Jo and Chris realise that they face a different enemy than they’d originally thought, and must act to address this accordingly. Alex and Ed are still unhappy at having their trust betrayed. Piper continues to talk to Emily, but can she be trusted.

This show. This damned show. Week after week, it confounds all my expectations as it throws another complete curveball at me and upends everything I thought I was starting to get the hang of. Last time, turned out that Piper’s little tete a tete’s with Virtual Kindred were actually with Virtual Emily, the slightly ditzy whistleblower/hacker. So what on earth is the deal?

Before we can start dealing with that the episode has some housekeeping of the more mundane variety to do. Both Ed and Alex are seriously upset that Jo has been lying to them about certain aspects of Piper and her abilities, and even more so that she won’t share anything further. For Alex that means taking his daughter away from danger, for Ed it means feeling a little pissed off that his daughter kept things from him. It’s a tricky conundrum because as a viewer its equally easy to sympathise with their hurt and with Jo’s point of view on it – after all, as far as she’s been told, if Piper were to ever learn the truth about what she is, even by accident, she would die.

Meanwhile, the disappearance again of Wilkis and the sudden difficulty in getting hold of his wife send Jo and Chris down a whole new route of investigation as they start to realise someone they’d trusted wasn’t all they seemed. And that means they’re right on the back foot again, unable to trust any of the technology around them and forced to use awkward workarounds.

This coincides with Emily’s own interactions with Piper, as it becomes clear that her motives for reaching out from the very beginning might not have been exactly what we’d thought. Suddenly, Kindred seems much more mundane as a character than he might have first appeared – hell, maybe even a little bit more sympathetic too. But the interactions between Piper and Emily do a great job of visually conveying concepts that might otherwise have been clumsy to execute on TV budget and runtime, and make for some seriously unsettling viewing.

Most important, by the end of the episode although a great many issues have been dealt with, nothing is just solved. Big things happen, people do things which reach across the lines in the sand which they have drawn for themselves in the heat of the moment, but that doesn’t mean those lines are erased, or that the nitty gritty of the real, everyday issues get sidelined in the warm afterglow of having overcome major adversities.

Verdict: I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but with each passing week this show just gets better. On so many levels it shouldn’t work, but it really does. 9/10

Greg D. Smith