Catherine works with Richard to discover something impossible. Bill gets broken out of prison.

I love a lot about this show but this episode highlights the two elements I’d argue it does better than anything else: absolute commitment to the tone and a clear-eyed exploration of people being forced to go to extremes.

First things first, the premise of the black hole parked at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere is staggeringly goofy. From a scientific point of view, it makes Roland Emmerich movies look careful and grounded. Yet, it works. The black hole becomes both a metaphor and a lens; a metaphor for the horrific unresolved trauma of the half-remembered war and a lens for the extremes people will go to. It’s not right, and it makes no sense and it’s right there so you have no choice but to have it make sense.

Catherine’s extended trip to the original timeline bridges (ha!) the two concepts. There must surely be ideas goofier than ‘My astronaut friend did some math and worked out how I can travel to an alternate timeline by sticking my hand in a particle accelerator’ but none of them spring to mind right now. Yet, the show works. Partially because of the writing and how grounded it is and partially because of Lukas Haas, quietly doing great work here, and Léa Drucker who has never been less than great as Catherine. The choices they make are chaotic, almost nonsensical and the only ones they can. The show never shies away from that, never hand waves away a damn thing and the result is a tense, driven episode which gives us a lot more idea of what’s going on and puts both characters in harm’s way. They know it, they do it anyway, pushed to the only extreme they can.

Speaking of extremes, the closing prison break from Zoe ups the stakes, as she and her team of survivors extract Bill. The bleakness, the chaos of all this is present at every level as this group of normal people, haunted by lives they don’t quite remember, take action in a war they barely understand.

Verdict: An episode that feels like a blindfolded chess match; every move is vital, even if the context is barely understood, at least for now. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart