Jo continues to be stymied at every turn as she tries to find out more about the people after Piper. Abbey continues to work with Piper to try to trigger her memories. A home invasion prompts Jo to invest in a security upgrade.

Sitting watching this instalment of Emergence, I couldn’t help but think I may have misjudged it last time out. Where it felt somehow wrong to me in its pilot episode, this one gave me the feeling I’d been approaching it wrong – it’s not a genre show that happens to have the trappings of a family-centred drama, it’s a family-centred drama that happens to have the trappings of a genre show.

It’s there in the undeniable chemistry between the various leads – Faison and Tolman play off each other so well as to make the only, continuing question why these two characters are divorced. But it’s there with others too. Alexa Swinton as Piper gives all the right nuances to the performance, and plays a believable terrified little girl in more ways than the obvious – it isn’t just the screams and the terrified looks, but also the instant rush into a hug, the neediness. She also plays excellently off Clancy Brown and Tolman, and it adds to a real sense of veracity in the family suddenly taking her so completely under its wing.

It’s also there in the way things play out from scene to scene. Of course the autopsy of the bodies of Piper’s erstwhile kidnappers is delayed, for the most mundane of reasons. Of course Benny the journalist irritates a local salvage merchant when he goes prying and of course Jo knows exactly how to smooth things over. In tone and sensibility, it’s more like a daytime soap opera set in a ubiquitous small town – everyone knows everyone, the local police chief is friendly and approachable but also authoritative when she needs to be, and the divorced couple still pretty much live in one another’s pockets and everyone gets along just fine. It’s the televisual equivalent of comfort food, full of relatable characters in a small town environment all rubbing along together the best they can. It’s just that in the midst of them all is a mysterious young girl with supernatural powers who’s being pursued by shadowy forces.

It probably shouldn’t work. The genre elements feels a little haphazard at points, and the breadcrumbs it continues to lay along the trail to whatever truth it is that Piper represents veer between ham-fistedly cliched and weirdly obscure, but with everyone being so damned likeable and with so much chemistry going on between all the main players, it’s difficult to pull against it.

Verdict: It continues to be odd for a genre show, and in terms of its genre elements it isn’t winning any prizes for originality, but this is one that the cast are really pulling up several levels, and if you watch it as a daytime soap with genre elements, it’s oddly enjoyable. 7/10

Greg D. Smith