Ryn and her baby return to land. Tia and her tribe make some aggressive moves. Ben is experiencing increasingly powerful side-effects from his experimental treatment.

After somewhat spinning its wheels a little last time out, Siren runs the risk of going in the opposite direction this time as it crams in quite a lot of different narrative threads, all competing for space in a slightly bulging hour.

It’s been a while since we really had much of a ‘fish out of water’ action for Ryn, who’s mostly pretty well integrated with her human friends now, so it was a pleasant (if largely narratively unnecessary) diversion to have her trying to adapt to parenting the human way. This includes some basic differences in how things are done and one scene involving a mother and baby group at the local library that leaves quite a few people in shock.

Ben meanwhile is continuing to inject himself with mermaid cells, ostensibly to make sure it’s safe for his mother. It’s hard to escape the feeling though, that he’s starting to do this more for himself. Not least because he didn’t simply ask Ryn – his actual lover – whether he could use her cells and instead dug up one of her dead sisters and hid it – you just know that’s going to come bite him in the ass at some point. At any rate, the side effects are continuing and getting more noticeable – how long realistically can he keep this hidden?

Xander is becoming extra responsible and seems pretty happy with his training to be a cop, although his classmate Annie seems to have issues of her own that he can’t quite get around. It’s nice to watch Xander grow as a character, and there are interesting things afoot here, especially when the two worlds he’s involved in collide in a way that there’s no easy way out of for him.

And underwater, things are starting to look dicey. Tia has a big following now, and Ryn’s tribe is vulnerable in more ways than the obvious to them. With Ted starting to ask serious questions as to how much danger the Merpeople might pose, it feels inevitable that the very war that Tia wants might arrive regardless of what Ryn or her brethren do.

Verdict: Tense and full of interesting character work. A little narratively dense but good to see the show back on form. 8/10

Greg D. Smith