‘House of Guinness’ Episode 7 Recap: Keeping It Eel

House of Guinness is a show on which Jack “King Joffrey” Gleeson makes his triumphant return to Ireland in a fur coat and bowler hat, riding triumphantly down the Liffey in a rowboat accompanied by a swan, while Kneecap plays. There, I’ve done my part. That sentence right there either sells you on this show, or it doesn’t. 

Our man in New York, Byron Hedges, is back in Dublin to help oversee Sir Arthur Guinness’s new and improved bid for Parliament. (This is taking place at the express invitation of the Conservative Party’s leader, Benjamin D’Israeli. Why let a single vote-fixing scandal disrupt a promising political career? After all, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agrees!) The thinking is that since Byron’s been so good at selling Guinness the beer, he’ll be just as good at selling Guinness the man. 

But as a condition of his new terms of employment, Byron insists on hearing all the dirt on the family straight from the horses’ mouths. He can’t defend their vulnerabilities if he doesn’t know what they are. But by this point, Arthur and Edward Guinness have spent the bulk of the episode cleaning up their messes and tying off loose ends. They knew this moment was coming, and they took precautions.

Arthur’s begin the moment he escapes from the police raid on the queer dance party he attended with his secret boyfriend, Patrick. Realizing Patrick tipped the cops off to the location, Arthur alternates between angrily shoving blood money in the man’s mouth and clinging to him desperately to keep him from being detected by the pursuing policemen. This is a masterful big of physical acting by Anthony Boyle, who realizes Arthur can’t turn his feelings for Patrick off like a light switch no matter how much he may want to.

Arthur knows right away who put Patrick up to it: his uncle Henry, the fundamentalist Protestant preacher. A visit from Mr. Rafferty, in which the Rev. Gravatt is nearly strangled to death with one of the Liffey eels to which he’s so fond of comparing Arthur, puts an end to this campaign of terror.

But Rafferty has his own transgression to answer for. On the day of Edward’s long-awaited marriage to Adelaide “Dodo” Guinness, his indomitable do-gooding cousin, the pregnancy of Arthur’s wife Olivia can no longer be denied, and Rafferty is of course the father. 

Meanwhile, the nuptials are only taking place at all because Edward broke things off with his Fenian lover, Ellen Cochrane. Though his decision not to keep her around as sidepiece seems nobly intended, Ellen has his number: He’s breaking up with her because falling in love with a Fenian is bad for business.

What I like about this development is that even though she’s not wrong, she’s selling Edward short somewhat. Yes, the brewery is important to him, but not to the exclusion of all else. He’s dumping a woman he loves — never do that! — but Arthur and Adelaide are just as important to him in their own ways. They’re people he loves, people he trusts, people who trust him. He’s not a cold fish, however much this decision makes him look like one.

No one can accuse his baby brother Benjamin of being a cold fish either. He shows up to Arthur and Adelaide’s wedding drunk, and estranged from his lady wife due to his resumed drinking in fact. But this gives the Lady Christine a chance to rekindle their relationship, which Benjamin appears to take as an invitation to start fucking her again in under two minutes. The beleaguered butler, Mr. Potter, instructs the staff to clean the wedding hall around the two as they fuck — standard operating procedure for “copulating couples” at the House of Guinness, he explains. (Honestly? That’s hot.)

The final piece of the puzzle in this penultimate episode is the Guinness family’s ever-expanding empire. Not only do they refurbish the family name and rekindle Arthur’s political career with their grand housing trust project, they also clear out their secondary antagonist, parasitic pimp Bonnie Champion, by blowing up the property on which his bar and brothel stands in order to make room for an even bigger export operation. 

It’s a weirdly bullish note for an “episode 7 of 8” to end on. There’s no cliffhanger, no jam anyone needs to get out of, no real adversity to speak of. From Arthur to Edward to Ann to Benjamin to Adelaide, virtually every Guinness gets what they want. (Except Uncle Henry, of course.) There are troubles brewing, of course — will the Fenians accept the new status quo? Can the Rafferty/Olivia/Arthur setup sustain an illegitimate child? — but what’s mainly brewing is the black stuff, and lots of it.

All I can conclude is that in the final episode, things will go horribly wrong. Pour me one last pint and let’s see.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.