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The chaps take to the rails as they hear stories of disfigured half human shapes, and something awful out past Station Thirteen…

Honestly this might be my favourite episode. I’ll have two! It’s worth it! Everything up to this point from the local weirdness and personal horror of earlier episodes through to the phrase Sara can’t write down and the strange, shifting psychogeography of the country come together here. On the railway line that isn’t there, in the church we’ve visited twice and the half whispered histories and figures in the fog.

This is classic paranormal research stuff and it puts Joel and Will front and centre. Their mounting fascination and mounting terror could have been cheesy but it’s not. They’re two smart, gifted, gently funny guys who are starting to realise they’re in over their heads and really struggling and the tension ratchets perfectly in this episode as the unknown takes steps closer.

A big part of that is the childhood recollection of a railwayman who used to stop and pick wild horseradish to make horseradish sauce for his family and friends. It’s a lovely image and a perfect embodiment of the liminal spaces the show inhabits and explores. The offhand terror behind him stopping doing it ‘Because he saw something horrible’ is one of those moments that make you lean forward in your seat. It’s not the last either.

The show takes the strange events at its core and maps them onto two landscapes; personal memory and the shifting nature of the UK countryside. The constantly shifting rail network gives us a possible answer for what’s going on but as the episode finishes what haunts them, and you, is that this story is no longer at a distance.

Verdict: Childhood memories, personal surveillance and a key that only they can open wrap around each other into a moment that leads the show to step forward out of genre and into something very different, very close and absolutely gripping. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Recommended Research

Doctor Beeching

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Beeching

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_steam_reserve