Mara must try to persuade an elderly woman out of Reverie so that her medical treatment can continue, but first she must unravel the mystery of why the woman wants to stay in her dream. Paul is still worried about the physical symptoms Mara experienced from injuries sustained in Reverie, and has a radical proposal as to who Alexis should look to for help in solving the issue.

Not for the first time, Reverie lulls the viewer in with an apparently obvious set of circumstances, before changing direction. Pilar is an elderly nursing home patient with lung cancer, and she’s disappeared off into a Reverie which sees her as a much younger woman living an apparently carefree life. Then comes the switcheroo.

The problem this week, is that for the first half of the episode the show forgets that Mara is an intelligent, empathetic individual who has a natural talent for reading people and has her pursuing entirely the wrong course of action even though it’s obvious to the audience from the beginning that she’s barking up the wrong tree. That’s bad enough, but that the rationale the show hints at seems to be that she is all girly and giddy because she got it on with her ex just makes it frankly offensive.

Still, once the lightbulb goes off and she realises what Pilar is actually in Reverie to do, things pick up significantly. There’s an edge of risk that wasn’t there before now that she’s been actually injured in Reverie and we know it can happen again, and she gets to be brave, empathetic and clever all over again. Honestly, it’s almost like the two halves of the episode were written by different people.

Elsewhere, Paul is clearly concerned about Mara’s safety. His pleas to Alexis on the subject seem to be falling on deaf ears, but when he makes a radical suggestion on the matter, she unexpectedly ends up following up on it. Whether that will be something she lives to regret remains to be seen.

The conclusion of Pilar’s story is schmaltzy and cliched, as the show can tend to be, and it’s also so obvious you will have guessed it at least ten minutes before anyone in the show does, but that’s the place in which Reverie operates, so it’s difficult to bear it ill will on that score. The conclusion of the episode itself on the other hand, is a whole other matter. Once again the show has the viewer and Mara wrong-footed, and questioning what’s real and what isn’t. That final couple of minutes is genuinely the most surprising and engaging part of the entire episode, while everything that goes before it is pretty much as close to spinning its wheels as the series gets.

Verdict: Not the best instalment by a long way. Inconsistency in the main character and the cliched, formulaic nature of the plot mean it’s left to the final couple of surprises, unrelated to what’s been happening for the last hour, that will hold your attention. 6/10

Greg D. Smith