‘The thing about landmines’, we’re told this episode, ‘is you gotta remember where you put ‘em.’ Otherwise, it seems, they have a tendency to blow up in your face. The same advice, it should be noted, can apply equally well to clever-clever dangling plot points.

Episode 6 is titled Paxton Petty, but – particularly as song lyrics are important in this week’s plot – it may as well steal a line from a Smiths single and call itself Girlfriend in a Coma, since that’s where a good deal of our attention is directed this week.

The scriptwriting is getting a little stronger – but only a little. Sam Neill is still lumbered with having to endure one of those scenes where Hauser has to read out exposition from a big shiny screen despite nobody else being in the room to hear him, simply so the audience are up to speed on the mechanics of the story. No wonder he looks like he literally has the weight of the world on his shoulders – if he leans any further right into camera, he’s in real danger of toppling over.

It’s Hauser’s backstory that we begin to investigate in this episode, via his relationship with Lucy, which begins – for him – in 1960. It’s as yet unclear if Lucy is pulling an Audrey Niffenegger on us, but it’s at least likely. However, it’s the deepening of her and Hauser’s characters, and their relationship, that give this episode real flavour and, to a certain degree, elevate the general status of the show as a whole.

Since Alcatraz’s main hook is all about the ‘Why’ – why are these villains being catapulted over the prison walls of time? – it’s good to see that all the twisty-turny plot points are beginning to get shoved to the background where, frankly, they belong, and can be subtly teased at throughout the episodes, and be generally ignored until a season finale demands it.

There’s still a way to go yet, however. Plot and dialogue can still be a little clunky – one character mutters ‘This doesn’t look good’, while arriving on a crime scene that involves multiple (bits of) bodies. Elsewhere, a significant character is introduced with so much screen time and affability that it’s quite clear from the outset that they won’t make the closing credits.

However, with so many smudged edges around the dialogue, there’s plenty of space for wriggle-room to keep the theorising Twitterati happy, particularly the unsettling idea that Lucy’s near fatal shooting was in fact planned (and possibly by Hauser himself) so that she could take a Life on Mars style trip and visit a long gone decade from the safety of a coma.

Still, that’s one theory (‘You’ve got, like, fifty’ Sarah tells Soto at one point. ‘Just pick one’). The fact that this week’s bad guy – a bomber who ends up being very revealing by virtue of the fact that he knows very little – almost tips Soto off to the existence of ‘60s Lucy, but is interrupted, indicates that there are secrets that are going to be held back for quite a while yet.

Alcatraz is improving, but still feels like the work of a talented JJ Abrams wannabe rather than the man himself.

Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 17th April 2012 on Watch.

> Order the Season 1 boxset on Amazon.

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