An encounter with a demon leads Gabriella into discovering a whole other side to the fight against their kind that she isn’t comfortable with. Daimon and Ana travel to San Francisco to retrieve an artefact that may help them defeat their father.

Helstrom is starting to feel very… bitty. There’s plenty going on, and lots of different threads lacing through the overall plot, but the way the show keeps jumping from one to the other – something I could forgive in the series opener as it tried to establish the characters and background – is starting to feel tiresome.

It doesn’t help that, four episodes in, we are still getting exposition by way of dialogue info dumps. It may well be compelling to know details about the fight against evil, the moral choices/sacrifices that entails and so on. But it might also be nice if there was a less clunky way of showing that to the audience than pausing for another two minutes so someone can tell us all about it.

This time out, in the wake of Ana’s encounter with her father (which itself still makes no sense to me), there’s a gathering of the siblings, Gabriella, Louise and the Caretaker to discuss what to do going forward. Except to be honest I think the real purpose of this scene is to have Caretaker and Gabriella meet one another for plot reasons later on. The meeting itself doesn’t really do anything except serve as – you guessed it – a bit more exposition.

The result of it is Daimon and Ana going to San-Francisco so that they can retrieve the skull from Ana’s vault. Of course, it isn’t there but what is there is the aftermath of Yen’s murderous attack with an axe. Cue another opportunity for exposition, as Daimon discovers what his sister has really been doing the last few years and why. Infuriatingly, the subtext I had picked up on last time out – of her doing it for redemption more than revenge – now just becomes text as she flat out says it.

As for Yen himself, who knows? I am genuinely stuck on this particular plot strand. He’s wandering around with a demon skull, occasionally letting it ‘bite’ his arm and talking to it in ways that do nothing to help us out as to what’s going on. There’s an odd suggestion as to his location at the end of the episode, but whether it’s actually where he’s supposed to be or just the show mucking around with shots is impossible to tell for sure.

And Gabby, having been conveniently introduced to Caretaker, has a (very) random encounter with a demon in the most inexplicable of places, and ends up having Caretaker save her, which then leads into him revealing the ugly truth about what the group to which he is affiliated does in the fight against demonkind. This is presented for the audience as some sort of massive moral dilemma for her, which seems odd given her previous revelation that she worked undercover amongst sex traffickers. It seems that her understanding of moral complexity and the trade-offs that need to be made in the fight against evil all get forgotten here so she can pout for half an episode that it’s not fair. It’s a disservice to the character and the actor, undoing a lot of the work done to date.

As the episode closes we get an interesting encounter for Daimon with a familiar foe, or at least it would be interesting if it didn’t get used – again – as another opportunity for exposition by dialogue. What makes it madder is that the exposition that’s being given isn’t even really complete, feeling like it’s referencing something that maybe got filmed but then left out. I’m not entirely clear who doesn’t want the Helstroms to work together (or why some of them seem to be doing such a terrible job of preventing it). I’m also not clear why their father is back now, what he wants with either of his children, how Mother fits into it or anything else. In the final, irritating twist of all this, for a show that keeps getting in its own way to deliver info-dumps, I’m still no clearer as to what – if anything – is actually going on.

Verdict: Jumpy, bitty and starting to grate. Stop telling me all these various details and background and just show me some of it! 5/10

Greg D. Smith