Things get tense with a corpse in the pool suggesting that the alien creature may not be as dead as everyone hoped it would be. As survivors begin to turn on one another, not knowing who to trust, Lee does her best to work out what’s going on, haunted by the memories of what drove her to board the Origin.

Continuing its trend for the familiar feel of its ideas, this instalment of Origin feels a bit Philip K Dick (even going so far as to have one character reference the author himself albeit in an unrelated scene) as we dig down into the past of Lee and what exactly it was that led this incredibly talented computer expert who detests physical contact and human interaction in general on board the Origin. Turns out, her expertise in computers wasn’t earned by a fancy education or some high-powered executive job. Lee is a very specific kind of expert, in a world that has left her kind behind with the development of new tech.

The story of how Lee harnesses that new tech out of curiosity, then ends up becoming entranced by it as she pushes it to do things that it was never meant for, feels so very Blade Runner 2049 that you may – like me – have to keep pinching yourself to ensure you’re not watching that movie. Fortunately, as has been the case so often in this series, the commitment of the performances helps you to forgive how very familiar the ground that it’s treading seems to be. At the very least, it doesn’t leave us wondering whether or not Lee is a real person, but aside from that, this will hold no surprises for genre fans.

Paralleling this in the here and now is the pressing concern that the parasite isn’t dead after all, coupled with the worry of exactly who might be infected and how to tell. Unsurprisingly, given the tension of the situation, this leads to fractious relations among this already fairly different group of people, with some going a lot further than might have been expected. This is where the show actually starts to challenge the viewer a bit, as those easy, comfortable pairings that I mentioned in the last episode all get challenged by the changing circumstances in which everyone finds themselves.

It’s also worth mentioning that those circumstances will – in many instances – reinforce the negative opinions some of the characters hold about themselves. It’s difficult to imagine that Henri’s actions will sit well with him given what we now know of his past and what unfolds here, for example, and it’s hard to imagine that Shun’s own sense of a new start won’t begin to be challenged by the role he’s increasingly forced to adopt here.

Taking that into account, it’s clear that the real meat here is in digging down hard into that original premise of a fresh start for all. It’s starting to look as if the message of the show might end up being that just because you travel halfway across the universe to start over doesn’t mean that you’ll end up being a different person. How it chooses to play with that idea should prove interesting to see indeed.

Verdict: At once familiar and also refreshing. It’s starting to become clear that perhaps all this mining of established ideas is quite deliberate, in service of the bigger theme of the show. I for one, would like to know more. 8/10

Greg D. Smith