‘House of Guinness’ Episode 5 Recap: The King of Infinite Space

By the time we catch up with Byron Hedges in House Of Guinness Episode 5, the Guinness company’s man in New York, our boy’s doing well for himself. The brewery’s expansion into Irish enclaves in America is going like gangbusters. He’s got free business cards and free beer to hand out to just about any swinging dick he meets. He’s wearing a massive fur coat, dripped out as if to the manner born. 

He even sweet-talks the Irish-American Civil War veteran  who’s in charge of the Fenian Brotherhood’s militant campaigns in the States, Eamon Dodd. Played by actor Sam C. Wilson, whose mellifluous basso profundo voice sounds like it belongs to a Boardwalk Empire character (which is the highest compliment I can pay an actor’s voice), Dodd’s a hard sell when it comes to Byron’s gift of gab, but not to his negotiation tactics. Byron earns the support of the Fenians and access to American pubs by promising them a fifteen percent cut of all the proceeds — money that will immediately be used to purchase weapons to use against British interests and soldiers in North America and Ireland alike. 

Here we see a rare error on the part of Edward Guinness, the responsible and honestly pretty decent brother who gave Byron this mission. The idea behind any negotiation is that everyone comes out feeling like a winner, regardless of what they gave up. However, your negotiator’s goal is to make you happy, not the other guys — that’s just a pleasant side effect. Not for Byron! Byron’s a Fenian first — the Brits hanged his dad for christ’s sake — and a bastard cousin and sales representative of the Guinness family second. He’d just like to see both sides thrive equally, and for a negotiator, that’s kind of an issue.

The family’s Fenian ties keep deepening, from the now-famous harp logo on down. At the start of the episode, Arthur is kinda sorta acquitted of bribery and vote-rigging — recall that this took place in a society where bribery and vote-rigging were considered illegal; fortunately we’ve made America great again and don’t need to worry about those pesky laws anymore — but only kinda sorta. While he’s absolved of any personal wrongdoing, he loses his seat in Parliament. What’s more, his outraged Protestant minister uncle, Henry, angrily tells Arthur’s sister Anne that the acquittal was pulled off through contacts with Fenian sympathizers.

But the real Fenian sympathizer is calling from inside the house. Scrambling to fix the mess Byron’s made, Edward runs to Ellen Cochrane, the first Fenian he can think of. But what she really is is the first person he thinks of, more often than he’s comfortable admitting. She tells him she feels the same. Yadda yadda yadda, they don’t make any progress on the Byron situation since reneging on that deal would get the poor bastard killed, but they do have tastefully edited sex, cross-cut with a similarly passionate but visually demure liaison between down-on-his-luck Arthur and an old fling named Patrick (Cúán Hosty-Blaney), whom he hooked up with a job and then promptly forgot about until the night of his embarrassment in court. All’s well that ends well, I guess?

If, that is, you trust Patrick, who doesn’t get so much as a last name yet provides Arthur with exactly what he needs when he’s at his most vulnerable. Hmmm. Less trustworthy still: Mr. Potter, the butler, whose obvious disapproval, distaste, and disgust for Sir Arthur, his wife Lady Olivia, and their libertine lifestyles leaves him stammering and glowering all episode long. The Fenians perpetually make reference to spies within the household, though in the past maids have been blamed; I’m guessing, however, that Potter’s the mole in the House of Guinness.

That House is becoming more of a home by the end of this tumultuous episode. Arthur decides, with the same evident sincerity he brings to his unconventional but clearly valued relationship with his wife Olivia, to turn over a new leaf. Humbled by his brother’s incredible work running the brewery, Arthur vows to become more involved himself — giving himself renewed purpose, easing his brother’s burden, trying to build a legacy, and in the process, freeing up his platonically beloved wife to pursue her relationship with Mr. Rafferty…as discreetly as possible, he continuously stresses.

Brother Benjamin’s back on the scene, too, with his wife Lady Henrietta in tow. This leaves his one-time inamorata Lady Christine in the lurch, but Aunt Agnes intervenes before she can kill herself — or Aunt Agnes, for that matter. Agnes’s hope is that she can convince Christine to be more like her cousin Adelaie, who keeps rebuffing Edward’s advances in favor of spending time on low-income housing projects funded by the Guinness fortune. Who needs men when you can actually build something on your own?

There’s even a brand new Guinness — well, a brand new Plunket — to add to the House. Anne gives birth to a new baby, her actual husband’s this time, in typical television screaming-and-snarling fashion. (In a grimly funny detail, her husband, the Rev. Plunket, asks permission to attend the big ribbon-cutting ceremony at the brewery where Arthur makes his pledges instead.) Thus a potential heir to the black brew empire is born.

There is, of course, that one pesky wrinkle involving Byron and his heads I win, tails I win dealmaking in Manhattan. Arthur, we’ve seen, truly believes in the Unionist cause, which he sees as important to his father’s legacy as the beer. He’s also barely escaped reputation-ruining scandal by the skin of his teeth, buoyed only by the family name, Edward’s industriousness, Byron’s expansion plan, and Anne and Adelaide’s charitable schemes. 

None of this, suffice it to say, is going to matter much if it’s discovered your family business is the number-one supplier of money and weapons to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. I, for one, look forward to the famously even-tempered Arthur’s reaction to this revelation.

I look forward to a lot about this show. Some of its most satisfying moments, like Ellen’s hookup with Edward, feel so inevitable you can see them coming several episodes away. Others, like the very real question of whether or not Lady Christine was going to kill herself or Aunt Agnes, you don’t know how they’ll go until they’ve gone. (Having the gun go off accidentally was a really deft touch.)

And you just never know when someone’s going to drop everything and start profanely paraphrasing Shakespeare. “I could be bounded in a nutshell,” Arthur tells his father Sir Benjamin’s portrait, “and still count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I had these bad fucking dreams, Father.” Friends, have you ever felt yourself on the cusp of happiness, only to have yourself held back by forces completely beyond your control? If so, Arthur Guinness is singing your song.

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.