Spoilers

Louis, Kaz, Glen and Bea return from the past – but Fisher has more plans for the Artefact…

And so the first season of Silverpoint wraps up with the heck of a cliffhanger that’s built towards across the whole of the final three episodes. We saw in episode 10 what was going on back in 1997, but everything depends on Meg being able to respond to the request her friends have made, and episode 11 sees Fisher and his team trying to find where Meg and her other trio of friends have gone. We feel very much in The Fugitive territory here, with some good use of drones both within the fiction and by director Amy Coop – and I’m sure I’m not the only person who had a big grin seeing the conclusion of the episode.

You might think it’s all over at that point, but it certainly isn’t, as Lee Walters moves our core characters – both those meant to be reacting with the artefact and those helping them – into position for season 2. We get away from Silverpoint with another chase sequence (and some lovely Spielbergian touchstones from ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark here – was that the exact sound effect coming from the crate?) counterpointed with some light comedy courtesy of Glen, with further questions raised about Fisher and co…

It’s all to rescue Kaz, and amidst all the derring-do, the core character work that’s been a hallmark of the show isn’t forgotten: Louis may be there in part to find out more about the Artefact, but Meg is there for her friend, and she’s not going to let anyone forget it. Kaz herself meanwhile discovers that she’s not the only person taken prisoner…

The escalation of scale that was demonstrated from the 1960s movies Village of the Damned to Children of the Damned is echoed here, and finally we start to get some answers. And they’re really not what we expect – but which open the door for the second run.

Verdict: There’s an alchemy in getting a show to click in all its constituent parts, and Silverpoint has achieved that across its first season, setting a high bar. Thoroughly recommended. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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