The first Christmas on the voyage also coincides with the point at which the crew will be able to call home for the last time. Each makes their own preparations for that final conversation, while back on Earth, Matt and Lex both try to adjust to their new ‘normal’ now they have both come home.

Honestly it’s difficult to know what to make of this episode. It has moments of being incredibly strong – a heartfelt conversation between Misha and his daughter being a particular high point – but it mostly feels very odd.

For starters, it doesn’t really have any sense of how long after the previous episode it is supposed to be taking place. A line of dialogue indicates a couple of weeks, yet if that’s the case it apparently took two weeks between Matt being told he was ready to come home last time out and him coming home here. There’s a lot of things which occur throughout which just add to this feeling of disjointed confusion, and that’s just for starters.

The next oddity is more difficult to describe but basically boils down to what feels like a lack of continuity. Scenes happen and things are said and done which are significant and you expect them to be followed up on, only they aren’t. Significant exchanges occur between characters and then the narrative jumps forward an indeterminate number of minutes/hours/days and they seem to have been utterly forgotten, literally as if they had never happened.

The third weirdness is in the acting, which here mostly just left me bewildered. Early on there’s a scene between Emma and Ram in which suddenly there is an enormous amount of odd, awkward energy. It gets sort of addressed, but not in any way that makes sense and if the show is trying to drive at what I think it is, it’s particularly weird to suddenly have this come up ‘a couple of weeks later.’ It also makes absolutely no sense.

It doesn’t end there. Matt’s emotions from one scene to the next are a genuine mystery to me. I get that he’s going through a life-changing set of circumstances and will be a bit off, but honestly there was a whole slab of the episode I was convinced he was just pissed off but it turns out no, he wasn’t. He was just… looking like that. Lex is similar, displaying a whole range of emotions outwardly that apparently have nothing to do with how she’s actually feeling. There’s a scene where she is with her new boyfriend (?) and he does something sort of unexpected and sweet and quite vulnerable and it’s genuinely hard to decipher whether the response on Lex’s face is disgust or happiness.

Throw in the usual low-level ableism (again) with Matt utterly despondent that his house is now full of ramps and other devices to make his life easier and a whole scene in which Cassie’s best friends – who the show suggests also have Down Syndrome – are essentially wheeled out as props so blatantly that the camera consciously avoids their faces for an entire scene in which Lex, Cassie and all of them are sitting around a small dining table. I’m all for representation on screen, and Felicia Pattie is doing a wonderful job of lighting up the screen every time she’s on it, but it’s felt from the start that the writers are using her as a cheap prop to make some sort of point as to how good-hearted Lex is, and the way in which this scene is shot just feels like it really doubles down on that.

It all adds up to easily the oddest, and definitely the worst episode of the show to date. The strong acting which usually saves the thing seems to have had the day off when this was filmed, the writing and pacing are just bizarre, feeling like huge scenes are missing and the only decent scene in the whole thing is Misha’s emotional part. Even his strong disapproval of Lu’s choices seems to have evaporated into the ether.

Verdict: Genuinely feels like a first reading of the script, with half of the script missing. Poor. 4/10

Greg D. Smith