Fear The Walking Dead has done a fantastic job so far this season of taking its multiple disparate threads and weaving them into a coherent whole. Ofelia’s after has been used to introduce the Nation, Daniel’s has been used to introduce the dam and now Strand’s time away is being used to bring all of this together as well as dangle some possible future plot lines in front of us.

That being said, I can see some viewers not exactly being gripped this week. The story is fundamentally simple: Strand takes Madison and Walker to the dam, no one wants to help the Ranch, the two groups talk until something clicks. Or in this case, explodes. It’s not fast, it’s not glamorous and even with a Herd attack and a moment where characters have to hack a Walker apart to move past it, it’s remarkably focused on the living.

But dig a little deeper and you’ve got one of the highest stakes episodes of the show to date. Not just because of the Ranch’s need for water but because of the ideological clashes at its core. Lola is an idealist, a woman who believes that the old version of society can be at least partially rebuilt. Efrain passionately believes this too while Daniel is painfully aware of just how bad humanity can be. Meanwhile, Madison both admires and is exasperated by Lola, Strand and Daniel trust one another as far as they could throw each other and Walker doesn’t trust anybody.

It’s a terrible foundation for any sort of working relationship and the entire episode is about these broken, cautious, traumatised people trying to get past all that and to get stuff done. The really interesting element of all this is Lola, who is both idealistic and antagonistic. Everyone is both working around her and protecting her, her idealism as important as the water she guards. It’s a fascinating premise and it gives Ruben Blades, Kim Dickens and Colman Domingo in particular some great material to work with.

Verdict: The end result is an episode that, weirdly, ends up being one of the most positive hours of the sho to date. No one gets killed, everyone (mostly) gets what they want and there’s a quiet, perky triumphalism to it that feels both earned and genuinely sweet. Chances are it won’t last of course but for now at least these characters are doing well and it’s as much fun for us to see as it is for them to experience. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart