The Chinese government have poisoned one of their sleeper agents, somewhat reminiscent of the Russian assassinations seen in the UK a few years back. But  Mike Chen has McCall helping him in his race against time to survive and to foil a much larger plot.

The story manages to hit a number of familiar sounding tropes at various times, though ties most of it around questions of trust, secrecy and jealousy. The challenge with this one though is the scale of plot as each reveal is made that it almost feels like too much to get into one self-contained episode. The twists with Chen’s own story are very good though, mostly because there ends up one more than there first appeared. Mr and Mrs Chen somewhat resemble Mr and Mrs Smith as a result. I wonder a little whether we would have had a better episode if they had not made that final reveal, but that would have turned a bittersweet conclusion into a simply bitter one.

Meanwhile, a right-wing climate change denier sees Dee want to protest, reminding Aunt Vi of her evidently more active days. We do not see the villain in question outside the events, so it has a strange found footage horror feel about it, particularly the way Delilah’s merry band of support protesters gradually drop, one by one. There is not the feel of a recurring villain about him, which feels like something of a missed opportunity as he managed to get a better buildup than some of the onscreen antagonists we have seen recently. The protest escalates and grows increasingly dangerous, yet Dee, and to some extent Vi, ignore multiple opportunities to back down and suffer as a result. Whilst the team cannot win them all, this has something of an unsatisfactory conclusion as matters stand. There is the start of a good subplot here if they do choose to pursue it though.

As ever, Harry and Mel are a great double act and manage to tie in the recurring hint of jealousy surrounding the episode (although not in a malicious way) with the comic relief. The two Mels – his partner and his AI assistant introduced this season –somehow develop a rivalry for Harry’s affections!

The other tale of jealousy, which again starts as a mildly amusing tease, is that of Dante with Miles, McCall’s ex, turning up on the scene. As a doctor, Miles has a skill set not covered anywhere else in the team, especially as more than once he has been called upon discreetly without asking as many questions as he might, not truly knowing why. This time though, he declares that he wants to stay around at the end – something somewhat telegraphed earlier in the season with the mention of the breakup with his partner. This is bound to interfere with the burgeoning romance between McCall and Dante and makes for an appropriately dramatic conclusion to the episode.

It is interesting to see how high the episode appears to raise the stakes but dampens that into to containment by complicating the plot devices even further. It is quite smart in terms of management in some ways, but makes me wonder whether we have been denied a far more satisfying adventure. It is also one I would have expected to have been structured around a Fisk-CIA plot, given that the late sequence skates close to the last Bond outing, at least in terms of weapon device. The consequences of trust and secrecy would ordinarily make sense in that range as well, but understandably, Dante has more subplot to advance. Fisk does not have any and ironically CIA involvement would probably have been that one complication too many in an episode which already has perhaps too many moving parts to really focus on its best elements.

6/10

Russell A. Smith