Reeva’s plans continue, albeit altered to suit her new circumstances. The Underground must act to stop her, but first they have a few problems to try to get around. As the clock ticks down, sacrifices must be made as a battle is fought to prevent a war.

With Andy and Lorna back at Underground HQ, surely Reeva’s plans have a big old spanner in them and victory for the good guys is assured? Well, it might be tempting to think that, but let’s remember that as powerful as those two are, Reeva has a few other allies with various tricks up their sleeves, access to apparently bottomless resources, and has been plotting her little war for quite some time.

This means that our heroes find themselves first trapped and then divided as the Purifiers show up with Turner at their head and then some of Reeva’s other assets arrive to deploy their own unique talents. Action flies thick and fast, with no prizes for guessing which of the gang especially wants to get their own back on Turner, and the writers cleverly manage to disguise a TV budget’s limitations on the narrative by keeping the battles our heroes have to fight small(ish) scale and personal as much as possible.

They also act to confound expectations more than once as events unfold – I found myself genuinely surprised by the way in which certain things were allowed to play out over the course of the episode, as well as highly emotional as the stakes kept raising and the twists kept coming.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some big set-pieces here – there really, really are. But even these are cleverly laid out to feel deliberately more intimate in terms of both how we the audience experience them and how the characters interact within them.

There’s payoffs to a few long-running themes as well. One character in particular finally gets to have a somewhat redemptive moment, while another finally gets to have a perhaps slightly unexpected moment of catharsis as we see a side of them emerge that perhaps we hadn’t necessarily anticipated through the twists and turns of recent weeks.

It’s an episode that clatters along and makes sure that everyone gets a big moment, and yes, I mean everyone. By the end, each of our major characters has had their chance to shine in the spotlight, and the battles which are fought are viscerally satisfying.

Where it chooses to end perhaps feels a little too neatly wrapped up, right until the last moment when something happens that indicates not only that the third season is going to change direction, but that perhaps it will be taking things broader than we might have imagined based on the series to date.

Verdict: The perfect sendoff to a season that’s done very little wrong and an awful lot right. Tense, emotional and with enough big bangs for even the most jaded of fans to be satisfied. My only letdown is having to wait ages now for the next season. 10/10

Greg D. Smith