Jolene, the old lady in the psych ward, gets to tell her story, while Vic and Maggie try to recover from Manx’s psychological and physical attacks on them.

Whenever there’s a flashback on this show, you know it’s something significant. It’s Saugus, Massachusetts 1954 and young Manx turns up at drive-in diner to meet his sweetheart, Jolene. He proposes to her, wanting her to be the mother of his children, but she too is a ‘strong creative’ and escapes from him by using her roller skates to access her Inscape bridge.

Vic is in hospital, voluntarily receiving therapy and medical treatment and finds herself rooming with an elderly Jolene. Drugs have been blunting her psychic knife, and once she’s off them she teams up with Vic to find Manx. They’re soon flying down the hospital ward corridors, the wheelchair is a substitute to her roller skates, and they travel to dark tunnels where the ‘missing’ posters of all the abducted children are pasted to the wall.

The greatest joy in this episode is watching Jolene (Eraserhead’s Judith Roberts) transform herself and Vic into invisible non-corporeal beings so that they can taunt Manx. They play with the Wraith, flipping switches and dials, before poisoning its owner with carbon monoxide fumes. It’s the first time we’ve seen any real vulnerability on Manx’s part, and when Jolene inevitably dies at the end, passing on the baton to Vic, you feel something positive has been achieved.

Verdict: After last week’s battering by Manx, it’s encouraging to see him getting some retaliation, suggesting that everything isn’t going his way. The dynamic between Vic and Maggie works beautifully – you feel they really are there for one another – but you can feel the hurt from the constant beating. Thrilling TV. 9/10

Nick Joy