Massive spoilers

MDR find themselves in the outside world on a frozen lake…

This rates as one of the most astonishing pieces of television I’ve seen in a decade. From the literal stone cold opening on a black speck on a vast white ice sheet to the closing shot of that same figure in close up, a twisted smile of knowing and cunning and acceptance on their face, it is made of mastery.

Shots, colours, framing, positioning, transitions – everything here is built with a sense that no second is wasted, no bird launching from a branch unintended, no look, no breath, no step is without meaning.

Of course for a viewer to see this, to feel it in their bones needs the material to sing, to draw us in so we can’t help but put our phones down and watch every frame with open mouths and beating hearts.

And all this is before we get to the events that unfold in the episode itself.

Look, episodes 1 through 3 were pretty, more than that, they used sound and sight to build something spectacular but this, this is an elevation in altitude for a show that’s already flying.

As for what happens? It’s like nothing you could have expected, nothing you could have predicted. And it leaves a whole lot of things people have been speculating about up in the air.

One huge question was answered though and that’s about Helly/Helena and which version of her we have on the severed floor. Yet in answering it, the show lays out several systems and possibilities that were always there but had remained, until now, invisible. These revelations are both fascinating and chilling because they only underscore Lumon’s complete control of their severed employees, regardless of where they find themselves.

And lest we forget, slavery is all too often a commercial enterprise. When people see corporations bowing the knee to fascists rather than standing up to them, remember it was businesses, traders and corporations who valued slaves for the labour they could steal from their bodies and souls. The worst kind of commerciality, the worst kind of business leader bows the knee because, in the end, the only thing they care about is themselves. If they’re collaborators now, with the moral hollowness that implies, they were collaborators before.

Our conclusion must be this: collaborators are not allies – this is important to remember because, like pieces flipping on a Go board, when fenced in by your opponent, they’ll change their colours at a moment’s notice.

Allies can be radical. Collaborators can’t because their collaboration is driven by expediency, by fashion and trends and social pressure, not by a moral commitment to the cause.

This episode sees each of our team distort out of shape from the pressure Lumon is applying. There’s a quote from the show ‘the surest way to tame a prisoner is to let him believe he’s free.’ This underscores Lumon’s approach since the breakout at the end of Season 1 and this week’s episode shows both this idea in practice and just how close the walls of the cell remain when you exercise your freedom ‘wrong’.

Irving, Helly, Mark and Dylan all manage to take the wrong steps, some of them because they’re right, others because they’re compromised and Mark because, honestly, he’s thinking with his penis. The clash of their decisions, their anger at themselves and at Lumon results in discord and discord results in disruption.

And disruption results in catastrophe in the sense of it being a sudden end and a reversal of what was expected. Just how bad it is? It remains to be seen.

Verdict: I don’t care about spoilers, but I don’t want to say more because this episode should be seen blind to be appreciated. Just be prepared for something beautiful, bleak, thrilling and unexpected.

10/10 Ortbo’s

Stewart Hotston