Ben and Maddie try to comfort Ryn, but a message from Helen has the two sisters meeting again to see if they can find some common ground. Meanwhile, Decker shows up at Ben’s mother’s benefit function, and has some unwelcome revelations.

It’s a bit of a quieter episode this week, but no less packed full of revelations for all that. First up, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: yes, last week Helen confessed to ‘Donna’ that she too is a mermaid (or at least used to be) and no, it doesn’t really get addressed any further this week at all. So there’s that.

However, what we do get is all sorts of other stuff: Ben has come up with a smart way to try to persuade his dad to stop with the overfishing – by appealing to his wallet. I’m still not 100% sure whether or not the senior Pownall and his wheelchair-bound wife are going to turn out to be on the side of the villains or the angels. This episode only adds to that uncertainty, which is to the show’s credit, even if it’s a little frustrating as a viewer, wanting to know for sure who to root for and against.

Then Chris spots that Decker is in town, and he and Xander go and inform Ben. This leads Ben to do a little digging and rapidly add up what’s going on – Decker is here looking for the mermaid that got away. This leads to a fairly awkward exchange between Ben and Maddie about a certain part of the whole experience he hasn’t yet divulged to her. I’d almost started to assume this was a thread that the show wasn’t going to pick up, and I’m happy to see it brought back up again, adding an extra layer of complexity and uncertainty for our protagonists in a show that’s brought plenty of both already.

At any rate, they go to Ben’s mother’s function to show their faces and there manage to run directly into Decker, who has rather slimily been making sure to tell Mrs Pownall all about his research into a ‘rare marine creature’ and how its stem cells can be used to cure paralysis. Ben takes that about as well as you might expect but his plan next is pretty decent.

Elsewhere, ‘Donna’ is trying to persuade Ryn to join Team Water-Bound-and-Hating-Humans while Ryn equally tries to persuade her sister that not all humans are bad. This is complicated slightly by the news that Decker is in town, and leads to another showdown (by this point about the third in the episode) in which choices are made that might come back to bite everyone going forward.

As the episode closes, our various protagonists are a little bit scattered and not all doing things that are necessarily good ideas. Next time out, I’m expecting fireworks.

Verdict: Ramping up the tension and setting up even more plot points to dive into going forwards, this is far smarter and more ambitious than the elevator pitch ‘A TV show about mermaids being real’ might suggest. 8/10

Greg D. Smith