Max and Michael go to visit a faith healer who Max believes may be able to shed light on the alien symbol. Liz worries about whether her cure might do more harm to Isobel. Jenna makes a new alliance after finding some disturbing new facts.

As fun as it is watching Michael and Liz work together (and it really is, partly because Michael is one of the characters who’s been interesting from the beginning), the episode wisely doesn’t overuse it, instead setting up a wonderful little coincidence when Maria and Liz end up going on a road trip to see the exact same faith healer Max and Michael are off to see for completely different reasons. Maria – being a psychic – thinks the healer may be able to help her increasingly ill mother. Max on the other hand has seen a familiar symbol on her flyer and wants to know if she can give him any information about he, Michael and Isobel’s heritage.

As you might expect, both come away disappointed with their main mission, but get satisfaction in other ways, meaning someone gets to find love and someone else gets to knock boots in what must be one of the more odd simultaneously obvious yet surprising hook-ups of the show so far. Either way, it’s a nice little detour that takes a bit of the pressure off some of our main characters.

Elsewhere, turns out that Jenna doesn’t much like being threatened by Jessie Manes, so decides to seek out his son for a bit of an alliance. She brings with her some disturbing information that leads her, Alex and Kyle down a rabbit hole that suggests something quite deadly about one or all of the siblings which none of them had previously suspected. This of course causes issues for all three – Jenna is close to Max, Alex is clearly still in love with Michael, and Kyle is involved in trying to cure Isobel. Only Liz looks for a different possible explanation when Kyle relays the information to her, and suddenly the possibilities are wide open once again.

The wild card is Isobel’s husband Noah, who is less than convinced about the explanation of his wife having suddenly gone off to rehab. He’s causing trouble at the sheriff’s office wanting an investigation of her whereabouts and someone to look into Max, who he’s becoming increasingly convinced is behind her disappearance somehow, but then his curiosity gets even more potentially inconvenient. Judging by his final actions in the episode, I’m suddenly intrigued by exactly what he might be up to.

It’s an odd one, because this is the sort of fictional setup which can be frustrating as characters work against one another in situations because nobody simply sits down to talk, but what makes it palatable is that people in this show tend to be less prone to jump to wild conclusions or to act upon them. I also would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching Jenna assert her authority over Kyle in one scene – as slightly obvious as it is, it’s still satisfying to watch his patronising question about ‘letting girls into the clubhouse’ get shot down quite as brutally as it is.

Verdict: It’s starting to feel like there’s a genuine wider mythos being set up here for future seasons. I hope so, because I’m here for it (as long as we get much more Alex and Michael). 9/10

Greg D. Smith