Joshua is put on trial for his efforts to help Cade fight the Gua, but Cade breaks him out of captivity in the hope of making him see where his loyalties lie.

I hate clip shows. I think they show a lack of imagination and a lack of proper budgetary care if cost-cutting measures of this kind need to be employed. As such, within the first couple of minutes of this episode, I got the impression I was going to be very disappointed with an episode I’d been looking forward to. And I was. That’s not to say the framing sequence is particularly poor, it just doesn’t get anywhere because it’s all designed to remind the viewer of how Joshua fits into the grand scheme of things and provide a potted history of the Gua.

After The Purge, it seemed the writers had come up with a good way of keeping Joshua heavily involved in the action. Now it seems as though they are determined to undo all this work, putting Joshua on trial when he is clearly guilty despite not having a significant amount of evidence against him. Where his position of power could have been played with for at least a season, this seems to be a counter-productive step in the character’s development.

Ignoring the clips, which of course have already been seen once, Cade’s efforts to win Joshua over show the strong rapport between Roger R Cross and Sebastian Spence. The problem is that it all gets a little confusing. Joshua keeps getting flashes, there’s a weird creature that attacks and kills Gua for no readily apparent reason, and quite quickly the viewer comes to realize that Cade isn’t present and everything is happening inside Joshua’s mind as some kind of test.

To be honest, it’s only the charismatic presence of Roger R Cross and Sebastian Spence that keeps things moving, as this really is a shambles held together by a couple of strong central performances. Although the ending could make for some more interesting storylines, it still seems a misstep for the producers to take. We’ll just have to see…

**

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