Joe’s origin is front and centre this week. Miguel and Penelope escape the carnival. Rick and Jenna escape nothing. Jane makes a colossal mistake. Again.

Any episode of anything where Lee Tergesen is front and centre is a good thing and this episode is no exception. Joe’s origin also throws a welcome light on another aspect of the Purge: the socio-economic choices that led to it. Joe is, explicitly, a good man. So what drives him to arm up and go out on Purge night? And what stops him killing as he explicitly does not do this episode? And best of all, who’s feeding him this data? Because Joe, it emerges, has a list. And next on that list is Jane.

Jane has a much better week this week, in that she has a much worse one. The slow reveal on Ryker’s true nature isn’t exactly subtle but it is well handled. Baldwin keeps it dialled down so hard that when he starts spouting the ‘as men once did’ toxic nonsense at the end it feels horrifying instead of tired. Plus there’s more nuance, once again here, to how people Purge. The pride with which he emphasises that penetration is forbidden at his ‘gallery’, the smugness with which he lets Jane discover her assassin. This is all a teaching moment for him and it’s going to end badly. It also, I now strongly suspect, will end with Jane radicalised and riding in a triage van. Which is where she should have been a couple of episodes ago but we are at least finally on the way.

Miguel and Penelope move along nicely too this week. Killing Henry and narrowly escaping the carnival, they’re finally on the same page. It’s a nice touch too that a fellow ‘disciple’ is in the victim line when they break out, demonstrating just how far Penelope has come. Similarly, Rick and Jenna get some good heart to heart moments that again contextualise their actions. Rick comes from a blue collar family. He can’t let his daughter come from one too. It’s still murder that he was prepared to do but we at least understand why. Especially as their lives are set to get much much worse very soon.

But the episode starts and finishes with Joe as it should. Is he a hero? A rebel? A villain? We don’t know yet. We do know he has a plan though and I can’t wait to see how that unfolds. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart