Everyone’s trying to be more than they expected. For Jentry it’s her powers. For Michael it’s a possible football career. For Ed it’s life as something other than an adorable evil henchman. For Kit it’s all about his soul, and what he has to do to get one.

The horrors of adolescence have fangs, and they’re bared at the entire cast this week.

AJ Beckles and Woosung Kim take the spotlight as we dig into the lives of the boys in Jentry’s life and both of them do sterling work, especially Beckles. Michael’s the kid we’ve all been: hard working, kindhearted, well liked and terrified he’s making the wrong choice. Michael gets three big moments here: a pair of feverish dream sequences and a moment where he plays the flute for Stella, his girlfriend. The first two are neatly executed moments of anxiety but it’s the third that breaks your heart.

Michael is painfully, terrifyingly average at music. Worse, we see Stella react to that, try to brave-face it and their entire relationship collapsing. Michael is either trapped in the life he thought he wanted or in the process of falling out of it. What he wants isn’t what he gets and he’s not sure whether he really wants it. The fact his decisions upset Stella so much seems odd at first but as the episode continues it makes more sense. Two hard-working, well-liked non-Caucasian kids doing their best to fit in suddenly realise the story they’ve been telling themselves isn’t the one they thought and may not be the one they want. No wonder they’re so stunned.

Kit, whose nightmarish home life is how the episode opens, is in a similarly bad spot. Mr Cheng wants him to steal Jentry’s powers in return for a soul but Kit has been human too long. Woosung Kim plays the friendly demon’s slow shift from calculation to attraction to self-sacrifice brilliantly and he’s helped by some wonderful spindly, unsettling animation. Both boys share the screen, both make wildly different choices, both end up in the same place; miserable and alone.

The one person this episode who tries to be more than they are and succeeds is Ed and it’s my favourite plot so far this season. Bowen Yang’s adorable pudding of a sidekick has decided he will be viewed as more than a Short King, and sets out to achieve this while also running interference on the weird in Jentry’s life. This is explored through Ed’s running battle with a gui (think the ghost from The Ring). As the episode continues, we slowly see him work out that she doesn’t have to be stopped, just listened to. When he does, she and he both become more than what they seem. It’s a really sweet, funny, powerful moment as the gui nails the band try-outs that Michael has been working up to. It also twists the knife. A dead girl is better at the flute than Michael, and he sees that.

The horror in this episode comes from everyone wanting to change their stories and the only two who manage it being a ghost and a (admittedly adorable) vampire. The hope comes from the fact someone manages it at all.

Verdict: Visually stunning, wittily written and acted and another top-notch episode. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart