Tia steps up her efforts to make war on humanity. Hope returns to the land. The return of an unexpected friend spells trouble. Xander gets weaker. Ted confronts his son about what exactly is happening.

Well, last time out we had Tia sending a call to Xander that disabled him with a weaponised recording of her song. With Xander out of action, and both the recording of the cavern song and the cavern itself both destroyed, things aren’t looking good for everyone’s favourite ex-drunken fisherman turned trainee law enforcement officer. And that’s just for starters.

Having failed to get the rest of the gang (because they all had their phones off at the wedding) Tia embarks on a much bigger and deadlier version of the same plan, threatening the lives of not just the inhabitants of Bristol Cove but many other towns and cities besides. She isn’t mucking around with this one at all.

Meanwhile, Hope (now looking like a 6 year old by human standards) has made her first kill in the water and returns to land to be with her mother and start learning how to use her own song. Cue lots of little ‘fish-out-of-water’ skits like we used to get with Ryn back in season 1 but with a small child instead, including one impressive display of sonic power that will leave Helen and her neighbours cleaning up for a while.

The return of a familiar face, thought dead by Ryn, seems good but spells unmistakeable trouble to the viewer. Though we know it isn’t entirely their fault, we know that it’s not a question of if they betray Ryn’s trust but when.

And poor old Ben has to have a fight with his Dad when he reluctantly asks him for help that ends even more badly than he might have predicted. Then having failed to secure that help, he has to go off and do his own thing to try to put a stop to what’s happening.

There’s a lot here, and it all blows by so quickly that it’s often tricky to actually keep track. Is it better than the last episode? Well, yes and no. If you’re invested in the show and its characters there’s plenty of little beats here – people who used to be, if not enemies, are at least not friends, pulling together in common cause and fighting the good fight.

But it can’t escape the fact that it’s starting to all feel a little bit goofy as it throws all sorts of plot threads at the screen and then hand-waves its way to resolving half of them. By the end of the episode, it resorts to that most TV of tropes for one character – the slipping into a coma – and you can’t help but feel it will be one of those ‘TV Comas’ where the patient is unconscious for just the right amount of plot-convenient time before waking again with no ill effects.

Verdict: As it rattles along toward its season finale, I can’t help but notice that the show is starting to creak at the edges. 6/10

Greg D. Smith