Catherine and Mokrani lead a team out to investigate the source of the signals. Ash makes an impossible decision and Bill and Helen bury their dead.

The show continues to progress its major plot lines at a pace that’s going to fascinate a lot of people and bore others. The tone here continues to be impossibly grim and if anything gets even darker this week. Ash and Kariem’s attempted rescue of the maternity ward takes an especially chilling turn as they finally make it in and discover the cots are empty. This, along with the odd biological relationship the alien signal seems to have with Emily and Sacha, suggests something awful is coming down the line. The mystery remains one of the show’s best lines, but it’s also the place it skirts closest to the line. If this goes wrong, the show is going to collapse into a morass of self-serving performative bleakness. If it doesn’t, then it’s going to stamp its identity on the source material like nothing before it.

But arguably the most interesting work the show is doing is with Jonathan and Chloe. The arrival of both her son, Sacha and a cop, Noah, who she has a clear past relationship with, crank the tension a dozen different ways. Hell may be other people, but in the French plot, Hell certainly seems to be the other people in the room.

Verdict: Measured, grim and still involving, this is a show working out how to break stride. I hope it makes it, because it has a lot to recommend it. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart