Welcome to the one episode this season that really doesn’t work. And, unusually for a series about family and intimacy, it’s all down to one person.

This is a Lito and Sun episode and they’re both great. As Sun infiltrates her brother’s investor party, Lito gets his audition. At the exact same time. Lito’s refusal to help Sun makes perfect sense but what makes even more is that he reverses it. Lito is, under the bluster, a fundamentally good guy and the point where he solves Sun’s problem while she solves his is the show at its simplest and most balletic.

The other major player this week is Capheus, who delivers his first speech. This works brilliantly, not just because Toby Onwumere is an exceptional speaker but because of how realistic the scene is. Faced with a crowd, Capheus freezes up and the moment Jela tells him ‘drive the bus’ has real poignancy to it. Likewise the way the speech works but is interrupted by a riot and even the realistic, frightening brutality that follows. The Capheus/Nairobi plot has impressed throughout the season and this episode is no exception.

All of that works. But over in the Lito plot, the moment Andy Dick walks on screen you can almost audibly hear the air leave the episode. Dick does the same thing Dick has always done: play a tone deaf caricature of a gay man whose big scene is explaining just what he did with his Oscar. He feels like he’s wandered in from a bad sitcom about Hollywood and he drags down the core of the episode. There’s none of the complexity and humanity you get with all the other LGBT characters; it’s just one note, blunt-edged comedy that never once lands.

Worse still, we spend so much time with him that other plots get lost. Will goes back to heroin and then gets clean again in the space of one episode. Sun stands around and waits for the season finale. Whispers pops in to remind us he’s still around. None of them is well served because a character who is at best an advert for season 3 somehow needs the screen time.

Verdict: There’s still a lot to enjoy here but this is a single, massively flat note, in a series that up to now has been close to perfect. Hopefully next episode will turn things around. 5/10

Alasdair Stuart