Everyone tries to prove Silas’ innocence. Except Silas…

World Beyond, due to the fact it was announced as a finite show, has had the luxury of measured plotting. This is the first week that doesn’t work in its favor but it’s still an impressive hour of TV with one hell of a twist in its final minutes.

The breakout star here is Hal Cumpston, on screen for the vast majority of the episode in two different time frames. In the present, he plays Silas as serene in his destruction. So much so he almost seems prepared to sit still and let an Empty kill him. Silas has bought into both the horrific reality of his past and the (deeply) unfair assumptions of his friends. He knows he’s killed. he thinks it’s pretty logical he’s killed again. He just wants it to be done. This presents, at times, as place marking in the episode. Silas is still, uncommunicative and oddly calm. In reality, this is how trauma survivors who aren’t recovered can and often do act. You’re back in hell, so you just wait for it to burn you. This is gutsy writing, gutsier acting and directing and it’s going to turn some people off. Please stick with it.

Especially as the sheer tragedy of Silas’ past is explored here. He beat his abusive father to death, refused help from a neighbour because he was so guilty and went comatose, listening to the music his dad had introduced him to on one of the rare good days. We cut between this and the attempts to prove Silas innocent in the present and at the exact moment you think the episode’s marking time?

His mum comes home. And he’s too late to save her.

Cumpston is extraordinarily good throughout as is Loren Yaconelli’s direction. Elizabeth Padden’’s script impresses too but ultimately, for me, falls down a little on the simple fact that Percy has vanished and somehow isn’t in the frame for Tony’s murder. On the one hand it makes sense as the group have clearly decided Silas is guilty. On the other it’s deeply unfair which is the point but still leaves a curiously nasty aftertaste.

While this plot takes up most of the episode and is heartrending for much of that time, it’s the revelations that close the episode that truly impress. Silas is banished and Elton opts to go with him. On top of that, Hope comes clean to Elton who is… surprisingly okay about it.

Oh and Huck is Colonel Kublek’s daughter and has been monitoring the ‘asset’.

So in the space of one episode, we’ve learned the CRM were after more than one element of the Campus Colony and no one has any idea how far their infiltration runs. We’re also, I strongly suspect, a week or so off everyone else owing Silas the mother of all muffin baskets.

Verdict: This episode is hard. It’s quiet and sad and horrific and doesn’t end tidily. But it’s also a portrait of trauma that works better than most and it makes major progress on the overall plot as well as an absolute acting clinic by Hal Cumpston. Tough to watch but essential viewing, and next? The two-part finale… 8/10

Alasdair Stuart