As Justin battles to save Faraday, Clay will stop at nothing to get his hands on the fusion core.

Q: How can you tell if someone is really an alien?

A: When they tell you to make a phone call, but insist that you use a payphone.

Seriously? On hearing this line, after I stopped laughing, I Googled ‘nearest phone box’ and it was over twenty miles away, and even then, it wasn’t clear whether it was working. I humbly suggest to the (American) writers of this week’s Man Who Fell to Earth that you don’t have time for that with a dying Anthean in the back of your car. You’d be better off sending smoke signals.

Aside from this utter travesty, I hugely enjoyed this week’s dive into the bonkers world of Faraday & Co. Writing about the last episode, I compared the series to a Gumpian tub of Quality Street chocolates, but as the series approaches its climax it’s more like a crate of fireworks into which someone has dropped a flaming box of matches. It’s firing off in all directions.

We’ve got some boom, bang, blowy-up stuff; we’ve got some classical style sibling betrayals; we’ve got Art Malik being villainous but not looking as if he’s not entirely sure what he’s banging on about; we’ve got some poignant mother/daughter gubbins; we’ve got Jimmi Simpson chewing the scenery; and we’ve got Juliet Stevenson as a nun with a gun. Who could ask for more?

Weeeeell… I guess it would help if I had the vaguest clue what was actually going on, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter. As an exercise in the effectiveness of a largely meaningless McGuffin this is a masterclass. I find it utterly compelling. An interesting case of not really caring about the story, but caring about all the characters, and the urgency of each individual sequence as it unfolds.

Verdict: The Man who Fell to Earth is a mess – but a beautiful mess. With only two episodes remaining I’m just going to light the blue touch paper and sit back and enjoy the fireworks. 8/10

Martin Jameson