The clue was in the title – I expected to be sucked in by an intricate plot and a web of deceit, culminating in a final rug-pull as our expectations were turned against us. But I was misdirected. What I got instead was a derivative plot full of not-quite-clever-enough twists and a predictable storyline. Which is a shame, because I was looking forward to this one.

When Shearsmith’s Neville encouraged Gabriel to pick out the Tarot cards, and he picked out granddad, justice, and the magician, I thought that this must clearly be a riff on Series 3’s Riddle of the Sphinx – a wronged relative coming to furtively exact revenge on a treacherous older man. Being clever and meta writers who love to play with the form of television, I thought that this must be deliberately priming us to recall Sphinx – possibly my favourite episode, incidentally – and so set us up for a real twist. But they didn’t. The episode instead played out much like Sphinx – Gabriel revealed his relation to Willy Wondo, and that he was acting the whole time, and then exacted his revenge on Neville. The details were different, but the story was the same.

I found this disappointing. Inside No. 9’s great strength is its dedication to originality – week after week it’s something different. And this didn’t feel different. I felt I was watching a poor copy of Riddle of the Sphinx, which was energetic and exciting and had a love of its craft (cryptic crosswords) that didn’t feel matched here.

The actual construction of the episode was, overall, fine. Some of the Sherlock-style reveal flashbacks felt a little amateurish and the plot was generally simplistic for such a potentially potent source, but it worked. On those grounds, I’d probably put it in my bottom few of Inside No. 9 episodes. But it was the repetition of Sphinx that soured this episode for me. Barring the surface trappings of magic, this felt like a rehash of that superior episode.

 And that’s the very opposite of the potential that this show represents.