With Eric still on the loose and the rest of the survivors on edge, Henri struggles against the ghosts of his past as he searches for answers in the present. Can anyone be trusted?

It feels a little like Henri gets short-changed in one way in this episode, as the run time seems to deal far more with the present than his past. That said, what we do discover about him starts to make a lot more sense of exactly why he might have chosen the blank slate offered to him by Origin. What’s fascinating is that unlike Shun, who was running from a laundry list of evil acts willingly committed, or Lana, running from a past where she failed, Henri is instead trying to outpace a far more morally complex past, in which noble intention led to a success which wasn’t necessarily all he had thought it might be. It certainly explains the man we met at the beginning, as well as why he is so nervous around medical procedures for a doctor.

However, most of the drama is in the present, as Eric runs loose around the ship and the others try to work out what best to do. Shun and Lana decide to go and track him down after he vanishes from an early encounter with one of the others, and Venisha elects to stay with Rey as Henri and Abigail set about an impromptu autopsy of Taylor’s body to try to determine exactly what it is that they’re dealing with.

But the whole point of this organism, as we saw demonstrated by Taylor, is that it seems to leave its host in semi-control periodically, meaning that it’s never quite as simple as tracking down Eric and dealing with him, as he alternates between cunning and apparent genuine terror. With the gang all still relative strangers to one another, this inevitably means that not everyone is on the same page about him, and that lends to the tension.

What’s becoming apparent is that certain of the survivors are already pairing off with one another, though not necessarily in a romantic so much as a pragmatic sense. Lana and Chun are developing a bond, Henri and Abigail share common ground and Logan and Katie obviously have some sort of chemistry between them although it is far from clear what that might actually amount to.

As usual, none of it necessarily feels especially new thematically, in terms of the genre. Bunch of people trapped on a ship with mysterious alien zombie plague virus isn’t exactly breaking new ground, and for that matter even the moral conundrum we see Henri experiencing in flashback is well-executed but not exactly original in concept. Fortunately, it’s the strength of the performances and the obvious budget on display that combine to elevate it from also-ran into something genuinely interesting.

Verdict: Still not doing anything especially new or different, but doing it slickly and with no little style. Solid. 7/10

Greg D. Smith