Jentry struggles to adapt to the school knowing the truth about her and begins seeing visions of her parents. Gugu realises these are due to a parasitic animal called a shén clam and helps Jentry find and remove it. But Jentry wants to know more about her parents and keeps the clam’s pearl…

As the show breaks stride we’re starting to see more exploration of how Jentry’s heritage collides with her past and this episode centres on that. The school element of the plot, aside from the introduction of Kit (Woosung Kim), a cute boy who Jentry instantly bonds with, is relatively minor. Instead we’re locked into Jentry’s head with Jentry herself, seeing images of her parents which may not be real but are all she has to remember them.

The animation on the show has been top notch from the start and this episode raises the bar even further. The pearl is a lovely, Cronenbergian nightmare, crawling under Jentry’s skin and gouging her third eye open. The transition from Jentry’s visions to the real world is elegantly handled too and slowly accelerates until the final scenes where her reality and the present day collide with explosive consequences. Palettes shift, ghosts flit through the way places used to be and Wong’s voice acting especially is excellent. The whole episode feels feverish, dangerous, in a way that shows like this have often struggled to show.

A lot of that danger comes from how personal this story is. Ali Wong’s work as Jentry steps up in a big way here and we can feel the ache she has to know more about her parents. Her burning needs to understand who she is, and through that maybe understand where she is, are irrational, destructive and incredibly sincere because teenagers are all those things all at once. You know she’s being stupid, so does she, she does it anyway. That’s top notch writing and the show doesn’t shy away from the consequences of her choices.

It also continues to cleverly set up the board elsewhere. The B plot here is Gugu adapting to her newfound life as a ghost and struggling with the telekinesis she’s gained as a result. Lori Tan Chinn is great here, not just because she does irascible charm very well but because Gugu is not telling the truth. By the end of the episode, we get some solid information on Jentry’s parents, we get some heavily implied information on Gugu and it becomes clear Jentry is a pawn in everyone’s game but her own For now.

Verdict: Clever, unsettling, heartfelt animated storytelling that started strong and is only getting better. This is a great episode of a show you need to pay attention to. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart