Months after the Venera 7 disaster, the Chief Designer is under house arrest in his dacha, and an incompetent apparatchik is in control of Star City forcing Colonel Raskova to forge some new alliances, while engineer Nikulov, relegated to being little more than a human calculator, makes an astonishing discovery (depending on whether or not you’ve ever seen a TV drama series before).

I spent much of last week’s review, mixing my shark metaphors, and ruminating on the laughable implausibilites of Star City’s wonderfully hokey storylines. Superficially, the show’s narrative waters are a lot calmer this week, in the aftermath of Raskova-Klebb’s murderous actions with regard to the supposedly ‘secret’ Venus mission. Anastasia (Alice Englert) is in mourning for Sasha and the remaining characters are generally even more miserable and stony faced than ever. The action is decidedly low key and even sensible – a bit like Anna Maxwell Martin’s KGB footwear.

However, anyone who has ever seen a war film or a cowboy movie is familiar with the scene where Grunt A peers over the top of the dugout and says: ‘It’s quiet.’ To which Grunt B responds, furrowing his brow: ‘Too quiet.’ At which point all hell breaks loose. After all, this is the penultimate episode of an eight part series so, grunt-like, the TV savvy audience knows that things can’t be quite as they seem and it’s got to kick off bigtime for the season finale next week.

I will chance my arm here (a risky thing to do in infested waters), and tentatively suggest that the episode’s massive twist is glaringly obvious from the very first frame. As ever, it’s lots of miserable Soviet fun, but you might find yourself becoming a tad impatient, and developing ocular strain from all that eye-rolling.

Verdict: So, while Plow Deep may be remarkably shark free on the surface, rest assured that there’s an overgrown Megalodon circling not far below, and I’m looking forward to donning my jet pack for next week’s finale. After all, I’m going to have to leap over it one way or another. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com