When Cal develops a sudden and mysterious fever, Michaela and Ben are convinced it’s another calling linked to a passenger on the plane who seems to have gone missing. But with Cal’s life on the line, can they convince Jared and Grace respectively that they aren’t mad, before it’s too late?

The last shot of the previous episode, of Cal looking out the plane window and saying ‘it’s all connected’ was a bit spooky, and unsurprisingly this episode follows up by centring on the young boy. Half awake with a raging fever and babbling apparent nonsense, Cal is rushed to the hospital where Ben and Grace face an agonising choice – put him on a course of antibiotics to treat an illness the doctors don’t really understand which will invalidate his experimental cancer treatment and see him kicked off the trial, or wait and hope that the fever breaks on its own. Of course, in Ben’s case he doesn’t mean to simply wait for it to clear on its own, but to follow through on his plans, first he has to finally explain to Grace what’s been happening.

Meanwhile, pursuing a lead from one of the other passengers, Michaela gets pulled aside by Jared who also finally wants to know exactly what’s going on. Of course, when she finally tells him, his obvious reaction is that she’s losing it, but then they witness some things together which start to ring a few alarm bells to him that maybe she’s on to something after all.

As for the passenger in question – well he’s in an apparent world of pain, but who’s got him and more importantly, why is never quite clear. Ben is convinced that Vance and the NSA are the ones they’re looking for, and certainly the NSA head has done nothing so far to convince us he’s one of the good guys, but maybe there’s more to all of this than meets the eye.

What continues to impress about this series is that the actual disappearance and reappearance of the plane is only ever referred back to narratively as a catalyst. This eerie, supernatural event is simply the blue touch paper, and the real drama is equally divided between the spooky events which are occurring to our protagonists now and their very normal attempts at trying to reassemble their scattered lives after five and a half years’ absence. The domestic scenes between Ben and Grace and Michaela and Jared are every bit as gripping and watchable as the mystery parts. It’s also nice that they’ve avoided slipping into a hackneyed ‘mystery of the week’ format, with certain things carrying over week to week and mysteries never being a straightforward case of going from A to B to solve them.

Verdict: Continuing to blend the mundane and the supernatural in just the right mixes, this may be the most interesting genre show on TV right now. 8/10

Greg D. Smith