The military arrives to request Ben and Ryn’s help in taking down Tia. Helen and the rest if the hybrids rally together to help the people of Bristol Cove. Maddie and Robb may have a cure for the people affected by Tia’s song. War comes to the water.

I’ve been a fan of Siren from the start, so it gives me no pleasure to say that the easiest comparison I can think of for this episode is a certain recent Star Wars entry. Yes, like The Rise of Skywalker, The Toll of the Sea packs an awful lot of stuff into its run time, relying on fancy visuals and an awful lot of contrivance and don’t think-about-it-too-hard plot points to rush towards a conclusion that superficially tugs at the heartstrings of the fan, but will leave them cold when they stop to think about it afterward.

Let’s start with Robb’s conveniently available ‘cure’. That brilliant idea of Maddie’s translates into a readily available and easily distributable cure in not much more time than it’s taking you to read this sentence. The fact that an entire hospital full of nurses and doctors then listen to them and start distributing pairs of earphones to all patients because they tested it on one person and it worked just makes it even sillier still.

Or how about the military, super-secret black ops outfit who just mosey into town because the gang called them and immediately start taking advice and assistance from Ben and Ryn for no real reason – remember not all that long ago when Ben stole the embryos from them? Or even more recently when Xander just walked off with a big box of Mermaid remains? Also, it’s really quite stretching the suspension of disbelief that this unit, which has apparently been studying mer-kind for years, needs Ben to point out a completely obvious fact to them in order to track down Tia.

How about the hybrids, who’ve gone from isolationist introverts who avoid contact with regular people as much as possible to friendly helpers who rock up to do whatever they can ‘because it’s our town too’. They’re only beaten in the ‘woah that was a quick about face’ stakes by Ted Pownall, who gets to sprint breathlessly through an entire character 180 in about the same time you’d usually reserve for introducing a minor character trait like what their favourite food was.

But it all comes down to the big showdown under the waves, when Ryn must go down into another obvious trap to free Hope only she has the ace up her sleeve of Tia apparently being unaware of Ben’s abilities. Cue big confrontation, stand off, fake out, bigger standoff, another fakeout and finally….all of about a minute and a half of fighting before the achingly obvious result which makes no sense given everything the show has told us throughout this season and then… well it just all limps to an awkward, teary conclusion. One character literally gets disposed of offscreen, left to the final indignity of a memory montage involving previously-shot footage. Another main character just vanishes, and life in Bristol Cove (and the rest of America) returns to perfectly normal with two weeks of a major attack that saw presumably hundreds of thousands of people afflicted with an inexplicable brain condition that then got cured by some trippy music.

It’s a shame because Siren started out small and grew a following and clearly the writers wanted to think bigger. But with ten episodes and a TV budget they’ve been forced to cut so many corners, narratively more than aesthetically, and it just leaves so much unfulfilled. Ted’s burgeoning desire to stop the mermaids? Gone. The whole tension of Ryn possibly finding out Ben had dug up a dead mermaid – one of her people – to get his stem cell treatments? Shrug. It feels like in dealing with all the big, showy war stuff, the show forgot about all the little, personal character stuff, which was what it was always about.

Verdict: A rushed, unsatisfying conclusion to what’s been an uneven season. 5/10

Greg D. Smith