Eight months after the incident with the Eagle 16, the crew of the Nightflyer are all very different, with life having settled into its own rhythm. But as they finally get closer to the Volcryn, everyone’s cosy little lives will be disrupted all over again.

Remember last episode when out of nowhere some of our heroes ended up on a ship that had been missing presumed destroyed for fourteen years, and it was being run by the all-female remainder of the crew as a weird cannibal cult which used the ‘seed’ of captured men to produce altered clones for food? Yeah, well this episode, set eight months later, doesn’t. Doesn’t even merit the faintest of mentions or allusions. Might as well not have happened.

Eight months on, there’s been a lot of change. D’Branin and Agatha are now openly in a relationship, he apparently having got over the fact she’s secretly an L-1 and always has been. Here the show feels like it’s squandered an opportunity for an interesting narrative diversion. We know these psychic humans are mistrusted and viewed with fear in this universe, and the story of how one managed to go undetected and become a psychiatrist and then a mentor to other, open, L-1s is one I’d be interested in seeing. Tough though, because having revealed her true nature, the show isn’t even all that clear about who knows and who doesn’t. I’m not even a hundred per cent clear whether Thale has always known, or if it was a major revelation, though it’s at least clear he knows now.

On the subject of Thale, he’s suddenly Mr Popular with a group of the crew who have become hooked on the extreme simulated experiences his talent can provide to them. Even Murphy, who he nearly burned to death not all that long ago, seems to have completely forgiven him. But a power like Thale’s isn’t one to be messed with lightly.

Lommie meanwhile is shutting herself away in a virtual world of her own creation, in which she can spend time with the people she misses most. It seems (although it’s never explicitly stated) that the encounter with the female cultists affected the tech specialist the most, reminding her as it did of her own background. That, combined with the hurt and betrayal she still feels at the actions of Mel (now cosily bunked up and in a relationship with Roy) seem to have driven her to this solitary life. But it’s while she’s in there that she makes a discovery that could spell trouble for her and everyone else.

And there’s Rowan. All these months on, he’s also in a relationship, and it’s very serious. This causes some issues between him and D’Branin, though the fact that the show has to have the characters spell it out quite so heavy-handedly (and in one case bizarrely as they quarrel about a protocol which makes no sense to me at all, much less the way that the conversation about it goes) detracts a bit from the genuine tension that this narrative thread could have produced, but then Nightflyers has that tendency of getting in its own way, so it’s not really a surprise by now.

D’Branin, meanwhile, is lost in his own obsession with the mission. Endlessly trying new variations on his chosen method for contacting the Volcryn which makes little sense to me purely because I don’t understand how he came to the conclusion this was what he needed to try or indeed any sort of reason for how or why he’s putting it together. The show doesn’t seem interested in explaining it either, probably rightly assuming that if you’ve already accepted a ship haunted by the Captain’s mother and a female cannibal cult with a literal milking machine for men then small details like this will be irrelevant to you.

Verdict: It’s increasingly frustrating to watch a show that so consistently alienates me as a viewer. It feels occasionally like maybe the show is trying to convince me I’m simply not smart enough to understand the story it’s telling, when the reality is that it’s telling several and it isn’t doing any single one of them properly. Maddening. 4/10

Greg D. Smith