‘House of Guinness’ Episode 8 Recap: Ready, Aim, Fire

What kind of man is Sir Arthur Guinness? That’s the question being put before the people of Dublin in this eighth and final installment of House of Guinness’ first season. (After that cliffhanger, it had better be only the first season.) Is he the great conciliator between Republican and Unionist, determined to save lives through his family’s charitable work regardless of denomination, or is he a Conservative wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is he the scandal-plagued politician who barely escaped jail after attempt to fix his last run for office, and around whom rumors no doubt swirl regarding his nocturnal activities? Is he the secret funder of Fenians at home and abroad? Is he a peddler of damnation in a bottle? Does he just make a really good beer?

But thanks to the work of actor Anthony Boyle, who is mesmerizing in the role, “What kind of man is Sir Arthur Guinness?” is one of the most interesting questions on television this year. 

Much of what Boyle is doing is physical: sad eyes, breathy voice, dangling cigarette, ostentatious mustache, a face the camera (and the lighting department) absolutely adores. He physically sinks into anger or despair, then leaps back into action with a chirpiness in his voice that his wife Olivia called out last episode. He seems, somehow, a modern man made to wear a costume and parade about as if he’s a 19th-century Tory MP — not because his performance is anachronistic, but because in so many ways, a modern man in retrograde drag is exactly what Arthur is.

Consider his non-electoral activities in this episode, which revolve around the relationship between his wife, Lady Olivia, and his chief enforcer, Mr. Rafferty. Think of the heady brew of emotion stewing in his head throughout this storyline. He’s worried for his wife’s safety during the abortion she travels to London to get, but he’s too angry with her to be with her during it, then he kicks himself for his insensitivity when she tells him how lonely she was.

But then he realizes who she was pining for in her lonesomeness. Not him, not her husband, but Rafferty, her lover, the father of the baby she no longer has. Yes, Arthur is gay, and has no romantic or sexual feelings towards any woman that we’ve ever seen, let alone Olivia. But he does love her, like a best friend and close confidante. It’s clear from his face and his voice that other than perhaps his brother Edward, he loves her more than anyone in the world. “So sad and odd, isn’t it?” he asks her of his feelings for her, half crying, half laughing at the bitter irony of it all. To have her choose another person over him — really choose him, not just have sex with him — is unbearable.

So we get to see another side of Arthur Guinness, and it’s an unpleasant one. Arthur describes himself as “kind to everyone but himself” in this episode, and he’s right, as far as it goes: He does tend to strap on the cross and carry it for others at regular intervals. 

But there’s a special kind of cruelty that stems from the experience of great melancholy — a desire to make life for those around you as black and painful as it is for you. We’ve already seen this cruel streak in Arthur: Just last episode, we watched him alternate between embracing the lover who betrayed him and stuffing money forcibly into his mouth for the transgression. In the end he cuts him off completely, a trademark Guinness move. 

It’s the move he demands of Olivia now as well. Because she broke their contract — she was free to “fuck and forget” anyone she wanted; she was not free to fuck and remember — Arthur says she must now go no-contact with Rafferty. Alternately, they could run away together, but Arthur would leave them penniless and Rafferty blackballed all across the country. 

But he counts on neither Olivia’s determination nor her resourcefulness. Forced by Arthur to break things off with Rafferty immediately, she summons him to the greenhouse and playacts dumping him, while actually telling him she’s figured out a way to maintain their arrangement in secret. Lady Olivia, wanting things all the more because she’s been told she can’t have them? Who could have seen that coming?

Arthur and Olivia are far from the only unhappy couple in this episode, which up until its final sequence is more about star-crossed love than parliamentary elections. When word spreads that Arthur may be assassinated by Patrick Cochran, the exiled brother of Edward Guinness’s former lover Ellen, the brewer goes to see her one last time. She agrees to try to stop her brother, but has no interest in his proclamation that he still loves her.

