Spoilers

Silas is released. Everyone else at the Facility is arrested. We lose our first major character.

Jadis is wasting no time and with four episodes to go it’s easy to see why. Pollyanna McIntosh’s combination of intellect, joviality and physical presence dominates this episode from her opening avuncular chat with Silas to the closing, disastrous confrontation between Lyla, Huck and herself. Throughout there’s a sense of her having a plan, of everything unfolding not because she’s unaware because she’s planned it that way. She feels dangerous, in a way no one else in this show has quite felt and it’s taken this long for me to figure out why: she’s disappointed. Disappointed that Huck is probably (definitely) working against her. Disappointed that people can’t see what she can about the CRM. She has the loyalty of a zealot and the patience of a bird of prey and Lyla is not going to be the only blood she spills before the show’s end.

That death comes about in a way Jadis has designed from the start and it’s chilling. Lyla is smart enough to figure out Leo and his kids have stolen the virus and here, at last, we find out it is a virus. A chemical weapon the CRM are planning to use to wipe out everyone who isn’t them or who won’t toe the line. No one has used the word Nazi yet and honestly no one needs to. Their combination of a holy war and eugenics is terrifying enough without the call being made explicit. It’s also, in the hands of scriptwriter Sinead Daly, nicely ambiguous. Lyla’s betrayal of Leo may be a last ditch ploy or it may be genuine. Natalie Gold plays the emotion of it both ways and that means the reveal hits all the harder when you realize her fate. Doubly so when you realize the Empty that kills her is Barca, the CRM soldier we met briefly much earlier in the season.

But the show isn’t close to done. In addition to another ethical clash between the sisters and a barrage of tiny lines that punch like a heavyweight (‘Iris, run.’ and Jadis’ callback to one of Lyla’s briefings especially) the show throws one last big idea out. Lyla is studying reanimation, and what happens and, it’s implied, how to stop it. The CRM are close to a cure and when the characters find that out, it changes everything. The work itself is soaked in blood and atrocity. The cure, if it works, would save everyone left. All they have to do is get it out.

So suddenly, grudges are put aside. Huck and Percy’s confrontation leaves both reeling at the news. The sisters revise their battle plan and must revise it again when Hope discovers her not quite boyfriend Mason is the son of Major General Beale, the CRM leader. And as the episode closes, Silas, who was saved earlier by Dennis, the TWD universe’s own Captain America, confronts Huck. The show wants us to think a fight is imminent. I don’t know if it is. I do know that if the final episodes are even just this good, the show is going to go out on a massive high.

Verdict: Gripping, morally complex and with a final conflict defined by the highest of stakes, the third act of World Beyond is here and it’s off to a Hell of a start. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart