Bill and Helen meet up with the London survivors. Matters come to a terrifying head in France, as Noah and Sacha’s personal issues collide with a robot attack and Catherine and Mokrani discover the source of the signals.

Bringing a couple of groups of characters together is an inspired choice and massively lifts the pace and tone of the episode. It also gives Helen and Sarah some much needed new things to do and the instant bonding between them, as well as Bill and Tom, does wonders for all four characters. The show has, to now, been largely about disparate groups of terrified survivors living moment to moment. Now, it’s about a group of people with the makings of a plan, especially Bill’s fascination with the biological elements of the robots.

All of this is great and the French plot works brilliantly too. But, the French plot also brings the core issue of the show to the fore. There, we find out what was implied last week is absolutely correct. Namely, that Chloe wasn’t just abused by her brother Noah throughout her childhood, but that Sacha is, in fact, Noah’s son.

Yeah.

So, in and amongst a horrific alien invasion that has wiped out the overwhelming majority (seemingly) of the Earth’s population, we get a story overtly exploring not just sexual abuse, but incest. Whether you can deal with that or not is up to you, but this episode pushes close to the edge of a lot of comfort zones and in some cases, all the way over the edge.

The final act here is almost entirely focused in France. Jonathan leaves to head to London but, when the house is attacked, returns. He returns to find Noah and his colleague Clara dead and agrees to stay with Chloe and Sacha. What he doesn’t see, but we do, is that Sacha manipulates the situation to get his father killed. What no one but us knows is that Clara isn’t dead. In one of the episode’s final scenes, we see her dragged to the shore by the robot that attacked her. Earlier in the episode, she mentions she’s pregnant. Here, the implications of the last couple of episodes are made overt; Clara’s baby is torn from her, killing her. The baby is…elsewhere.

This is hard to watch. It’s going to be too much for some people. If you can deal with it, then this, along with the discovery earlier that the beacons sending the signal are also organic, sends the show onto the course I was hoping we’d see last week. I wasn’t expecting to get quite this dark though and the show continues to skirt the line of performative horror dangerously closely. But, for now, it works and works better than it has to date.

Just be advised that while this is more interesting than you might expect, it’s also much harder to watch than you’d think. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart