The horse-trading in personnel steps up a notch as Karen sets her sights on some ambitious ‘gets’ for Helios. Danny gets himself into some trouble it looks like he won’t get out of. Margot finds herself compromised unexpectedly.

With Ed now mission commander at Helios, Karen sets about seeing who else she might be able to poach from NASA’s side of the table, with some surprising results. Kelly seems an obvious win, given she’s Ed and Karen’s daughter, but the ambitious young woman has ideas of her own. Another tense scene for the Baldwin family around a dinner table as they confront the difference between expectations and reality and once more all three actors knock it out of the park.

Danny, somewhat distraught by Karen’s rejection of his advances, is back to his old ways, which means on the booze and picking up any young woman he can. When he gets caught by the police somewhere he very much shouldn’t be, he assumes that a quick telling off will be the worst of his worries, but Dani is his commander and she isn’t about to let things carry on as they did back in the old days. Faced with the possibility of having to confess a litany of failures to his new wife, Danny finds himself the subject of an unusual last minute saviour, as someone takes a decision that they and everyone they care about may well live to regret.

Meanwhile Margot and Sergei continue to get closer to one another. We are shown a montage of their increasingly sweet ‘courtship’ as these two scientists who are accomplished in their field and terrible at human interaction slowly stumble closer and closer together until we get to the modern day where it feels like they might finally actually break those last personal barriers when things go very sideways. Turns out that there’s a price to be paid when you’ve been quietly feeding bits and pieces of information to your biggest rivals in the biggest contest between them to date. Turns out further that the shadowy figures behind Sergei in all this have very few scruples and no discernible morals in getting exactly what they want. Will Margot find herself in some really serious trouble?

There’s a particularly touching farewell between the unlikeliest of friends too, as someone well-established at NASA takes the offer of more money and new challenges at Helios, while their younger protégé decides to stay where they are. It’s a microcosm of the wider feeling the show has been giving these last few episodes of the Band finally breaking up. Ed has left, Gordo is dead, Molly is grounded – the very real ‘Dream Team’ which forged all those incredible paths is slowly falling apart, and whereas new teams are being forged in the aftermath, in the light of the biggest challenge any have ever faced, will they be up to the task?

Verdict: Once again, little space stuff but a lot of interpersonal conflict and development. 8/10

Greg D. Smith