Natasha continues her quest to discover the root of the baby’s malevolent powers.

Remember the first four episodes of The Baby? Comedy Horror I called it. Oh, how innocent I was. How I laughed!

And then I watched episode 5.

Yikes. Be warned. There are no jokes in this mid-series trip back to the 1970s revealing how the baby got to be… The Baby. Perhaps it’s because of the quirky tone of the preceding acts, but this episode hits you like a hammer. It’s genuinely disturbing and if issues around violent homophobia, domestic abuse, post-natal depression and suicide are problematic for you then it’s as well to be prepared. It’s also at this stage that the show gets into its stride visually, and the stilted quality of some of the opening episodes is formally banished.

Episode 6 brings us back up to date, but is no less shocking as the baby expresses its rage through a group of hot-housed children in a New Age commune. Recently Sky subjected us to the extremely underwhelming Midwich Cuckoos, which dismally failed to escape its 1950s origins. If you want to see paedophobic horror brought properly up to date then this is the episode for you. Possessed children on film are often beyond cheesy, but this gang are entirely convincing and for that reason completely wigged me out. There’s a soupçon of ritualised self-harm along the way, so again, be warned.

These middle episodes are directed by Faraz Shariat, a young German/Iranian filmmaker – and clearly a name to watch.

The closing episodes of the series explore Natasha’s attempts to assuage the baby’s rage and dig deep into whether the anger of children is innate, or a social construct, and asks the same question about maternal instinct. Are the obligations of motherhood – often painful obligations – forced upon women through expectation, or something natural and mythic? And don’t expect to get off lightly. We’re going to pay a visit to abandonment, patricide and infanticide along the way.

If I’m making it sound a bit heavy, then that would be misleading. What makes this a very special series is that it has a lot of valuable and important stuff to say which it does through excellent storytelling, only very occasionally getting a bit bogged down.

Verdict: The Baby makes for an original and hugely entertaining eight episodes, and is a blissful relief from the all the tired apocalypse shows we’ve had to endure recently. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but I would implore people to check it out, not least because in a poor year for home grown UK genre drama, this proves that there are other things to talk about, and that we can be up there with the best when we put our minds to it. 9/10

Martin Jameson