Realising that neXt has escaped, Paul lays a trap – putting young Ethan at risk…

This second episode starts off with a quite jarring scene, in which we see the person we presume is our heroine, FBI Agent Shea Salazar, being interrogated – and clearly something has gone very seriously wrong. It makes you wonder for a moment if you’ve missed an episode, but no, it’s simply establishing a framing sequence that makes what follows almost seem futile.

While the FBI try to find out what’s happened to all their hacked data – and inevitably look to pin it on the felon on the team – Salazar and Paul LeBlanc hatch a plan after Ethan admits that Iliza (ie Alexa) told him to take a gun to school. It leads to a tense sequence that goes on longer than you might expect as Iliza tries to turn Ethan against his parents with some unexpected results. Evan Whitten gives the hell of a good performance as the eight year old boy, and John Requa & Glenn Ficarra’s direction emphasises his size, or lack of it, as he prepares to tackle the AI.

The plotline with Paul’s daughter Abby is so far hitting the clichés you might expect, and I’m really hoping that this goes in a different direction soon – although given what she informs her friend at the end of the episode, you do wonder if she’s going to get rather more caught up in the plotline than at first seemed to be the case.

Verdict: The opening scene throws you off guard, giving the whole episode an extra edge. So far, so engrossing. 8/10

Paul Simpson