Liz and Rosa are both forced to confront painful memories from the past when their mother briefly walks back into their lives. Michael is worried about Maria. Isobel starts to question her very being.

Max is back, Rosa and her father have been reunited. Michael and Maria are finally in a functional, happy relationship. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, turns out quite a bit, starting with Liz and Rosa’s mother coming back to town to stir up trouble in the Ortecho family once again. Liz may feel like she’s got the worst end of this deal, being as how she actually has to speak to her absent-for-the-past-decade mum, but Rosa might argue. Watching from the shadows brings back memories that even Liz is too young to fully appreciate, and for a recovering junkie who’s just come back from the dead and can’t even show her face in public, that’s a lot to take in.

Making it worse is just what sort of a person their mother is. Devious, manipulative and not really to be trusted, it’s the cruellest of ironies that Liz’s father is reliant on her good graces to get his full citizenship (by her signing her half of the diner over to Liz). There’s a lot here about the nature of motherhood, how Liz coped with bringing up herself and shining ever so brightly, and her mother Helena’s own narcissistic take on her own part in that is played to perfection by Bertila Damas, all soft and snuggly one moment and full of hard edges in the space of an eyeblink the next.

Meanwhile, Michael is worried about Maria, especially when she starts to tell him that she thinks Kyle has been abducted. This is a deep narrative dive, which starts with that simple thing and blossoms into an arc that encompasses not only Maria but her mother and grandmother, and a link to the past of the alien trio that I honestly had never seen coming.

And while Michael is struggling with all that, Isobel is having issues of her own as she starts to wonder whether there’s something inherently broken inside of her that has caused all of her problems, from the blackouts that followed her early trauma onward. Admittedly, her having been spending lots of time with Rosa to try to help her master her own new-found powers and dealing with her lack of self-esteem probably hasn’t helped. But it’s unusual to see Isobel struggling this way, and even more so to watch her and Michael finally have such common ground with one another.

Verdict: Strong as always, with lots of new stuff springing up for the writers to explore. 9/10

Greg D. Smith