Catherine does some action science, Kariem and Ash (!) do some detective work, Bill does some home tutoring, Richard does some research and the aliens do some very, very frightening action science.

There are episodes of this show where a lot happens and there are episode where a lot is set up. This is one of the latter and while it still has some of the wobbles of the first episode, it progresses an awful lot. It also continues to make big asks.

Two episodes in we now know the black hole… isn’t. It’s a portal in time to the original timeline of the show. Richard sees a flash of that universe and the ISS being pulled apart during an EVA. Catherine spends some time there, or at least in a timeline where her sister is alive. Travel, at least mental travel is possible. That’s what the hallucinations are. Homeless memories. Echoes of a terrible alternative.

One Catherine wants to visit. The second big ask of the season is her literally sticking her hand into a particle collider and suffering no ill effects (yet) and seemingly no consequences. You can view it, and I think should, as a sense of how this timeline is so stressed and exhausted that people just don’t quite care the same way. But the same viewers who struggled with the black hole will struggle with this.

It’s a big development but oddly the small character ones are what stay with you this episode. Bayo Gbadamosi is clearly relishing being front and centre as Kariem and he and Ash, played by Aaron Heffernan with effortless charm, provide much needed light relief. Their theory, that Tom (Ty Tennant) is a viable target for the alien threat, is a really smart one but, oddly, doesn’t seem to play out. Instead, the aliens are building some form of EM device that, as the episode finishes, kills birds above the building it’s being tested in. Zoe and Kariem arrive not long after they’ve left, find the birds and find burnt equations. Equations that look similar to the ones that Catherine sees in the alternate timeline and that, maybe, Bill’s math pupil in prison, has been working on too…

That’s a Lot and it unfolds with the same deliberation the show always uses. Richard’s plot seems heading this way too and there’s a real sense of a global problem being worked from four different directions at once. It’s nicely handled and builds well but the destination here is the next episode, not the third act.

Verdict: The show is a serial, an unapologetic one and as long as you’re okay with that, there’s plenty to enjoy here. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart