Liz’s increasingly strange behaviour begins to trouble Max and Rosa. Michael and Maria continue to search for some way to reach Alex, Dallas and Bonnie. Isobel begins training with Tezca to try to banish her demons.

After last week’s very Liz-centric episode, the show gets back to being more of an ensemble, as our various heroes search for the way forward in an increasingly confusing world for all of them.

Liz herself is super-focused on doing all the things that she couldn’t do when she was busy worrying about others, which seems, as Max is forced to observe at one point, more than a little unethical. Shivani is happy to keep encouraging her though and between them they start going to some dark places with all this ‘research’, all the while huffing even more of that Alien Mist which just last week almost managed to kill the pair of them.

Rosa, being an ex-addict herself, is quick to notice the signs in her sister, which serves to confirm Max’s rather more vague suspicions that something is off with his girlfriend. Each of them tries, in their own way, to confront her about what she’s doing and the path down which she is headed, but has Liz Ortecho ever been one to listen to the advice of others when she has the science bit between her teeth?

Michael and Maria continue in their own ways to try to figure out a way to access their friends trapped beneath the sinkhole, and they aren’t without help in this endeavour. It seems that the key to their respective paths may lie in things they already have/know, and added to that Michael gets some advice from a very unexpected source, which is welcome nonetheless.

Isobel decides to try a fairly direct approach to helping Tezca confront her fears, but isn’t quite prepared for the nature of them. It’s true that her old mentor’s fears are wrapped up in Jones and what he did to her, but it isn’t as simple as merely a fear of the Dictator himself, and confronting the full scale and magnitude of the demons she carries with her may be beyond even Isobel’s skills to overcome.

Meanwhile, after a couple of episodes’ complete absence, we get to see things from Dallas and Bonnie’s perspective, and honestly it feels like neither of them could have asked for a better person to be stuck with in whatever place it is they find themselves Bonnie is able to encourage Dallas in embracing his alien side more while Dallas – being a preacher – is able to help Bonnie to more fully accept who she is and more importantly value that.

It’s an interesting episode, if not necessarily the strongest of the season. There are a couple of leaps in the narrative logic and one or two plot-convenient developments but overall it presents us with some interesting answers and some nice character moments.

Verdict: Not the strongest it’s been but not bad either. 7/10

Greg D. Smith