Donna and her two friends are in town in search of Ryn, but will she go quietly with them? Ben and Maddie’s relationship is starting to strain thanks to Ben’s addiction to Siren song and Xander is out for blood.

After the slow, deliberate pace of last time out, this instalment of Siren ramps everything up again, as Ryn’s sister, accompanied by two other merfolk including the male who murdered Sean, make landfall to find Ryn. Trouble is, Ryn has become quite attached to life on land with Ben and Maddie, and doesn’t really want to go back to the water.

Adding an extra layer of complication to our happy little show about life in a small fishing town is that Ben doesn’t want Ryn to go either, for quite different reasons. It’s to the show’s credit that it held off on the whole ‘hero gets hopelessly enchanted by the Siren song’ trope, and took the time to build the relationship between Ben and Ryn slowly, with Maddie’s presence keeping the interactions platonic-ish, though half indicating that there’s equal attraction to Maddie for Ryn as there is to Ben. Of course, Maddie hasn’t heard the song, and so now, as the series approaches its end game, she’s starting to feel less like an equal part of this adventure and more like a third wheel.

Xander, still full of grief for his father and also being Xander, greets news of the Merfolk being in town pretty much as you’d expect, grabbing his dad’s hunting rifle and heading out into a night that already has Sheriff Bishop running around also looking for Donna and friends and Doctor Decker, wandering forlornly in search of his own siren. So that’s rogue merfolk, the police, an angry man with poor impulse control, a doctor who is both in love with one of the merfolk and also wants to use her blood to cure paralysis and Ben all out on the streets, each seeking the others in a game that can only end in violence.

And of course it does, but not in quite the ways that you might expect. Blows are thrown, shots are fired, but when the crescendo is reached, there are fewer casualties than you might expect. Helen is on hand to play loremaster of mermaids and pout angrily at various folks, but honestly I’m starting to wonder if we are ever going to hear more about exactly who she is and why she’s there. The reveal earlier in the season to Donna that she was ‘one of them’ hasn’t had anything done with it since, so either it’s coming in the finale or it was set aside in hope of a Season 2 (which was recently confirmed) – given the quality of the show to date I’m ruling out the third option that the writers just forgot to do anything with it, for now.

But by the time the dust settles, we are left well set up for the finale – strange alliances are being made all over the place, and there’s plenty of tension still to be resolved.

Verdict: Pacy, action-packed and really starting to provide the goods to some of the threads its been sowing from episode 1, what’s not to like? 9/10

Greg D. Smith