Bill (Gabriel Byrne) has changed time, the world is saved. So why is there a black hole orbiting Earth? And why are so many people having hallucinations? Hallucinations that seem to be connected?

The hands down grimmest show on TV reminds you what it is pretty quickly. In the space of the first episode we have a gun battle in the streets of London, a stabbing by pen, a horrific car accident and a sense of tangible dread. It’s a very hard watch. It’s also for the most part a very good one.

The bad news first. The black hole plot is such a blatant piece of pulp that it’s going to throw people out of the show. That’s a shame but it is, I guess, understandable. There are a ton of ways to theorize it away and the show trusts you to do that but it’s a big ask and the show makes no apologies for it.

The second you get past it though, everything clicks. The recurrent theme of the hallucinations is not just well handled, it feels new. It also feels particularly resonant. You find truth in art that you bring to it of course but it’s hard not to watch this show and think the hallucinations are a metaphor for the deferred planetary grief of the COVID pandemic. People refusing to acknowledge their past trauma, working around the seemingly impossible. United in unspoken trauma. It’s a planetary grieving event, written at the cusp of a planetary grieving event.

It’s also the topography the show unfolds over and cheerfully refuses to pull a single punch. Léa Drucker’s Doctor Catherine Durand returns and is humming with the barely contained conspiratorial joy of realizing something awful. Her sister, Sophia, played by Emilie de Preissac is also impressive here. Bent double under the weight of the hallucinations everyone shares, she’s ultimately lost to them in a moment of crunching brutality that will not be the show’s last.

But the stars here are Bill, unsurprisingly, and Zoe. Gabriel Byrne’s Bill has had the most distance to travel and his embittered genius here is entitled and tragic by turns. Bill saved the world and only committed a single murder to do it. He’s clearly pretty bloody furious that he’s not had a parade yet and as the show goes on and it’ll be fascinating to see if Bill’s ego tops Bill’s brilliance as the season finishes.

Pearl Chanda steals the show though. A memorable if brief presence in season 2, she’s front and centre here. The reveal that Zoe is an intelligence officer is subtly handled and feels organic while her connection of Bill, her hallucinations and the massacre at the police station is pretty solid detective work. It’s great to see Bayo Gbadamosi back as Kariem too, especially given he looks set to be a main character at last. The moment the two share notes is electric, and we even get a mention of Ash! The big lad’s alive!

All of this is bookended by Lizzie Brocheré and Lukas Haas as Juliet and Richard, two astronauts on the ISS who are tasked with investigating the black hole. They’re spiky, likable, a little dorky and probably doomed. I’m looking forward to seeing how.

Verdict: This is a weirdly great place to jump into the show if you never have before, because it re-casts the first two seasons as a possible time loop. Doing that, especially given the violence here, feels pretty gutsy but I’d love to see how folks find it. Alternately if you’ve followed the journey so far this is a slightly lumpy but vastly ambitious start to the new season. Let’s see where it goes. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart