Lasher and Emaleth are married. Emaleth gives birth, over and over, and everything collapses down onto the castle and Julien’s plans.

After a season of increasingly disparate plots everything comes together here. It’s a great, weird combination of tones too, with some black comedy shooting through some abject horror.

The comedy first. Moira bonds delightfully with her captor and their frequent check ins ground the episode in a deeply charming way. Moira is everything Rowan isn’t – pragmatic, emotionally open and determined – and her infiltrating the ceremony is some of the most fun we’ve had this season. It also throws the horror into some stark, spotlit relief. We’re with Moira as she slowly realises that this is a mass execution of children. We’re with her when the situation goes south and we’re with her for a lot of the final fight. It’s a nice choice and I hope Alyssa Jirrels gets more screen time next season, she’s great.

Elsewhere the season throws Rowan, Julien, Ciprien, Ian and Polina into a blender and turns it all the way up. This is where the comedy and humanity wind together, and the slow realisation of what’s going on colours the characters’ perceptions and ours alike. Rowan is sincerely horrified at the thought that she now has an extended family that are cannibalising each other and the emotional intensity of the ending is sincere and espresso strong. It also cleverly brings all the season’s themes into line. Julien moving his family around like chess pieces, Cortland and Ian broken in complementary ways and all of them orbiting the horrific exploitation of Lasher and his children. It’s heady stuff, and it gives Daddario some great beats to work with especially in her closing clashes with Julien.

But there’s a price to all this and a lot of characters pay it. Ciprien and Polina show up just in time to help a little in the closing fight and nothing else. Harry Hamlin’s Cortland turned Julien is enormous fun but mostly preens while Jack Huston’s Lasher dies not just once but twice. The show’s attitude towards Lasher is so weird, benching him for episodes at a time and turning him into a McGuffin as much as a character.

Worst of all the closing fight feels oddly cheap, the epic clash between fully active supernatural powerhouses turned into a series of mostly static, small scale brawls. Only Lark comes out of this element strongly, getting a nicely desperate, clumsy fight and a lovely signoff which makes it clear Rowan’s life is not his and he doesn’t want that to change. It’s a smart move and one that writes him out with agency as well as giving Rowan an extra dimension.

Verdict: This isn’t a bad episode by any means, but it is one where its reach exceeds its grasp. A very strong season, a good season finale and a great set up for a new season but despite that, oddly, it’s still a season low point. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart