In the aftermath of the Creed bank job, anti-mutant attacks break out across the city, causing Lorna to fear for Dawn’s safety. Johnny and Clarice trace the path taken by the Inner Circle as they got away from the bank, hoping for answers. Reed and Caitlin find the doctor who worked with Reed’s father, who offers Reed help with his condition and a shot at a normal life.

This week’s main focus is on Lorna – her history, her own family and lineage, and her concerns for her daughter. There’s plenty other stuff happening too, but mainly the show sticks tightly to her.

In the immediate aftermath of the bank job, Lorna is horrified by Rebecca’s actions, and the resulting argument sees Rebecca running off on her own, which is not really ideal for a homicidally angry mutant whose power is turning things and people inside out. Lorna has more immediate concerns though. As violence breaks out across the city in response to Rebecca’s slaughter of the people at the bank, Lorna starts to fret about how exactly she can keep her daughter safe while she’s at the forefront of this war.

Flashback scenes here alternate between Lorna’s childhood and her and Marcos talking about their future child not long after discovering she was pregnant. In both cases, the focus is largely on Lorna’s true parentage, something the show has thus far simply assumed we all knew and hinted at only in the vaguest terms. Here, it’s hammered home by repeated inferences, though never explicitly stated by anyone. What’s interesting is how Lorna’s concern for her daughter causes her to re-evaluate her own relationship with her biological father, and where that line of reasoning might take her. At any rate, there’s plenty of emotional stuff here, and it’s handled well.

Meanwhile, Johnny and an increasingly disillusioned Clarice are wandering around the city following the trail of the Inner Circle convoy after it left the bank. Sensing one of them had left, Johnny switches to following that trail, which leads to some unpleasant discoveries as they follow where Rebecca has been. When they find her, there’s a certain amount of disagreement between the two as to how useful that encounter was. Johnny is desperately trying to hold things together, to keep fighting in the face of ever increasing odds, and Clarice – having met the Morlocks – is increasingly losing patience with both him and the Underground as a whole. Not sure where that one is headed, but it doesn’t seem good.

And then there’s the Struckers. Reed is taken to see Madeline, his father’s former colleague, by Caitlin and Lauren, and it seems like they’ve done the right thing. Madeline welcomes them with open arms, and sets to work on steadying Reed’s condition before studying Lauren’s DNA to see if she can offer a more permanent solution. She’s been doing work like this with many mutants, helping them to have control over dangerous out of control powers, and she seems committed to the cause, but there’s something about all this which feels a little too good to be true. Ultimately, it feels like even this well-meaning person is just approaching the idea of getting rid of mutants altogether, albeit from a more benevolent standpoint. And the question that leaves hanging is – what if that’s not what the mutants want?

This feels like a turning point. The war is about to kick up a serious notch or three, and both the Inner Circle and the Underground are going to find themselves in the firing line, as well as being in conflict with one another. This is starting to feel like the X Men vs the Brotherhood of Mutants, two opposing factions engaged in a conflict that exposes them having as much in common as they do apart, while both are hated and hunted by the rest of the world. I only hope that the quality of the writing and the budget are up to where this seems to be headed.

Verdict: Emotional, densely packed and deeply complex. Feels like things are being kicked up a gear, which honestly didn’t feel possible before now. I’m very much here for it. 9/10

Greg D. Smith