Summary
Sophie’s welcome return enlivens “Town” a bit, but the feeling of a middle-season filler episode is never quite overcome.
After the previous episode’s giant f**k-up of a climax, we rejoin Marissa (Mireille Enos) in “Town” idly looking for the escaped Erik (Joel Kinnaman), who you’ll recall was pumped full of holes and rescued in the nick of time by Elsa (Katharina Heyer) and Dieter (Benno Fürmann). He is, to use a medical term, all kinds of f****d up; his bullet wounds are infected, at least one bullet is still lodged inside him, and he’s delirious. But he’s alive, as is Hanna (Esme Creed-Miles), which is enough of a problem for Marissa, who is still being hounded by Sawyer (Khalid Abdalla).
Speaking of Hanna, she has made it all the way to London and is hiding out in Sophie’s (Rhianne Barreto) family camper van. “Town” is another middle-season episode that tends to linger a bit, but Hanna‘s coming-of-age elements are handled relatively well, and are certainly less dreary than its espionage business, so the presence of Sophie is welcome. Needless to say, she takes Hanna to a party. Then she wants to take her to another but gets grounded, so Hanna, now with a taste for it, goes on her own. Then they nick the camper van with Sophie’s chain-smoking friend Dan (Leo Flanagan) and her big-time crush Anton (Gamba Cole) and spend the night out in the woods, where Hanna uses her finely-honed survival skills to build a fire and hunt rabbits and have sex with Anton.
Oops, that last bit wasn’t under dad’s instruction, but you know how it is when teenagers get together. Obviously, this is sure to qualify as a major betrayal in the eyes of Sophie, who has gone out of her way for Hanna time and time again despite her parents’ marriage being a disaster and her own relationship with them gradually eroding. Then again, you can’t expect a girl raised in a cave to understand the concept of sisters over misters, can you?
Nobody’s home life is going particularly well in “Town”, least of all Marissa’s. She’s trying to play the happy domesticated spouse role with her French fella and his son, Benoit (Giles Norris-Tari), but the kid’s hilariously unintimidated by her and thwarts her attempts at every opportunity. To make matters worse, she’s also dealing with the screams of all the babies she had executed during the closure of Utrax, which I suppose on some level she deserves.
And then there’s Dieter, who is shocked to call home and discover Sawyer has employed the old “visit a dude’s family to show how vulnerable they are” tactic to pressure him into giving up Erik. You can’t blame the guy for doing so; he tried to stay out of it from the beginning, and every time the finish line looks to be in sight someone moves it several miles further away. It’s a shame Erik’s physical rehabilitation had to be interrupted, and a shame that Elsa got her head popped off, but at least it meant that something of genuine note actually happened in the episode. For a while, I thought we were going to be following Hanna and Sophie’s boy dramas for the rest of the series.
