Ben and Maddie decide to try a different approach to hiding the pack after Ryn explains to them that enforced captivity together isn’t working. Xander has a plan to enact revenge on his father’s killer. Ryn struggles with her feelings for Ben and the unfamiliar effects they are having on her.

Another episode where humour is used to keep things moving, and plenty more of those ‘fish out of water’ scenarios as the pack continue to try getting acquainted with life out of the water. Ben and Maddie try separating the pack a bit so that they can stop getting on one another’s nerves and fighting all the time, leading to some hilarious scrapes for all concerned.

Mainly these fall to Ben and his new companion ‘Levi’ – the merman who killed Xander’s father, and who has elected that he must learn how to be a man on land from Ben. This works about as well as you might think, but the writers make sure to use this as a two-way opportunity as Ben seeks to learn more about the culture of the merfolk in the water equally as he teaches his new companion about life on Land. What’s really interesting is how quickly Levi takes to certain elements, and how compatible certain elements of modern thinking are to this ‘backward’ race, but don’t worry – there’s still room in there for the odd bit of slapstick in among the profound bits.

Ryn meanwhile is struggling with newfound experiences of her own – it’s becoming more and more obvious (especially with her confession to Maddie in the last episode) that Ryn harbours deep feelings for Ben, every bit as much as he does for her. It feels very peculiar watching her discuss this with Maddie, and more particularly Maddie’s calm reaction to it all, but then it seems that her own experience of the Siren song may have significantly altered Maddie’s perception of the whole thing. Still, it feels unusual to see this whole situation unfolding in the way that it is, reinforcing my perception from an earlier episode that the writers really are delving deep into the possibilities offered by the material.

Elsewhere, Xander encounters the wounded ex-leader of the Pack, which gives him an idea as to how he might secure revenge on his father’s murderer once and for all. I feel like I was a bit hard on Xander’s character last time out, here he shows at least a fair amount of cleverness – even sneakiness – as he pursues his plan. His interaction with Ben, where the latter tries to explain that Levi isn’t necessarily who Xander should be angry at, shows a level of emotional manipulation hitherto unexplored in the character, and I’m almost starting to wonder if we will eventually find out he’s been stringing along his new ‘girlfriend’ the whole time.

There’s other stuff around the edges – Maddie’s continued difficulties with her mother, Cal’s continued tendency to speak first and engage brain later and Helen getting to know her new-found relative, but mostly this feels like an episode giving us a little breather with the merfolk learning how to ‘people’ in their own ways to various degrees of success. One thing’s for certain though – there’s an awful lot of secrets ready to burst out and ruin some delicately balanced plans.

Verdict: Somehow managing to juggle and overarching genre narrative (several in fact) with some light-hearted humour and heartfelt emotional beats. Continues to impress the more it goes on. 8/10

Greg D. Smith