Another good episode in what is proving to be my favourite new TV series of the year. Before he comes back from leading an almost disastrous mission of plunder to a neighbouring planet for a vital chemical element, Bryan Cranston's Silas Merick character, a senior army officer, is clearly bored with his senior government adviser wife Vera, played by Essie Davis. There's no sexual spark between them as he treats her as coldly in their private as well as public life, driving her to seek solace in an underground sex-cellar at night and virtual jogging in the daytime.
However when she attends to him after his near-death injuries from the mission she's surprised and initially disconcerted by his apparently softened demeanour and even renewed sexual attraction towards her. Is this really the same unfeeling, unrelenting man she previously knew or has he been somehow changed after his near-fatal encounter with the inhabitants of the planet Rexor who can possess shape-shifting capabilities. Matters come to a head when Merick goes on trial, accused of being a surreptitious Rexorian - is Merick human or not, it seems his wife's testimony will determine whether he lives or dies.
Cranston, one of the series' executive producers, and Davis are very good as the central couple and the central theme of what defines humanity is well argued and indeed resolved by the end. I could have done without the mildly pornographic depictions of sex in the underworld that Davis witnesses plus the fashions of the future as depicted here seem positively turgid, but the central story was otherwise effectively told in another entertaining and thought-provoking episode of this continuing anthology.
