Dale and Stacey go to some drastic lengths to try to get information from their captives. The gang decide to throw a proper party for Molly’s 15th birthday. Chase is starting to have doubts about what the right thing is to do. Leslie struggles to keep her guard up after Frank sends her to one of the Church’s conversion centres.

It’s getting increasingly difficulty to work out exactly what is going on with some of the PRIDE parents. We know from last episode that Victor and Tina are at least occasionally under the control of something else – presumably members of Jonah’s ‘family’ – but Stacey is also acting mightily weird yet doesn’t seem to have the same recognition for them. It’s also getting increasingly difficult to tell whether they are just ‘possessed’ some of the time, really good at hiding being possessed all the time or maybe just have doppelgangers in some instances.

Regardless, Dale and Stacey’s willingness to push boundaries goes to whole new levels this week as they try to leverage information from Chase any way they can. What’s weirder is that in spite of all that they do, Chase seems to keep getting stuck on how ‘nice’ they’ve been.

Molly’s birthday apparently passed without anyone noticing, so the gang elect to throw her a proper party, using all the money they got when… whatever happened to the Strike Team happened. It’s actually a really sweet little sequence, watching the girls all fuss over Molly as everyone takes her shopping and they get her the clothes and the food she wants, and then Chase and Alex doing their best to be older brother figure and friend respectively, but there remains a tense undercurrent as Chase continues to struggle with whether he’s really cut out for this life, not helped by some clever manipulation (or is it?) by Victor.

Meanwhile, Leslie has been shipped off by Frank to a conversion centre after his attempts to ‘recondition’ her at the church met with failure. It’s fascinating watching Leslie’s iron-hard resolve slowly begin to manifest cracks as she is confronted by a mysterious guru of the church who is able to tell her things about herself of which nobody else was aware, but worse is in store as she goes digging in archive files and discovers a truth that had been hidden even from her. For a ‘fake church’ whose adherents’ beliefs are ‘all bullshit’, the Gibborim seems to have a pretty solid infrastructure and no intention of going anywhere anytime soon.

It’s a sort of heartbreaking episode really, veering between moments of genuine warmth and positivity and desperate sadness. It seems nobody on either side is destined to have a happy or easy existence, but as cracks begin to widen on both sides, I wouldn’t bet against some sort of alliance of necessity before things come to a close.

Verdict: Keeping its audience confused and never quite sure of what’s happening, but in the best of ways. 9/10

Greg D. Smith