Six months after leaving Chicago, Tomas and Marcus are driving hell for leather across the Montana countryside with Cindy, the victim of possession, while elsewhere, a group of foster kids face a new set of challenges…

There’s a moment towards the end of this opening episode of The Exorcist’s second season when Marcus is holding the line outside the place where Tomas is desperately trying to exorcise a young woman. He’s facing off against people who don’t believe that he’ll fight back because he’s a priest. But what they don’t realise what the audience has been reminded in the recap at the start: Marcus is no longer a priest. And you can see the instant when he realises that that releases him from certain strictures. It is just a flash, but Ben Daniels’ whole demeanour changes – and all hell breaks loose.

It’s a very sensible move by Jeremy Slater and the production team to start things in the middle of a case, rather than with the slow burn of the first season. The Exorcist needs to grab an audience fast and retain them through this second year, and seeing Alfonso Herrera and Daniels performing the rituals and battling a demon who clearly knows them throws us straight back into the show (a great performance from Zibby Allen). Daniels and Herrera continue to have terrific chemistry together as the two priests, butting heads but united in their service, no matter the cost to themselves. But things aren’t quite the same as before and those changes, I suspect, will be at the heart of the new season.

The exorcism of Cindy is counterpointed with the introduction of John Cho’s Andrew Kim, and his house full of foster kids. There’s not enough time for us to get to know them fully, but scenes with them and Cho, and then on their own give us plenty of indication of the dynamic, with Brianna Hildebrand’s Verity unsettlingly mature. Li Jun Li’s Rose and Cho’s Kim have a backstory (the discussion of which is perhaps the only slightly stilted scene of the episode) and the end of the hour neatly links some of what have seemed disparate pieces together…

Verdict: “Holy shit” has never been a more appropriate expression – welcome back to The Exorcist. 8/10

Paul Simpson