As Klesco prepare for a big live presentation to the town, Ben and Maddie see the perfect opportunity to do something that will hopefully send the company out of town for good. Ryn starts to repay her debt to the military. Xander finally starts to put the pieces together.

After swearing to the pack a few episodes back that they were all in this fight together and would do something big to get rid of the oil company and make the waters safe, it can’t help but feel like Ben and Maddie have been treading water. Then again they have had dead drug dealers, temperamental mermaids (and their health) and various other distractions to deal with. This week however, they are handed an opportunity to really hit Klesco where it hurts, making a big splash as the company presents a live feed of their drilling to the whole town. But have they really thought this all through?

Audacious as the plan is, it relies heavily on trust between the pack and their human allies, and it just hasn’t ever felt like Katrina is really on board with this particular alliance, while Donna’s daughter is clearly still harbouring issues with Xander, the man who killed her mother. It’s interesting here that Xander has been a lot quicker to forgive Levi his murder of Xander’s father, doubly so when you consider that his shooting Donna had been an accident and had come in the wake of his father’s death, but this serves merely to emphasise the different nature of the mermaids from humans – as Ryn says to Ben and Maddie, in the water they are more animal, and even she herself is animal, regardless of their affection for her.

Speaking of that affection, those who may have been wondering whether the little arrangement between Ben, Maddie and Ryn would ever be revisited won’t be disappointed with this episode. It feels simultaneously like a fitting place for it to happen and also a little incongruous against the background of everything else going on, but then again how does one ‘normalise’ a mermaid/human threesome? Who knows?

We also get to see a bit more of Ben’s mother, who isn’t doing great herself (again I suspect seeds of future plots being sown here) and Helen’s long-lost relative gets a brief reappearance too. It all starts to feel like it’s a bit finale-ish, until you realise that this is literally the halfway mark of a 16 episode run. Between Xander’s confrontation of his ‘girlfriend’ and the whole plan with the oil boat, things really start barrelling along toward an exciting conclusion, and this is the episode before the mid-season finale next week – god alone knows what they have in store for us for the end of the season!

Verdict: Throwing an awful lot at the viewer and making almost all of it stick. The little show that could keeps on delivering week after week. 8/10

Greg D. Smith