Problems pile up as the survivors face a potentially disastrous situation arising from the damaged section of the ship. Trust will need to be put both in those who have earned it and those who have not as lives are on the line.

We are almost in danger at this point of forgetting that little alien virus thing that’s presumably scuttling about inside someone’s brain, as the show deals with the human drama attaching to each of our protagonists while also suddenly remembering that they’re stuck on a damaged spaceship with no crew that they’re vaguely relying on holding together long enough to get them where they were headed. Doubly so now that Baum has fired off the only escape pod into space in a fit of petulant anger.

So a serious problem arises with the ship – one which could potentially spell the doom of the craft and everyone on board – and a group of them sets off to try to fix it, running into Logan on the way who’s still trying his very best to help. Inevitably, things go more than a little sideways and we end up with two lives on the line in two very different ways, with two very different potential saviours in the frame.

Against this backdrop, the flashbacks this episode return to Shun – a first for the series – as we get a little more information about what he did on Earth after the death of his brother and the journey he took which ultimately led to his boarding the origin. This narrative has relevance to the present day in a very real way, as we see Shun stepping up to a role he might plausibly have assumed was denied to him by his previous life and which certainly he could not have guessed at.

What’s interesting here is that whereas some characters on the Origin either seem beyond redemption or are looking for it on Thea, there’s almost a suggestion here that Shun is someone whose redemption began on Earth, and that his trip to Thea was less the beginning and more the next stage of that arc. But it’s clear that he’s never at any point forgiven himself for what he was or what he allowed to happen, and thus that he believes himself to be a bad person. The conflict we witness in Shun is less against his baser nature as with certain other characters and more with his own assessment of himself as a person.

So there are big set pieces, important decisions and people coming through both in line with and utterly against expectations throughout this instalment, and it all pays off rather pleasingly, before the show takes a sudden left turn to remind us all about that gribbly alien it seemed in danger of forgetting just as the credits begin to roll.

Verdict: Interesting character focus that builds on the foundations laid previously, and some great action sequences mean that this one is still very much holding my attention. 8/10

Greg D. Smith