Alex Rider - Target

After having his world rocked by a revelation about how his father died, Alex (Otto Farrant) is faced with some hard choices about who to trust and what to believe. "Target" offers a couple of sequences highlighting this struggle. In the first Alex arranges a short rendezvous with Jack (Ronke Adekoluejo) offering an chance for a preemptive apology for the path the Widow (Sofia Helin) has put him on to become, what she claims, is the true Alex Rider.. The second, of course, is the end of the episode where Alex comes face to face with The Department agent who ordered the death of his father. Both literally and figuratively, the episode ends with a bang.

Budling up that scene we get Alex and Gregorvich (Thomas Levin) planning  their reconnaissance of Mrs. Jones' (Vicky McClure) building and preparation for that night which includes printing 3D gun for Alex that will go through the metal detector. We also get SCORPIA and their aesthetic technician helping to work on Alex provide a disguise to beat the building security facial recognition. Elsewhere, Kyra (Marli Siu) and Tom (Brenock O’Connor) return and tell Jack what happened overseas further foreshadowing the events at the end of the episode.

Having broken into Jones' apartment and laid in wait, Alex is given the opportunity SOCRPIA sent him for and the chance for vengeance for his father's death. We know the kind of kid Alex is, and the man he is becoming, and how such action SCORPIA demands goes against everything we've seen in the series. Knowing that, the episode sets a pretty lofty goal teasing the new direction of the character but  sells it by doing a pretty good job at showcasing how well SCORPIA have turned him around, isolating Alex, and then letting him lose himself in his grief and the minutiae of his mission until the point of no return finally arrives. Do we believe Alex really will turn to the dark? Given he's the main character of the series who is needed to stop SCORPIA, no, but it gets us a far as possible down the rabbit hole with Alex to face his moment of truth as the screen goes black and the shot is fired.

• Title: Alex Rider - Target
• IMDb: link