Adelaide, his wife, knows it. And she’s surprisingly alright with it! It’s not that she makes some Arthur/Olivia–style arrangement on Edward’s behalf, but while she likes him a great deal, she doesn’t love him any more than he loves her. In fact, she’s not convinced she can love anyone, not compared to the way she loves the charitable work she helps oversee for the family. Acknowledging their shared plight, the pair shake on their “imperfect compromise.” It’s less than ideal, but it will do.

Lady Christine faces a similar situation. Called before Benjamin’s formidable sister Ann and aunt Agnes to answer for the rather too public way they’ve been carrying on, Christine and Benjamin are told that if they knock the PDA in the Imperial Hotel off, Christine will be considered an official Guinness mistress, with all the rights and privileges this entails. 

These are all rather civilized arrangements, no? Other than Ann, whose wild side seems to have been tamed by a combination of disability and responsibility, none of the Guinnesses have much interest in traditional marriage. In fact, they don’t have much interest in traditions of any kind. Not a one of them objects to Arthur’s sexuality. Getting in bed with the Fenians goes against all their father stood for. Expanding across the globe shows imagination their father never possessed. The American-style political campaign that the trickster god Byron Hedges brings back with him from New York is the least conservative campaign a Conservative politician has ever run. 

It’s no coincidence that their antagonists have all seemed weathered and hidebound by comparison. Bonnie Champion is an old-school local hoodlum who’s not ready for the globalized world the Guinnesses are helping to usher in. Rev. Henry Gravatt is a stuffed shirt whose fire and brimstone condemnations of his nephew Arthur turn to ashes in his mouth. Even Patrick Cochrane, the man handpicked by the Irish Republican Brotherhood to be Arthur Guinness’s assassin, is so set in his ways that his sister Ellen repeatedly calls him a bonehead, implying that his brain has literally calcified. The dynamism of Edward and the unpredictability of Arthur are the fresh air that clears the room of the musty scent of the past.

Patrick is the key to this finale, and to the show’s future, should there be one. Arthur knows he’s slated to be killed at his big campaign rally, and he knows Patrick is in town to pull the trigger. Strangely, however, he’s not scared at all. “I’ve realized something,” Arthur says to his siblings. “I’m brave. I’m brave! Who would have guessed?”

“Me,” says Edward, without missing a beat. His brother, at least, believes he knows what kind of man Sir Arthur Guinness is.

Edward has turned out to be a better man than I gave him credit for in the early going. When he’s trying to rally Arthur out of his despond, he says he can relate: “I have a broken heart — so what? We have important work to do.” I don’t read this as Edward coldly shutting down his own emotions, but as him deliberately denying their impact in an attempt to help his brother through his own pain. 

Despite the best efforts of Rafferty and Potter (maybe I was wrong about him being a secret Fenian, or maybe it just has yet to be revealed), the Brotherhood plants a gun in the hall where Arthur’s big campaign rally is to be held. They then infiltrate the crowd, staging a fight to distract the guards. In the confusion, Patrick comes in, gets the gun, takes aim, and fires…

Then the show cuts to Guinness black.

It’s audacious, I’ll give them that! It also speaks to the confidence of writer-creator Steven Knight in what he’s doing here. That confidence is earned, in my estimation. A combination of fine writing and fun characters — especially Arthur, brave, cruel, loving, hateful Arthur — have made it so.

The show also provides us with insight into our current unpleasantness. After all, we too are ruled by conservative politicians representing occupying forces in a time of political violence. At first Arthur just doesn’t understand why he’s still a target, when he’s done so much for Dublin. That’s exactly the point, Edward says: “kindness to make the status quo bearable” is what the Fenians fear the most. A despotism without that kindness has no bulwark against public sentiment beyond brute force and an aura of intimidation, clumsy and brittle tools respectively. Such a tyranny has no future. As they say in Ireland, tiocfaidh ár lá. Our day will come.

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.