Okay, this is the cut off point. It’s quite clear – this being a JJ Abrams show an’ all – that we’re going to spend most of the first season simply setting up more and more questions, and that we’re sure as hell not going get any answers.

For a programme all about smoke and mirrors, that’s perfectly acceptable – it’s part of the DNA, but there has to be something else there in the mix.

The X-Files, for instance, managed a good five years or so of brooding sexual tension – and crucially, a subtly different story for each episode. If all we’re going to get is another criminal to suddenly Quantum Leap their way in each week, this is about the time we’ll start switching off – we already know what the story beats are, and there’s only so often you can watch a magician pull the same rabbit out of the same hat.

Perhaps mindful of this, team Alcatraz have decided that this week’s Big Bad is a child-killer, that most monstrous of US TV boogie-men.

This a serial murderer of children, who, according to his MO, works only weekends (he snatches kids on a Friday, delivers their corpses back on the Sunday), but it’s instructive to note that the script is squeamish about even musing on any other uses the killer might have for the children.

Also worthy of note is the playful side-swipe at the core audience, when ‘Doc’ Soto (Jorge Garcia) is told he has the best life – all secret task force, hot partners, and comic books: ‘So, what you’re saying,’ he replies dismissively, ‘is that I have a sixteen year old’s wet dream?’

This character is developing nicely, and it’s a clever move for the programme makers to have (at least apparently) nixed any chance of a resolution to the ‘will they/won’t they’ storyline that normally forms the spine of shows like this.

What is useful is that the team is beginning to get fractured, and also that they’re beginning to get dropped in the middle of the action. Plus, we see a lot more of the Warden, who, despite being in charge of (1960’s) Alcatraz, is shaping up to be the real Big Bad, channelling the spirit of Shawshank’s Warden Samuel Norton.

Perhaps consciously striving to avoid Lost-style confusion, the script is still somewhat simplistic, which sometimes means that it ends up working against itself: when a character admits to something, it’s impossible to decipher if they’re actually confessing, or if there’s something else they’re covering up for.

This week’s stand out scene, with the child killer and the Warden, plus a few lit matches, is a good example of this. When our bad guy confesses to his crime, it’s impossible to rid yourself of the suspicion that he’s only telling the Warden what he wants to hear.

It might be that the show is finding its groove now, particularly when it continues to throw a few curve balls – such as Doctor Milton Beauregard (Leon Rippy) also travelling from the sixties, also apparently un-aged, turning up to work on a – now dead – new inmate.

There are now enough problems and questions that have been set up to baffle and frustrate us, and since we are now beginning to suspect that the main concept of the show (that villains travel one way to the present from Alcatraz) might in itself be somewhat lacking in truth, there’s plenty to play with.

Once you surrender to the idea that most people we see know more than what they’re letting on, but also that most people know next to nothing, we’re ready to believe anything.

Hell, we’ll even buy that the lead character, Sarah Jones isn’t even who she thinks she is – and turns out to be a flower child of the sixties. If we turn out to be right, we want a writing credit. Or at least a walk-on part in the next Star Trek movie.

Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 27th March 2012 on Watch.

> Order the Season 1 boxset on Amazon.

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