Having tricked his way onto the secret Venus mission, Valya finds himself the target of Colonel Raskova’s murderous wrath.

It’s generally accepted that great whites hunt alone, which is good news for Star City, because having Fosbury flopped over one last week, hopefully what follows can be sustained by its own logic, rather than laughable incredulity. So, the less said about the premise of somehow launching three cosmonauts towards Venus without anyone noticing the better. They’re on their way there now, and we can focus on the meat of all this daftness – will Colonel Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) have an aneurysm, and does she have a flick knife in the toe of her left boot?

Flick knife or not, it’s all kicking off at Mission Control with a battle of wits to see whether our plucky (if perennially miserable) cosmonauts can evade the KGB’s dastardly clutches… with a plot development that explains why the writers went to so much narrative trouble to get a Hindi speaking Indian seconded to the spaceship’s crew.

Meanwhile, Irina and Tanya are chasing each other around Moscow and if Irina does have some kind of family connection to an extremely senior communist figure of historical note, and this has slipped Colonel Raskova’s attention, then Rosa Klebb really is the Soviet Union’s least competent KGB officer ever.

Verdict: The episode ends with a humongous hook of the sort that won’t just need a bigger boat – it’s going to need a bigger shark.  Wonderful stuff! 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com