The owner of the bar below Nate's loft has passed away, and a good Irishman gets a good Irish wake. Only it turns out that before he died, he took out a loan from a nasty loanshark named Doyle, who's come to collect from the daughter. At the wake! (Have some respect, man.) And if she can't pay, he's going to take the bar. Nate convinces the crew that they can pull off The Wire, a con which normally takes three weeks, in a single evening. And pull it off they do! They saved the bar, Cora gets to keep her livelihood, and Doyle is going back to Ireland. Then Nate decides to knock things up a notch...
- Beyond the Impossible: Pulling off a three-week con in two hours ("hour and a half").
- Bottle Episode: It's even in the title. With the exception of Parker and Eliot's brief excursion to Doyle's warehouse headquarters, the entire episode takes place within McRory's pub and Nate's condo upstairs from the pub.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The Old Nate painting finally fires because it is where Hardison keeps some hidden cash for rainy days.
- When Cora pays Doyle some money, Liam's brother is seen marking the bills. Doyle later sees the mark and realizes Nate stole his money.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The poker players Cora speaks with at the start become instrumental to taking down Doyle in the final act.
- Chekhov M.I.A.: Jimmy Ford gets a few mentions in this episode.
- The Con: Hardison sets the basketball game on the bar's TV on a delay, letting Nate cheat Doyle out of a lot of money.
- Double-Meaning Title: It's a Bottle Episode... and also Nate starts drinking again.
- Empty Chair Memorial: The poker players leave one chair empty for the late John McRory.
- Engineered Public Confession: Nate gets Doyle to confess to at least one felony to a table with three police officers.Police Captain: So you're telling me this Doyle kid's going to march right in here, confess to a crime, and give us all his money?
Nathan: If all goes to plan.
Det. Sergeant Mickey: I don't know what kind of schmuck would do that, but I'd sure as heck pay to see it. - Every Man Has His Price: Doyle sure hopes this to be the case when he realizes he just confessed to several crimes to three high ranked cops. He offers to just walk away with his gains and he will give them a donation to their "retirement". The cops look unlikely to accept even before Nate pushes Doyle to the table and threatens to expose his failures to Doyle's old man.
- Exact Words: Doyle asks Mickey, one of the poker players, if he was involved with the O'Hare business back in August. Mickey chuckles and affirms it. He is involved because he was investigating the crime.
- Faux Affably Evil: Doyle puts on the appearance of a nice and even jovial fella, like when hitting on Tara or drinking and betting some petty cash with Nate, but that is just a veneer hiding a ruthless streak and dangerous mind. He is introduced collecting money from Cora at her father's wake and later coldly pulls a gun on Nate when he realizes Nate had someone find Doyle's other money, stole it, and is now using it in the poker game.
- Fingore:
- In Nate's flashback, he recalls his father breaking the fingers of a man who couldn't pay back the loan Jimmy gave him after gambling some of it away.
- After Nate delivers his ultimatum to Doyle to leave and not come back and Doyle agrees, then Nate breaks the guy's finger. Detective Sergeant Mickey notes after that, Nate is exactly like his father.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Doyle's father was a former terrorist who runs an even larger (and just as ruthless) loan-sharking operation back in Ireland, it's his influence that is implied to have caused his son to go into the business, and his money started his son out in his Boston operations. He never appears in person though, and remains secure with his own operation back in Europe at the end.
- Hidden Supplies: Parker, Hardison, and Eliot each have an emergency fund (totaling over nine grand) stashed around Nate's apartment. Eliot has his in the underside of a chair, Hardison has his in the back of the Old Nate painting, and Parker keeps hers in the cereal.
- Humiliation Conga: Doyle loses his marker on the bar which would be a good place to run the illicit cash through to clean it, but that's just the beginning. By the end, he's broke, humiliated, forced to get out of town (having confessed his crimes in front of a poker game full of cops), facing the wrath of his father for having destroyed the family's operations, and nursing a broken finger.
- I Am Not My Father: Averted. Nate insists on this when his father Jimmy is mentioned. However, evidence in the episode shows Nate to have some traits shared with his father: both are smart players and protective of those close to them, and Nate also breaks Doyle's finger just like he remembers his father doing to a man. One officer even tells Nate he is just like Jimmy.
- I Was Never Here: The cops at the end invoke this. They weren't at the wake playing poker, hearing the confession of an Irish mobster and discovering his illicit funds which they would have to take into evidence and keep from his victims until they filled all the long paperwork. No, two were at a basketball game, and the third was at the movies.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Eliot, buddying up to Doyle's goons, demonstrates a very deft hand with darts. He makes a bullseye without looking, then hits that dart with a second dart.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Doyle is smart enough to not try and fight in a room with three cops and one with his gun on the loan shark. He hopes to escape with some Pragmatic Villainy and bribe the cops to look away, but Nate forces him into a deal which the end results are either embarrassment and failure to his father, or exposing his incompetence at losing the money in a poker game to cops and confessing to several crimes to Doyle's father.
- Off the Wagon: Nate. He is forced to take a drink by Doyle as Doyle won't keep betting when Nate's sober and he isn't, and it is a drink Doyle paid for.
- Oh, Crap!:
- When Doyle demands that Nate actually take a drink or he'll walk away, the entire universe holds its breath. When Nate downs the whiskey, no one is happy.
- Hardison is not happy when he has to improvise a weather broadcast in about two minutes.
- Doyle has a look of genuine concern when he realizes the men, save Nate, he has been playing poker against are cops.
- Percussive Pickpocket: After Eliot smacks her on the rear to keep up the charade, Parker nicks just about everything Doyle's goons are carrying by going along with it and slapping them on the rear. Later she does it again, presumably to put all the stuff back.
- Persona Non Grata: Doyle is given the choice of either leaving Boston and not looking back or dealing with the consequences of publicly admitting his crimes in front of several police officers. He takes the first option.
- Running Gag: "Liam and Liam's brother." Nobody ever bothers to ask what Doyle's other thug is named, simply referring to him as "Liam's brother" or (once) "Liam Two."
- Simple Solution Won't Work: When Parker wonders why Cora doesn't just go to the cops about Doyle, Nate counters that a) Doyle could just deny everything about the loan, and come back a few months later to torch the bar for revenge, and b) Doyle probably has a few cops on his payroll already.
- Spoiled by the Format: Nate wins the marker on the bar from Doyle halfway through the episode, so you know there's more that's going to go on.
- To Be Lawful or Good: The police officers are quick to decide on good when Tara observes that Doyle's cash, if properly taken into evidence, will take a very long time to get back to the people he extorted it from. By pretending they were never there and know nothing about the money or Doyle's confession, they allow Nate and his team to return the cash to those it belongs to.
- Western Terrorists: Doyle's father made nail bombs for the IRA before going into loansharking
- Whole-Plot Reference: There are a lot of influences from The Sting, although the episode mixes it up. The Wire is the classic scam run by Redford and Newman's crew in that movie; in the film, they convince their Irish Mob opponent to get involved in it by playing Poker with him first. Here, it's running the wire scam that leads the Irish Mobster to get involved in the Poker game. The Sting features conmen pretending to be law enforcement; here, the conman convinces law enforcement to pretend to be mobsters... in order to play a con.
