Faraday struggles to make sense of Newton’s tenth patent.

Perrrdannnngggg!!!

That, dear reader, is the sound of my bungee of disbelief snapping. Sadly, my moment of joy last week, as The Man Who Fell to Earth finally found its mojo, was to prove short-lived. The pleasure of a series like this, where the audience is asked to believe that Chiwetel Ejiofor is an alien abroad on a quest to save his (and our) planet, is that when it works, we do just that. We believe. The story involves us. The characters engage us. They behave plausibly within their own terms of reference. If it’s really working, the sets could be made out of toilet rolls and sticky-backed plastic (one for UK viewers of a certain vintage) and we’d still go with it.

This suspension of disbelief tends to fall apart when the programme makers forget that it’s always, always all about the story telling, and they stop the narrative, thinking it’s clever to show us the alien planet, in the mistaken belief that a load of iffy CGI will convince as some kind of reality. It doesn’t work because we are now just looking at effects and we see the artifice for what it is. In this case, Faraday’s journey from Anthea is supposed to be dead weird, but unfortunately it looks more as if he’s been launched into space inside a giant Cadbury’s Creme Egg. (Other brands of chocolate egg are available.)

I might have gone along with this if, at the same time, Naomie Harris hadn’t somehow managed to pull off the least plausible transatlantic house move in the history of Pickfords whereby she flies to New Mexico without suffering any kind of jet lag, helps Clarke Peters alphabetise his vinyl as if that was all moving house entailed, and a day later is fully ensconced in a swish London apartment… without a hair out of place, her complexion positively glowing. I can’t speak for anyone else but a few years ago I moved house a quarter of a mile up the road and was a complete wreck for a week.

All of this may sound petty, but played together it’s a clunking mis-step because a show like this can’t allow the audience time to say ‘pah, that wouldn’t happen’. If we’re doing that it means we’ve lost touch with whatever it was that got us involved in the first place.

And don’t get me started on the comedy boffin minions in black mackintoshes. They seem to have been air-dropped from a completely different series altogether.

The one redeeming segment of the episode is Faraday’s encounter with the mysterious character played exuberantly by Zoë Wanamaker. This is very much in the convincing toilet-roll-and-sticky-backed-plastic stylie, and all the better for it, as a non-literal dramatisation of his struggle to understand the mysterious tenth patent.

I perked up at this point, only for the episode to sink down into trite sentimentality and cod philosophising in its closing act.

Verdict: Hopefully this is only a momentary blip and the show will return to form next week. 6/10

Martin Jameson