Alex is sent to live with the Friend family to start maintaining his cover, but which will be the harder test? Surviving the Friend’s wayward daughter Fiona, or passing the inspection of Point Blanc’s Dean, Eva Stellenbosch?

If there’s one thing that’s starting to bug me – in a minor way – about Alex Rider, it’s that MI6 here don’t get presented as being terribly competent at their job. Alex intuited there was more to his uncle’s death almost straightaway, and went on to actually infiltrate the crime scene, disable an adult agent and let himself into the Division’s base of operations. Jack herself figured out very quickly what the score was (helped by Alan Blunt’s less-than-subtle methods of coercion) and was able to effectively blackmail them. This episode, someone else in Alex’s life is able to decode the mystery of what’s going on, based on very little information. In Alex’s case, you can make an argument his uncle has been training him without him knowing all these years, but that still leaves a pretty big gap.

At any rate, it’s a minor gripe in an otherwise very entertaining instalment of the show as Alex finds his plans to spend a nice weekend with Tom (and more importantly Ayisha) scuppered by his responsibilities to the mission. MI6 need him to prepare himself and learn his cover story in time to meet with the Dean of Point Blanc for his interview. This means living with the Friends at their mansion – something about which neither of the Friends senior is terribly happy. Fortunately their troublemaking daughter is away, though that doesn’t last all that long.

I liked the depth this instalment gave to characters – David Friend could so easily have been a two-dimensional caricature as the businessman who’s done one dodgy deal too many and therefore finds himself owing favours to Blunt. However he does take some active interest in engaging with Alex, as reluctant as he seems to be involved, and he and his wife do take decent care of him. Then of course, Fiona turns up and things take a turn for the worse.

Unfortunately, for all the depth that Mr & Mrs Friend are given, the script seems happy to render Fiona as a cliched spoiled rich girl with an awful boyfriend who brings an equally awful entourage of friends with him. Their interactions with Alex all feel a little forced and artificial as a result, leading to an ultimate confrontation which the show really didn’t need to give us. I would guess that the plan was to showcase some more of Alex’s skills, but given the context and what we’ve seen of him already, none of it was really necessary and ultimately it only really serves to set up one fun scene later in the episode as a furious Fiona threatens to ruin the best-laid plans.

Also on the subject of Fiona, it only took three episodes for a gratuitous swimwear shot, and in the context of the relative ages of the characters and exactly how that shot is delivered, it felt especially inappropriate to this viewer – your mileage may vary, but it was a little disappointing to me, especially given writer Guy Burt’s comments when I met him on set about female characters.

Still, most of what we have here is still good. Farrant handles himself well in every sense, playing his actual self being pissed off, his actual self being awkward as he tries to keep his cover with those closest to him and his cover identity as a pissed off ‘problem child’ equally well. Vicky McClure’s Mrs Jones is easily the bright spot among the MI6 personnel (Ace Bhatti’s Crawley has been given so little to do so far and Blunt as a character is just instantly dislikeable) and Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo’s Jack is believable as the older sister figure in Alex’s life. I just hope it makes fewer of the more basic errors as it goes on.

Verdict: Juggling a lot of different stuff and not always quite carrying it off. Still great fun overall though. 7/10

Greg D. Smith