Johnny, Clarice and Marcos go to enlist the help of Wire again to see if they can figure out a way of getting to the Inner Circle. What they discover will test the limits of everyone. Ex-Agent Turner receives an offer of help from an unexpected quarter, forcing him to ask himself what he is prepared to do.

Beginning with a flashback which goes to show the audience the depth of Caitlin’s love for Andy, and goes someway to explaining the extraordinary bond she feels with her errant son, the episode doesn’t let up from there as it continues to ask the same question of all our characters – just how far are you willing to go for your cause?

In the case of Marcos, he’s willing to go back to Wire for help despite how badly that went last time because he’s desperate to get his child (and hopefully also the love of his life) back from Reeva. Clarice and Johnny tag along for the ride (only one of them willingly) but things don’t go according to plan (because when do they ever in this show?) Bringing Wire’s brother back to home base, it becomes time to see how they might go about soliciting his help.

Which brings us to Caitlin, whose journey is the starkest, perhaps in some ways the most on-the-nose but certainly after that flashback completely believable. There is very little she’s not willing to do in order to get her son back, and that becomes starkly clear to everyone around her, Reed included.

Faced with another opportunity to confront the Inner Circle as they raid a mental health facility which houses mutants, Johnny, Clarice and Marcos pile in, with Lauren insisting on accompanying them, driven by a conviction that only she can stop Andy. But when the two siblings face off against one another, how far will either of them go to stop the other, and what might the consequences of their actions be in the long term?

And then there’s Turner, living in a motel room, ignored by the authorities and isolated from his wife. Frustrated by the knowledge that the mutants everyone assumes are dead are alive and well, he’s at a low ebb, so when he’s offered assistance from what transpires to be a dubious angle, it’s a genuine struggle for him. How far will he go to advance his personal crusade against mutant-kind? It certainly seems as if we are about to find out.

Unusually for this show, here we have an episode where the prevalent theme is if anything a little heavy-handed. The Gifted has always been a series that dealt with its themes well, and exercised a subtlety of execution which elevated it above other entries in the genre. Here, it’s as subtle as a sledgehammer, facing various characters with stark moral choices, and forcing us to watch them make decisions we don’t want them to, and in some cases face up to the consequences of just how far they have pushed. It’s not that it works against the show, per se – at this point it’s done enough to invest us in these characters that it can get away with being this blatant – but it feels like a definite departure, and possibly signifies the beginning of some real escalations in the fight to come. At any rate, it’s compelling, if uncomfortable stuff to watch, helped by a cast who commit from the first moment to the last.

Verdict: Powerful, unsubtle and at times genuinely hard to watch. Things seem to be stepping up in every sense and I get the impression that what we are heading for here is less a skirmish and more an all-out war. 8/10

Greg D. Smith