Strand, Charlie, Sarah and Wendell try to steal Strand’s plane. Daniel is several moves ahead. Of all of them. Ever. But not his cat, Skidmark…

Samir Mehta’s gloriously eccentric script is basically an asynchronous comedy where Daniel is the Road Runner and everyone else is Wile E Coyote. It’s a weird, fractious, oddly sweet plot that culminates in Strand showing just how much he’s changed. The amoral con man of the first year has been replaced by someone desperate to close the gap between the man he is and the man he wants to be.

Colman Domingo and Ruben Blades are always great but their interaction here is especially fantastic. Daniel and Victor are Bad Men but they don’t want to be and the show’s constant theme of helping out comes to the fore as they come back together. At least part of that comes from their shared dedication; Daniel wants to help too and most recently, he can do that by disarming the Breaking Bad-esque booby traps the man whose supplies he ‘inherited’ set around town. Bad men, yes, but working on it and the two teams operating out of the same warehouse should be fun to watch.

Elsewhere, Luciana and Dylan bond in one of the show’s gentler plots even as Dylan is steering his siblings around the others via radio. The way the kids have been used this season is really interesting and Dylan’s friendship with Luciana is a big part of that. His simple belief they can fix the plane that gets wrecked this week (in a wonderfully gooey scene too) draws Luciana up short the same way it does us. They could… just… do that. Daniel seems to have the tools after all. Likewise the other kids plot, which sees Alicia and Morgan make contact with the nuclear power plant worker’s children is great and quietly horrifying as feral kids always are. But as Dylan shows, the kids have a genuine purity and trust to them that the adults don’t and that may well make the difference. It’s an interesting dynamic and one the show handles very well.

Best of all though, this episode connects everything together. Being thrown out of the factory leads the team to the plane, which crashes and leads them to Dylan and the kids. The other team make their way to Daniel in an attempt to stage a rescue and he and Strand reconcile while the first team witness the existence of a large, experienced military force as a helicopter flies away. Every duck is in a row and the show is much stronger for it. Especially as next week we get to find out who was in the chopper… 9/10

Alasdair Stuart