In retrospect, this entire episode is a homage, with minor and major nods to a few classic films along the way. What it does is emulate the Taranatino flip in From Dusk Til Dawn, building the tension in dramatic fashion before flourishing into high camp and comedy. Hyde emerges and then undergoes a series of visions, presented almost as VR, where he can experience Jackman’s life in small but rewindable chunks. “We’ve got Sky in here!”, he announces and later, “I’ve found the Adult Channel”, when he discovers an intimate moment from the Jackman’s past. The explanation for this I found massively unsatisfactory, the resident science geek explains that now that Jackman’s personality is ‘dead’, Hyde is now reclaiming the brain real-estate occupied by those memories. It’s a common modern analogy, but the brain isn’t a hard drive waiting to be wiped and reclaimed, as suggested. Perhaps ‘Click’ advised on this part. What? How does that work? In it we see him meet Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to discuss the publication and it’s yet to be defined ending. Stevenson is ably played by Moffat pal and also another Doctor Who writer, Mark Gatiss, who presumably walked off his Doctor Who production onto this one. In this scene Stevenson pushes Jekyll on the exact nature of the potion that transforms him, writing down its parts on a note so that they can be confirmed. At this point I was having a significant WTF moment, because as strong a reaction I’ve had to sexy women, I have yet to experience extreme personality modifications and psychopathic tendencies. Perhaps I’m just not meeting the right types. The problem is that this doesn’t actually explain why Jackman and Jekyll look the same, or Jekyll’s housemaid Alice and Mrs Jackman, other than for the audience to follow what’s going on, which frankly might be a push at this point. We go on then to see the Victorian Hyde killing ‘Alice’, who he sees as his only real threat. This is a complete setup for the flip sequence, where we’re lead to believe modern Hyde will kill Claire Jackman, and her kids are brought into the lab for good jeopardy measure. At this point the tension had been cranked up, although it was slightly blown by a the preceding sequence which referenced the sorts of horror movies that rely on supposedly intelligent people being in a room with something they know that’s dangerous, but decide to totally ignore. And then…the flip…Suddenly Hyde’s a nice reasonable person who wants to escape and help the Jackman’s to do so too. Claire doesn’t buy this, and I’m with her. It also requires that the TV monitoring is intentionally turned off by the organisation holding them in a Dr. Evil, ‘No no no, I’m going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I’m just gonna assume it all went to plan’, moment. I’m not even going to mention what happens to the now superfluous-to-the-plot women held in the basement, because it’s downright silly. But Claire and kids are ultimately separated from Hyde, and he is left shouting “Why am I not Superman” on the roof of the building in frustration, as they’re whisked away by the power dressing American in a helicopter. This was the point where I came back onside, as the idea that without Jackman the Hyde character isn’t the real deal was great. As was the return of Jackman’s personality, ‘Daddy’s Back’, and the merging of the egos into one superhuman but rational being. It could have been me, but it looked at this time like one of his eyes was normal while the other was ‘Hyde’. Overall, the episode was massively uneven if plenty of fun, possibly the most entertaining so far, if totally unbelievable in places. It got so camp at one point I thought it was degenerating into a pilot for a 1970s American TV show, where superhuman Hyde uses his powers for good, fighting crime for a well funded but secret foundation. It never quite got there, but it was on that greasy slope on a few occasions. Can’t wait for episode 6 though, even if the idiots at BBC promotions tried to spoil it so effectively for us.