As the Nightflyer gets closer to the Volcryn, tensions rise among the crew. Rowan is processing his grief, Agatha and Thale are suffering in proximity to the Vocryn energy and Mel wants explanations from Roy. Underpinning it all, Cynthia is back and has her eyes on re-taking her ship and getting it away from the Volcryn.

So, there was a lot in the last episode – Rowan and Tessia’s baby turned out to be spewing out spores that could eat their way through medical quarantine glass. Rowan couldn’t develop an antidote in time because D’Branin was too busy using the relevant equipment to go on dream encounters with some alternate universe version of his dead daughter, Agatha was getting super powerful with her abilities, Cynthia trapped Lommie and made her escape and Roy turned out to be… well, not biological according to the ship’s decontamination protocols. Shit, as the kids have it these days, went down.

This time out, we get some actual sense of forward momentum on some of that. For starters there’s Rowan. Now, because of the opening moments of the first episode, we all know that at some point Rowan will lose his cool and start chasing Agatha around with an axe and then she’ll top herself with a medical saw. What we couldn’t see until now was why those things happened. Now we know that Rowan had to watch his new baby and wife die and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. And being as how it was Agatha who was ‘communicating’ with Tessia and pressed the purge button, it’s fairly obvious why he might have a slight issue with her. But before it can get to that, the show has to let us see Rowan’s descent, and here’s the issue. Although Angus Thompson is a great actor and obviously enjoys playing the role, at this late stage and with so many other narratives going on, it’s difficult to fully buy into the turn from rational scientist to crazed killer, even with the losses he has suffered. What makes it worse is the show’s continued habit of having the cast not behave like human beings would – there’s one particular encounter between Thale and Rowan that makes no sense at all – so overall it just doesn’t quite hit the spot.

There’s similar issues with Agatha. She’s now unable to speak directly to Thale because their respective powers cause an immensely painful feedback loop of teke energy and apparently despite building a ship that can go into deep space the engineers of the Nightflyer forgot to include any sort of remote communications devices. She’s on a path of her own realising that D’Branin is all-consumed by his work (which seems like a really late realisation for a psychiatrist who is also his lover to make but sure) and that the continued existence of her and Thale on the same ship as they get closer to the Volcryn is going to be fairly destructively problematic for everyone on board. So in a weird sort of Harry Potter-esque twist she decides that one of them has to die for the other to survive, and despite her being a psychiatrist, in a relationship, educated etc obviously it needs to be Thale who survives. Again, there’s little sense of logic here – for starters as we saw in the opening episode she runs from Rowan who’s trying to kill her, only to then kill herself anyway. You can argue that she’s only trying to stave off Rowan until she can send her message (but, how useful is that actually going to be anyway?) but then why not send the message and then let Rowan kill her anyway? It all just doesn’t quite work.

And there’s Roy, who is… well we don’t know because despite Mel confronting him and demanding an explanation while looking all fierce, he just tells her ‘not now’ and she drops it. I feel particularly sorry for Jodie Turner-Smith in this show, being as how her main function seems to be wandering around in tight outfits, having sex with various people and occasionally looking mean. The last thing the show actually gave her to do was going to the engine rooms and manually doing… something and even then she had to be rescued by Roy. There’s honestly a scene here where someone tells her how essential she’s been to the mission and it jarred me as I spent a good five minutes wondering what they wouldn’t have achieved if she hadn’t been around. Anyway, Roy clearly isn’t human, although what he actually might be remains mysterious and will be just another plot point either left to dangle or wrapped too quickly in the remaining hour.

Oh and of course Auggie and his devotion to Cynthia which seems odd, slightly tacked on and a bit pointless. The show seriously needs to make its mind up about Cynthia – what she actually is, what her capabilities are etc. because based on previous episodes and what we saw her do, I’m a little unsure why she needs any help from the little bald second in command.

Verdict: Unsatisfying. Nobody here is getting the time or space to have actual character development, which has the effect of making almost every action taken by anyone seem random. With one episode to go, my faith in them pulling off the landing here is not high. 5/10

Greg D. Smith