Okay, perhaps not that weird. But still, odd. Love triangles, affairs, false identities, Catwoman getting stabbed. All it’s lacking is someone shouting ‘Gerrouta my Lake Pub!’

Just as in Soapland, everyone in the Alpine tiny town of terror knows everyone else, and everyone has a past entangled with the emotions of their neighbours. So it’s not surprising that the whole town seems to turn out for Mr Costa’s funeral. Or is it a memorial? We assumed his corpse would be bobbing downstream toward the Cote d’Azur like a grisly canoe. It doesn’t matter. There are more interesting bodies present. Costa’s returned wife haunts her grave unnoticed, like Dirty Den.

Also watching proceedings from afar is CCTV vulture Thomas, sitting in his nest of screens, watching Simon and Adèle reconnect over their adorable daughter Chloe, and picking choice shots like carrion from the carcass of his failing relationship. In a similar vein to the Simon/Adèle/Thomas Dairylea triangle of lust and mistrust, tobacco-stained odd sock Jerome tries to win back ex-wife Claire’s affections from Pierre by using their daughter Camille’s return; promising fresh starts, a new home, perhaps even a bin that doesn’t have a dead animal wedged in it. The suburban dream.

These sexually-driven shenanigans serve to highlight just how alone Julie has become since she became ‘The Appetiser’ (shudder) for Serge the gut-buffet gourmand 7 years ago. Even her lone companion, little Victor, isn’t a connection to the outside world but a ghostly reminder of her isolation – the secrecy she has to maintain in order to keep him is just another reason to shut the door on everything.

At first he seemed like one of the animatronic children from Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World After All’ ride had broken free and gone to seek adult assistance, but more and more Victor is a travel-size totem for everything unsettling. Behind those big eyes and the painted-on smile there’s a darkness as languorous and foreboding as the plummeting reservoir. What meaning is there in his terrifying drawings, some of which feel oddly prescient of other pieces of plot? And did he weaponise one of his biros to eliminate Mme Payet and keep child services at bay, or is the truth more sinister and supernatural, as Julie’s hallucination might suggest?

Mme Payet lies dead on her floor like a dropped sack of Go-Cat, her hungry feline chums gathering round her to snack on her tender vittles. Well, it wouldn’t be a soap without a lifeless body on the floor as an end of episode cliffhanger. Except instead of EastEnders‘s duff-duffs, The Twilight Zone theme might be more appropriate for The Returned.

Aired at 9pm on Sunday 23 June 2013 on Channel 4.

> Order The Returned on DVD on Amazon.

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