The girls must wait for the arrival of the Elders to deal with the Harbinger – meanwhile they must fend off questions from Niko and her partner Trip about the last sighting of the missing again Angela at their Halloween party. Confronted with a stark choice by the Elders, the sisters are once again at odds as to the best thing to do.

I’m not really sure where to begin with this episode, because the ending of it has me caught halfway between admiration for its boldness and disappointment in another tone deaf set of notes it hits.

But that’s getting ahead of myself. Having secured the Harbinger (in the form of the possessed Angela Wu) in their attic, the girls are stuck watching over it until the Elders arrive with their solution. Making matters a little more complicated, Angela was very publicly seen at their party before she apparently ‘vanished’ again, meaning that the girls are facing some routine questions which put them on edge from Niko and her partner. Getting away with it (just) because the arriving Elder covers for them, the girls are presented with their next issue.

It turns out that the Elders’ solution to the Harbinger problem is a fairly terminal one. For the Harbinger and its host. This doesn’t sit well with Mel and Maggie, both of whom knew Angela and one of whom feels personally responsible for her current predicament. Macy, as the scientist of the three, is more cool and logical about it and didn’t we just run this very same plotline of emotion vs rationality in the last episode (and resolve it)?

Anyway, regardless of how impressive the Elder is, Mel is determined to find another way that won’t harm Angela. Meanwhile Maggie is on the verge of flunking her classes, and extra complications are added when Lucy asks Parker to help her study. Honestly, it’s not really clear to me where the writers are going with this odd proto-love triangle thing but then to be fair I’m already as fed up of hearing Maggie moan about Kappa as Mel clearly is.

It all bundles along rather predictably towards its conclusion – empathy winning over cold calculation, the discovery of a potential third way and so on and so forth and then the show does something that I am still having trouble crediting. Worse, just as you think it might be doing something a bit brave and original instead of just troublingly odd, it compounds one bum note with a further one, and I’m left wondering just what the hell the writers were thinking.

As usual, the show is loud and proud with its politics, but it’s starting to run the risk of feeling less like an empowering show for young women and more like a show cynically taking every opportunity to show off just how ‘woke’ it is. There’s another jibe at Trump, another opportunity for the sisterhood to band together and save a woman’s life and then there’s…that ending.

Verdict: Conflicting is the best way to describe this one. The narrative element at the heart (emotion vs logic) feels like a retread of something we’d already done last week and the ending just feels obstinately jarring. I’m still here girls, but I’m not sure for how much longer at this rate. 5/10

Greg D. Smith