It's Cora's (Claire Danes) birthday, and Luke (Frank Dillane) has organised a party for her. Friends from London, Will (Tom Hiddleston), Stella (Clémence Poésy) and their children join the pair, Martha (Hayley Squires) and Frankie (Caspar Griffiths), for a night of celebration, drinking and dancing. But the jovial mood doesn't last, and as morning breaks it appears Naomi (Lily-Rose Aslandogdu) has gone missing. Here's been a great deal of focus on the series' mood, atmosphere and tension building over the previous three episodes. This week the tension is mostly confined to Cora's living room, and as Cora and Will share a dance, it could almost be cut with a knife. The party starts relatively smoothly, if a bit awkward, with the visiting Londoners' boisterousness at odds with the more reserved locals. There's also the stirrings of a more melancholic theme in this episode. Stella, yet to confront her husband over what she saw last week, takes a moment of respite during the party and comments to Luke that she feels 'blue'. Her pallid complexion, tiredness and shallow breaths concern him, and it seems as though her secret might well have to do with her health. The relationship between her and Will seems a little cold, but the episode doesn't give us anything in regards to a confrontation about Will's growing attraction to Cora. But it's at this point that the issues with pacing need to be addressed. The majority of the episode takes place over one night, with the party and then the 'fallout' afterwards. It doesn't feel slow up until the final ten minutes or so, but then it all kicks off and moves at a near rapid-fire pace. Accusations, illicit encounters, sacrifices, horrific discoveries and frantic fleeing all take place in that space of ten minutes, and it feels a little jarring. It isn't surprising, the suspicion and tension in regards to Cora's presence in the village has been growing steadily, but it all comes to a head fairly quickly in a manner that doesn't feel like the satisfying explosion of built-up tension we'd perhaps expected.
