Possible arrangement of the emission regions in Mrk 590 during the flaring episodes since 2017, inspired by the ‘passive disc’ scenarios invoked by Petrucci et al. (2018, 2020), Ballantyne et al. (2024), and Palit et al. (2024). For Mrk 590, the bright X-ray emission (relative to the UV) requires that a substantial fraction of the accretion energy is released in the form of hot-Comptonized emission, here represented by a hot corona extending to |$\sim 100r_g$| (based on the energetic assumptions of the agnsed model, Section 4.2). The warm-Comptonized emission is then produced in an extended, optically thick disc atmosphere, which reprocesses seed photons form an underlying thermal disc. As the thermal disc is obscured by this optically thick atmosphere out to |$\sim 10^5r_g$| (Section 4.2), and/or truncated at the inner edge due to the large corona, it does not produce a prompt UV response to X-ray illumination. Instead, the UV response may be dominated by a ‘pure reprocessing’ component emitted at larger radii. This may explain both the 3-d X-ray to UV delay (Paper 1), and the unusually (for AGN) coherent UV response to X-ray variability. We note that our analyses do not constrain the shape, size or orientation of the distant reprocessor. Nor do they demand that the hot corona be spherically symmetric, as opposed to, e.g. a ‘lamp-post’ geometry, perhaps related to jet processes.