Black Bolt and his new found friend adjust to life free from prison, but is their new benefactor to be trusted? Medusa and Louise get to know one another a little better as they attempt to trace Black Bolt’s whereabouts, Karnak finds himself settling in nicely and Gorgon and his allies try and stay one step ahead of Auran and her crew.

In its first three episodes, Inhumans bored me with terrible dialogue, abysmal pacing and non-existent plotting. In this fourth episode, it managed a surprise – it infuriated me.

The good parts first. Serinda Swan genuinely comes alive in this episode as it transpires that what she’s been missing is a likeable compatriot to bounce off. Ellen Woglom is that likeable companion as Louise – a rocket scientist singleton genius who just wants to be loved. Yes, she’s about as cliched as a character can be, yes she is basically an almost carbon copy of Emily Bett Rickards’ Felicity Smoak, but gosh darn it, the girl commits, and the scenes between her and Swan’s Medusa are a literal joy to watch. Thelma & Louise by way of Lethal Weapon. Funny, warm, heartfelt. What we get here is a character relationship that feels earned, where two characters get to know each other organically, in a believable way.

Elsewhere, we have Iwan Rheon’s Maximus finally actually starting to feel like a proper villain. There’s still a large element of scenery-chewing (or perhaps rather scenery gently licking, given the blandness of the Attilan sets) but there’s finally some decent development of the character, some hint at larger and more long-term plans being in place rather than just the adolescent temper tantrum we’ve seen so far. It’s positive, almost engaging.

So why on earth does the show insist on throwing this all away elsewhere? The Karnak storyline – I won’t get into spoilers here but suffice it to say that it feels stupid, inorganic and frankly backwards in both tone and execution. It isn’t helped by an appallingly bad choice of soundtrack.

Then there’s Gorgon. I have no idea even now why a group of ex-soldier surfer-dudes are happy to follow this guy around getting in harm’s way, especially since one of their number got killed last week. They don’t know him, nor he them, so lofty pronouncements about ‘brotherhood’, ‘family’ and the like just ring utterly hollow and pointless. Like much of the show, the whole Gorgon subplot feels more and more like a wheel-spinning exercise, and it’s wearing incredibly thin.

Crystal gets a little more to do this week, harnessing the services of the boy who hit Lockjaw last week and his…shall we say acquaintance, to render the large teleporting pooch better. Cornish I sense is doing her best with the material she has, but there’s an odd sense of disconnect when the script requires her to be wide-eyed fish-out-of-water-cutesy one second and hard-assed, entitled princess the next.

And so we go on, glimmers of hope appearing in places like the cracks in a terrigen cocoon, but with this now the halfway mark of the series, it feels like too little is happening far too late. It’s frustrating because these are characters with a rich lore in the background, and the setup was there for another show to inhabit the TV part of the MCU universe set up by Agents of SHIELD, but so far, this is just a damp squib.

Verdict: Still slow, still clunky and still a mess. There’s redemption appearing slowly for a couple of characters but it’s more in spite of the show rather than because of it. Better than it was before, but oh-so-annoying with it. 3/10

Greg D. Smith