Miles tries a new way to make ends meet. Margo finds herself in grave danger. Aleida and Kelly strike out for new horizons and quickly discover that obstacles still very much exist.

Dani might well have staved off the impending revolution from below stairs when she got internet access back for everyone, but what she hasn’t (and can’t) solve is the fact that those Helios employees, upon whom the base relies for so many basic essentials, are treated like crap, underpaid and ripped off by their employers at every corner.

Of course, this means that Ilya’s black market economy is thriving, and with his wages way lower than they were and an increasingly dissatisfied wife millions of miles away, he wonders if he can get a piece of that action and make himself some extra cash. The answer is… maybe, but will his cockiness and need to always push his luck be his undoing?

Back on Earth, Kelly and Aleida’s mission to secure private funding for Kelly’s project to find life on Mars hits some roadblocks, namely that private companies aren’t all that interested in investing in something which seems risky in the current climate and doesn’t offer them the sort of returns they might want. The girls then hit on the idea of tapping up one hitherto unconsidered resource, and a meeting with Dev goes about as well as you might expect, given his history with Kelly’s mother. The question is, even if they can get the enigmatic billionaire on board, can they really handle what that might mean?

As part of that whole process though, Aleida gets to reconnect with an old friend, one whose life hasn’t been going all that well recently. It’s nice to see these two spiky, not all that comfortable people in each other’s company again – they’ve always brought out the best in one another and you sense that if either of them is ever to move past the pain hanging over them both, they’ll need each other to do it.

In Russia, Margo is caught up in events that go way over her head. It’s almost impressive that after everything she’s been through, Margo still manages to be so naïve to what’s going on around her. Turns out the mysterious woman she met with and the card she left for her are each things which might get her in a world of trouble with both sides of the emerging coup, and every time she thinks she might be on the verge of safety, her world keeps getting tipped sideways once again.

On the subject of that coup, it leaves the Russian contingent of the Mars mission without contact from home and with a bunch of uncertainty. It’s telling that, up in the big black with only one another to rely on, the people of the USA and Russia are able to push past all this political nonsense and just crack on with things. I wonder if there’s a lesson there for their compatriots back home, and for us in the here and now?

Verdict: Dramatic, twisty and never content to let its characters or indeed its audience settle too comfortably. Fantastic TV. 9/10

Greg D. Smith