Aneesha is left reeling by the disappearance of her daughter, but her issues may only just have begun. Mitsuki determines to hurt the aliens as a response to the new wave. Trevante continues his search for answers.

Episode five. The halfway mark. The tipping point where a show starts to find its stride and pieces start to come together to make sense.

Right?

Feeling oddly diffuse in focus after the previous episode, this one ranges far and wide as it pushes the narrative of the show… forwards? I’m not really sure anymore.

Sarah has vanished, and despite the feelings of some of the Movement, they and Aneesha are still all where they were, looking for the little girl some apparent hours later. Where could she have gone? Well, eventually one of the Movement’s soldiers works it out, having spotted some tracks that apparently nobody else noticed in the previous few hours and working out a sequence of events so monumentally daft that even by the standards of the show, it sticks out.

Back at Alien Aquarium Central, Nikhil and his team are in a spot of bother with the World President (or whatever her title is) because their plan, rather than killing off the alien threat, instead seems to have pissed it off and caused it to produce super aliens who aren’t vulnerable to anything the last lot were. Cue Mitsuki having another of her Gargantuan Super Brain moments and fashioning a plan to sort this all out by… hurting the aliens some more? OK…

As for Trevante, he’s ducking patrols of soldiers looking for him as he and his new friend continue to look for some answers relating to Caspar’s notebook. Angry emo charcoal style scribblings may hold the key to stopping an alien threat. Because of course.

Each of the three threads tries its best to introduce some drama. Aneesha and Luke find themselves in a spot more bother than they’re used to when Luke decides to share their secrets a little too freely, but then it all gets sorted in a way that – you’ve guessed it – makes no real sense, but boy howdy advances one sub-plot I have a personal bet with myself on.

Mitsuki resolves to push as hard as she can to really hurt the aliens but when she has their attention, their response is predictable to me (and should be to her by now) and basically recycles a whole bunch of stuff that we really should be past by now. Of course, she ends up in a dangerous situation, which I have no doubt she will easily overcome next time out. I will at least give the show that it sort of makes a connection here between Mitsuki and another character up until now separated from her entirely, but even that seems wishy washy and weird. How can we know so little about any of this halfway through the second season?

Trevante’s drama might be the weirdest of all. Still no real idea why his new friend trusts him any more than any other crazy, and also, in keeping with everything else, the comprehensiveness of the search for him by the authorities varies depending on where the writers want him to be. Maybe it’ll all get better after this, now we are on the home stretch? I can only hope.

Verdict: Still slow, Still wildly inconsistent in plotting and characters. Still, inexplicably, here. 4/10

Greg D. Smith