Alfred gets dragged into ‘one last job’ before he can head off to America, helping to extract Lucius Fox from the Raven Society. But he must also sort out his tangled personal life before he goes. Prime Minister Aziz sets in motion a plan to rid him of a troublesome rival.

I have to admit, by the end of the last episode, I felt pretty much like Mrs P herself, thoroughly disillusioned with young Alfred and ready to wash my hands of him. This time out, I won’t say that he gets a lot better, but there is at least a sense that he’s trying.

Having gathered the money he needs to get out of the country and go to America, Alfie is ready to just tie up loose ends and be on his way. But fate has other ideas. Lucious Fox needs to get away from his Raven Society handlers, and Alfred is determined by many different interested parties to be the man for the job. Haunted by what happened on the robbery with Troy, Alfred is determined to try to take a more peaceful approach to matters, but that isn’t necessarily a choice that life will allow him to make.

If that seems difficult though, Alfie has other problems, unsurprisingly of the romantic variety. Having left it to almost the last possible moment, he needs to let Sandra know his plans, and that they specifically don’t include her. As if that weren’t enough trouble for him to be in, there’s the matter of Troy’s wife and his dalliance with her, which is bad enough without the fact that everyone else seems to know about it as well, meaning it’s presumably only a matter of time before Troy himself gets wise and then who knows what might happen?

At Raven Society HQ, Lord Harwood finds himself increasingly isolated, encouraged by the quiet whispers of the sinister Salt. Having manoeuvred Lady Gaunt out of the way, Salt sets about planting seeds in Harwood’s mind about any other supporters she may still have on his staff, with some explosive results. As events progress, it seems that Salt’s ambitions may be even more far reaching (and deadlier) than they had previously seemed. Despite everything Harwood is, it’s difficult not to feel a tinge of sympathy for him, increasingly isolated, without any of his preferred and trusted confidants around him, and increasingly at the mercy of the scheming Salt. Bad show indeed.

And just so we are under no illusions as to everyone in the series being a bit of a bastard, Prime Minister Aziz comes up with a very cunning and quite merciless way of ridding himself of an old rival, while having some fun at the same time. It really is a dastardly bit of scheming that he pulls off here, and if anyone doubted he had the ruthlessness needed to keep his job, this should silence those qualms.

Verdict: Redeems its central character a little from last time out but everyone else is still the centre of far more interesting stories. 8/10

Greg D. Smith