With her options limited and time for her species running out, Ryn has one last chance to make a baby, requiring the help of several parties that neither she nor Ben and Maddie trust. Meanwhile, the return of Chris isn’t the joyous reunion his old buddies might have expected.

There’s an awful lot going on in this instalment of Siren. First up, let’s deal with Chris, who was revealed to be secretly holed up at the military base at the end of the last episode. Thing is, though yes this is Chris, he isn’t quite himself. It seems that his last encounter with the merfolk may have done him some permanent damage. The question is whether Ben can trust his military allies when they say that they’ve been looking after his old friend with only his best interests at heart.

Then there’s Ryn, who is getting increasingly desperate to have a baby and having absolutely no luck. A throwaway comment from Maddie as she tries to comfort her about how difficult it can be for humans leads to a crazy idea – IVF. But how does one give a mermaid IVF? With great difficulty as it turns out, which means – yes you guessed it – more leaning on the military. Not only that, to provide an extra layer of complication, Helen’s newfound hybrid extended family need to get involved as well. For those keeping score, that’s Ryn’s last chance at fertility resting in the hands of two groups of people she can’t fully trust.

If you’re wondering where Nicole is in all this (given Ben was supposed to be looking for her when he found Chris), the answer is that nobody really seems to know. Xander is getting increasingly worried by her absence/silence, and when he finally does hear from her, it isn’t necessarily in a way he wants to.

Or how about the Pownalls senior? Ben’s mother is feeling increasingly improved after the first course of stem cells and naturally wants some more. If that wasn’t complicated enough, Ben’s father is – amongst the joy of his wife apparently improving – thinking more on the night of the accident which left her in a wheelchair. And it seems like that wasn’t a simple sequence of events either.

Oh, and there’s Ian, still snooping around, desperate to catch a break on what he senses is a big story lying just outside his grasp. When his editor demands proof of his pet theory (that the creature on the tape is something bred by the military to sabotage the drill rig deliberately), he’s pushed over the edge. Ian ends up doing things we normally wouldn’t expect from the character, and it just goes to show you shouldn’t piss a journalist off too much.

By the end of the episode, far from feeling like it’s getting ready to wrap up, Siren has set up numerous new, emergent plot threads which I can only imagine the writers are planning on tackling in the third season.

Verdict: Fast-paced, sprawling and adding new threads to its web all the time. Still very much the little mermaid show that can. 9/10

Greg D. Smith