As Isobel and Rosa fight to help Maria navigate her grandmother’s memories and avoid Jones in the dreamscape, Liz works in the real world to find a physical way to separate her best friend from the alien warlord. Michael and Alex team up to locate Jones and more importantly, the pod.

Having left us on a rather dramatic cliffhanger last week, the show keeps turning the screw on the audience and the characters this week, with several desperate races against time to save the day all going on at once.

Liz ploughs the loneliest furrow this week, stuck on her own in a barn with the comatose Maria and the recumbent forms of her sister and Isobel, trying to work out a scientific way of physically separating the bond Jones has created between himself and Maria. It’s a thankless bit of the script really, requiring Jeanine Mason to basically talk to herself a lot and desperately try to make the fairly pedestrian science stuff seem as dramatic as what’s going on everywhere else, but she does it with gusto (and even an impromptu bit of blacksmithing) and though it’s all a little forced and silly, she makes it work.

Michael and Alex get their own work to do, running a mission to locate wherever Jones is hiding and grab his pod. This is almost equally tough for the actors given that the majority of the screen time is them talking a lot about stuff – info dumps aplenty as Alex slowly reveals what he’s been up to at Deep Sky and Michael gets a little bit vulnerable. Given that these two are as meant to be as Liz and Max, it feels long overdue that they finally start spending some quality time together, and Michael Vlamis and Tyler Blackburn have always sold the relationship well with decent onscreen chemistry, but Alex’s sudden revelation of a tale from Iraq not only feels rambling but also a little forced for the circumstances, It would be nice if the writers trusted the characters and their relationship enough for Alex to be able to reach Michael without him having to have a perfect parable to relate in detail that matches the exact circumstances, but again, they’re both good enough to make what they have work.

The vast majority of the action and excitement comes in the mindscape, as Isobel and Rosa do their best to help Maria navigate her Grandmother’s memories. There’s some painful revelations here as Maria is literally forced to re-live the day as her grandmother in the Caulfield Institute as their experiments on aliens and people of colour continue, and the tension is palpable as they wait for Jones to suddenly jump out, bogeyman-style from any dark corner. Seeing the three of them work together and be there for one another is great though – Isobel in particular has come so far in the last three seasons and seeing her genuine worry for Maria and Maria’s acceptance and implicit trust in her good intentions is lovely to see.

It’s difficult to really predict where the show will go next. Some things get tied off, while a whole lot more get started, and it seems clear that for now at least, this is one story that will run and run.

Verdict: One of the weaker episodes in terms of dialogue, pulled up by committed performances and decent onscreen chemistry. 8/10

Greg D. Smith