A new phase begins as some of the 4400 start to be assigned to live outside the hotel on their own, with certain provisos. But are Homeland Security really set to free them all that easily?

In truth, the bits of the episode involving Homeland Security are short and fairly minor. Rather than focusing on examining the past of one of the 4400, the flashbacks this week deal with Keisha’s previous life, specifically her close relationship with her late sister and her nieces, which contrasts with the present day where she barely sees the kids and has a fractious relationship with her brother in law, made worse when he reveals to her he’s going to see the man who killed Keisha’s sister.

It’s actually an interesting shift, and colours in a lot of the character nicely – until now Keisha has been a little bit of an unknown quantity, but now and awful lot of things that she has done and said so far make a lot more sense. It also starts to make more sense why she isn’t about to run to the authorities with her suspicions about Claudette and what she thinks she saw at Mrs Grover’s.

As for the 4400 themselves. LaDonna has some serious apologising to do when Soraya finally reappears at the hotel, looking much less happy-go-lucky than she did before. Shanice and Andre are somewhat awkward together after their moment last time out. Shanice is still very conflicted as you might expect – to her, she was still married to Logan only a couple of weeks ago, but to him he’s been without her sixteen years and has moved on. No wonder that whatever her feelings for Andre, she feels confused at best.

Still, she’s all set to move into Logan’s house with him, Bridget and Mariah (at the latter’s urging) and so she and Andre abscond briefly for one final day out and stumble into the most fitting place to spend it. Unfortunately, in the meantime Mariah gets found out with regards to her role in the distribution of LaDonna’s video, and that doesn’t reflect too well on her or on her mother’s ‘influence’ in Logan’s eyes.

And then there’s Hayden, who seems destined to be one of the show’s victims, this time having a run in with one of the guards over his ‘chess set’. But as things pan out, it becomes clear he’s not about to just sit back and take everything that life dishes out to him. And Claudette? Well she gets to know Jharrell a little better and they bond over shared taste in music, his ability to trust in her and, ultimately, her ability to trust him back.

It’s another strong episode overall, but it does occasionally get a little over-enthusiastic with its messaging, breaking the flow of the episode with dialogue that hits the viewer over the head with things which were already perfectly clear from context. One specific speech from Soraya is the worst offender, in which she literally has to spell out – twice – that she’s a queer Muslim woman working for the government and that the world is a much scarier place than it was a few years ago. I love the character and Kausar Mohammed has done a brilliant job so far of bringing her to life, such that this kind of info dump wasn’t needed.

Verdict: Strong and well-developed with an occasional unforced infodump dialogue error. 8/10

Greg D. Smith