But nothing could have prepared for the triple murder at the end of the episode, which literally left viewers open-mouthed and with many burning questions.

At the beginning of the episode, the Bransons wanted to recruit young Ronan (Bill Jones) to solve the Bottomleys’ case. But when his mother Daphne (Lorraine Ashbourne) finds out that Ronan wasn’t alone when he witnessed Nicky Branson’s murder, she wants to find out who he was with.

However, when she exchanged text messages with the mysterious number on her son’s cell phone, she didn’t expect that this would lead her to meet her adult daughter Rachel (Christine Bottomley).

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To save Ronan from having to point out the Bottomleys, Daphne persuaded Rachel to do so after seeing Stephie (Bethany Asher) in a photo that Ryan (Oliver Huntingdon) made her look at before he shot Nicky.

And while the mother-daughter reunion was complicated and emotional, the tension in the Sherwood episode really ramped up in the last 20 minutes. Crammed into a car, Ann and Roy sat in the front while Daphne and Rachel waited to see how the day in Skegness would go.

In the middle of town, Roy told Daphne and Rachel to go to the local pub as it was lunchtime and if the Bottomleys were going out then there was a good chance they would be there. Although they had no original plans to go out that day, Pam (Sharlene Whyte), Denis (David Harewood) and Stephie all enjoyed a day in the town and actually sat in the pub for lunch.

Rachel recognized them immediately and as Daphne quickly tries to warn her, Ann comes in and spots them herself. To confirm that they are the ones they are looking for, Ann casually calls out Pam’s name and Pam actually turns around.

Daphne goes to the toilet to try and send a warning to the Bottomleys. She sends a warning text from her own phone telling them to run to the disposable phone Rory gave her, but as the battery is running low, it won’t stay charged for long. On the way back to Ann and Rachel, she puts the disposable phone in Pam’s coat pocket in the hope that she will read the message soon.

But Pam doesn’t find the phone until they return to the safe house and see that it isn’t charged. She calls Harry (Michael Balogun) for help, but instead Marcus (Jorden Myrie) answers and tells her to hang on, he’ll send some officers to keep watch.

Out in the garden, Denis is preparing Stephie to use the metal detector on the beach. When he notices that a neighbor has a riding mower, he asks if he can use it on his own lawn. The neighbor also has a phone charger, so Denis can charge the mysterious phone.

On the way to the Bottomleys’ safe house, Roy receives a text message from his man inside, aka Marcus, informing him that he too must pick up the phone after Pam informed him.

But in the episode’s thrilling final moments, Denis starts the lawnmower, drowning out the sounds of Roy’s break-in. Pam is confronted in her bedroom by Roy, who shoots her after saying “For Nicky.” But Kyre goes outside without Roy and shoots Denis as well while sitting on the lawnmower, not realizing that Roy has already killed Pam.

As they walk out the back, the camera pans to a lonely Stephie, still using the metal detector on the beach, not knowing what just happened – or so we think.

When Kyre returns to his van, Roy, Ann, Daphne and Rachel drive off in their own car. But as he is left alone at his van, putting his things in the back, he is stabbed in the back with a pair of garden shears by none other than Stephie, who closes the back doors and leaves him in the van to die.

In the final scenes, Harry is seen in the safe house (now a crime scene) and Stephie is seen crying. Will she confess to the murder? And what significance does Branson’s double revenge killing have for the ongoing rivalries between the gangs?

We say: Bring on episode 3 – even if that means that the series has to do without the emotional performances of Whyte and Harewood.

The sequel to Sherwood will be broadcast on Sunday 1 September at 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer.

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