly as this season moves forward. This isn’t shaping up to be a clean, straightforward investigation, and you can already feel the first cracks of rebellion starting to show underneath his cooperation with Polk.
Taken as a whole, this was a strong follow-up episode. There’s real momentum building here, plenty of tension to chew on, and that ending, Mickey’s kidnapping paired with the reveal about the IRA’s target, leaves things wide open heading into next week. If episode 1 was setup, episode 2 is where the dominoes really start to fall.
The Westies Season 1 Episode 1 | The Westies Season 1 Episode 3
