Clay has taken Justin and Faraday prisoner and will stop at nothing to do… whatever it is he’s doing.

A recurring theme of these weekly trips to Man-Who-Fell-To-Earth-land has been the switchback smorgasbord approach to style and tone. I wanted to pick a different theme this week, but now I’m convinced that in the corner of the writers’ room was a giant genre bingo card, and no one would be allowed a Danish Pastry until every cinematic, literary and dramatic genre had been checked off at least once.

Okay, so where were we at the end of last week? Oh yes. Juliet Stevenson was a nun-with-a-gun, but that didn’t end too well and now Clay has Faraday and Justin tied up in a deserted and dusty school gymnasium, where for some reason he keeps a second-hand dental X-Ray machine. By this point the series has so beaten the logic centre of my cerebral cortex into submission, I’m not even going to ask.

Anyway, they’re tied up and Clay starts to torture them for something or other.  Precisely what it is he’s trying to do, isn’t particularly clear, or even why it requires torture. His objectives seem to shift from scene to scene. On the plus side Zoë Wanamaker makes a welcome reappearance which is rather wonderful.

Along the way we check into The Deer Hunter and a little bit of alien-tinged Homeland at its most incomprehensible, all leading to a personal revelation for Clay that the audience have already worked out (if they’ve been paying attention) and a lot more scenery chewing from Jimmi Simpson. With respect to Simpson, nothing his character does in this series makes any kind of sense, so hats off to him for at least getting us to believe that he knows what’s going on. The big set piece between Faraday and Clay may be bafflingly nonsensical, but both men deserve multiple BAFTAs for Acting Bravery in the face of the most ludicrous set-up for a backstory info-dump I can recall seeing.

Meanwhile, over with Rob Delaney and Sonya Cassidy as the warring Flood siblings, a sort of Succession-style Greek tragedy is unfolding, also for no particularly clear reason.

The episode ends with Art Malik getting out of a big car wearing shades and a major reveal which will surprise absolutely no one who has ever seen a TV drama before.

Verdict: You might conclude from the above that I didn’t rate this episode. You’d be wrong. I was absolutely gripped by it. Somehow this series has groomed me into loving it, like a cult that I know I ought to escape, but am drawn to week after week. Resistance is futile. I’m already excited for the series finale and wondering how I will replace my fix once the show has concluded. 8/10

Martin Jameson