Marcus and Tomas accompany Harper out to the island, and Verity tries to understand some strange behaviour.

Normally, I try to keep these reviews pretty spoiler-light, but given the last scene of this episode, it’s really impossible to discuss it sensibly spoiler-free, so proceed beyond this paragraph at your own risk!

One of the great arts involved with creating any suspense story is ensuring that your audience is not looking in the right direction so they can be surprised by the sharp turn that you bring to a story. In the first season of The Exorcist, this came not just with the revelation of Geena Davis’ character’s real identity, but then with the murder of another key character a few weeks later. This time around, we’ve not really been sure what’s going on on the island, and who it is who’s going to require the priests’ assistance… until that final shot, and we realise that Grace doesn’t exist – or at least in the way that she has been presented to us as an audience through Andy’s eyes. Some point between now and the next episode I’m going to be going back through those first four episodes with a fresh eye… Considerable kudos to John Cho for his performance up to now which has been completely and utterly believable!

There’s plenty going on elsewhere in the episode. We now have a better understanding of the link between Bennett, Mouse, Sister Dolores and the two exorcists, particularly in terms of the nature of the way their fame has spread although I am wondering quite how these plotlines are going to fuse. And as for the dynamic between Marcus and Tomas – the conversation over a beer is one of the most powerful yet between the pair, with both Ben Daniels and Alfonso Herrera playing it at exactly the right pitch for it to be affecting without feeling melodramatic.

Verdict: The phrase “game changer” gets chucked around a lot, but it’s totally applicable to this episode, which will totally alter how you view the season to date. 9/10

Paul Simpson