Down in Grenoble, Durrand put her science head on and did
some complicated algorithm-signal-array-bounce business to track down the alien
HQ. They was near, she discovered, and they were listening in.
It’s far from comfort viewing, this lugubrious story, but
there are the odd flashes of warmth amid all the grief and graveness. Emily’s
droll “That went well” when Kariem told her he’d come to England to escape
Sudan’s civil war fighting was one. Another was Col. Mokrani’s admission to
Durrand that yes, he felt fear, but had learned to hide it. These bursts of
humanity and intimacies are a blessed respite from the heart-heaviness of it
all. A few more would go a long way.
That was something the UK contingent didn’t manage this
week. Ash and Kariem went in a circle, first escaping the hospital and then
returning there to discover the dread sight of those empty cots. Bill and Helen
made slow progress wheeling around a shopping trolley filled with dead alien
robot sniper dog and lugging approximately the same weight of emotional baggage
at the same time.
Speaking of baggage, Chloe’s brother-rapist storyline was an odd diversion from the matter at hand, as though it had drifted in from another script. Personal drama doesn’t just disappear in the apocalypse, is perhaps the point, but that was an unusual development for a story whose main message seems to be that in the end family is what truly matters. With an eight-episode order to fill though, something else had to plump up the slowly creeping alien plot until the next big revelation.
A revelation is due. The past two episodes have established the threat represented by those heartless robot critters, now it’s time to move up a level. Cool as they look (and they do look scarily cool – as well as very Earth-based in design. Have the aliens been watching these Boston Dynamics videos like the rest of us?) now at the halfway point in this series, we’re ready to see something else.