It’s almost as if writer Fabrice Gobert suddenly realised ‘Zut-alors! There has been so little ‘anky-panky!’ and scribbled as much in as possible. It’s a nudity extravaganza. Hey…Hey! Take your eyes off Simon’s perfectly SkyPlussable rear for a minute, you randy animal. There’s doings afoot…

Sex and death – the favourite combo-thought-platter of every Parisian café philosopher – are intrinsically linked in Episode 6, as Lucy Clarsen wakes from her coma, and Simon re-returns from the dead after appealing to necrophiliacs everywhere with lots of tasteful mortuary nude shots.

In what feels like a rejected power from Heroes, Lucy has the ability to contact the dead while she’s having sex. She’s a sex psychic (a Psexic?), which is awfully inconvenient when you think about it. Last thing you want is your sexual partner’s dead nan appearing and telling you stories about the war over the sound of frantically creaking springs. Real mood-killer. But it doesn’t put her off her work, and she seems to be genuinely able to contact the dead, in contrast to a certain little mademoiselle…

Pushed forward by Pierre (Boo! Hiss! Bad hair!), Camille becomes the Babel Fish for dead children, bringing false hope to their grieving parents through fabricated tales of the afterlife. We know that her well-meaning charlatanry will end in harm, and it does, as she gives the bereaved parents of a child named Eduardo such naïve and poorly-worded advice that they hang themselves in order to be reunited with their son.

For two characters who we don’t know their death scene is incredibly powerful as it’s intercut with Lucy’s psychic psex psession with Simon; but also incredibly clever, as it frames the euphemistic ‘petit mort’ with the real thing. No doubt in a Paris café an intellectual moves his Gauloises an inch further from his lips and gives a nod of approval.

Also enjoying a bit of ‘slap et tickle’ are Lena and Serge, in an act that unfolds like a piece of fan-fiction written by Norman Bates, as she gets it on/haves it off with a zombie cannibal while dressed as his dead mother. It’s an incongruous bit of titillation; an act that is as nonsensically passionate and foolish as Toni shooting a police officer, and we hope it doesn’t result in Lena being pregnant with an undead killer’s child come Series 2. Although that would be very French.

But Lena has more pressing concerns, as she finds the tail section passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 a group of Revenants hiding in the woods, standing around like an undead Scout troupe and presumably waiting to become story titles in Series 2. Considering there are only two episodes remaining it’s an annoyingly tantalising reveal, one that’ll no doubt avalanche into Series 2. Is it too much to hope it’ll also bring some answers in the final two hours? Like what that thing on Victor’s arm is for a start.

Maybe there’s a good undead dermatologist among that lot?

Aired at 9pm on Sunday 14 July 2013 on Channel 4.

> Order The Returned on DVD on Amazon.

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