After Sheriff Cable and her son Matt ambush him and leave him for dead, Marais’ big boss Avery Sunderland finds himself staggering around the hostile swamplands.

Last week’s episode threw a number of big narrative surprises at us, and it was assumed that injured Sunderland (a gloriously entertaining Will Patton – so good in 2018’s Halloween) would go the way of Alec Holland, namely changing into a beast to square up against Swamp Thing. Instead, he undertakes the long road home alluded to in the episode title.

Sunderland hallucinates that Lucilia is with him, ropey (in both senses of the word) CGI tendrils coming out of her head. He then flashes back to his father foolishly chopping down a sacred tree in the swamp, which inevitably starts bleeding before dragging him into a fire, cueing up a nasty immolation.

When he finally meets Alec’s Swamp Thing he’s taken back to Holland’s lab. There’s some intriguing interaction between Alec, Avery and Kevin Durand’s increasingly loopy Dr Woodrue, with plans hatched to replicate our hero’s condition, leading to an action-packed showdown.

Abby is pretty much sidelined, going to Atlanta’s CDC HQ, where she meets her new boss Dr Palomar – a fun, though brief, appearance by Adrienne Barbeau, who played Alice Cable in Wes Craven’s pulpy 1982 Swamp Thing. It was somewhat inevitable that the CDC are in the pay of sinister shadow organisation the Conclave, and now Abby has no-one to trust.

Verdict: With only two episodes to go, a lot has still to be resolved, and I have fears that we’re not getting go to get all the answers that we want – the show was announced as dead in the swamp water just as the first episode aired. It’s terrific entertainment, but it really looks like the network have squandered this property. 8/10