Siddiq remembers. Everything.

The depiction of Siddiq’s PTSD this season has been, if not a pleasant surprise, a welcome one. The show is now at a time in its life when it can explore the effects not only of the casual, everyday horror that these characters face but also the atrocities perpetrated by their enemies. It would be all too easy, especially with everyone’s favourite baseball bat aficionado now on the side of the angels, to forget what happened last season. Siddiq has been the reason we can’t, and in doing so has kept the Whisperers as a real, insidious and brutal threat.

This doesn’t make for easy viewing, nor should it. This episode in particular, the repeated flashes of Enid, fists up, dwarfed by the people coming to murder her is a very, very hard watch. The genius of the episode lies in the way Corey Reed’s script turn that recurrent image into not just a plot beat for the show but a character beat for Alexandria’s doctor. Siddiq is a scientist. He wants to understand things. He needs to understand things. Even under the inconceivable trauma of watching his friends get butchered, he notices something. And this episode, he realises what he noticed. And it gets him killed.

Avi Nash leaves everything on the screen here and it shows. Siddiq is pushed far past his limits and when he realises why everyone is getting sick, it’s especially telling. This is a man whose job it is to look after people and in doing so, he’s inadvertently been making them much, much worse. No wonder he loses it, and no wonder he acts instead of talking. In a lesser show, the fact the truth about the sickness dies with Siddiq would be maddening. Here it only heightens the tragedy.

Top marks too to Christian Serratos, who has quietly been one of the lynchpins of this show for years. Her quiet, composed determined compassion absolutely sells her relationship with this good, damaged man. Likewise newcomer Juan Javier Cardenas who is amazing here. The transition from Dante as jovial caregiver to killer again is an area the episode could fail. But the site of him choking his friend to death, sobbing ‘Not you!’ drives home not only just how much trouble everyone is in but how broken and dangerous the Whisperers are. Dante has lived with these people for months, seen the wonderful community they have… and still conspired to kill them all, knowing full well what he’s doing. That’s about as dark as the show has ever got and it’s a look that suits it very, very well.

Throw in the interesting development with Carol’s plan (Dante kills her prisoner), Lydia (she leaves in disgust), Aaron (in so much trouble) and Gamma (also in so much trouble) and Alpha (both her lieutenants now know she’s a hypocrite) and you have a rock solid set up for the mid season finale. There will, without a doubt, be blood. And now, Alexandria has no doctor to patch its wounds. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart