The gang are up for an epic boss raid, but can they put their respective personal lives aside long enough to prevail?

Set against the backdrop of a long queue to get into the titular boss raid, this episode takes some surprising turns from the off.

A few weeks have passed seemingly, and Meg and Greg are in a relationship of sorts, though Meg doesn’t really seem to have got any better at knowing exactly how to do the ‘relationship’ part of the relationship, being mainly fixed on how quickly she and Greg will ‘nut’. That may of course be because Nicky has a nascent ‘thing’ of his own going on.

Yes, Nicky and Daisy are hanging out more, and he’s finding out more about her, but that’s attracted the less than impressed attentions of DVT and the Twelve Disciples, who have taken to ‘griefing’ Nicky both in the game and in real life. The episode’s take on ‘SWATing’ – a practice quite common in the more toxic elements of American gamer culture – is as surreal as it is amusing.

Usman meanwhile has romantic issues of his own – his wife seems to have put her foot down with regards to the amount of time Kingdom Scrolls is spending taking over his life, and he’s in therapy. But Usman’s a hardcore gamer, and a little thing like being in a therapy session isn’t going to stop him from getting to a raid boss, no matter the financial or emotional cost.

As for Alison – her relationship with the ever-unseen Jay gets more and more odd – another revelation is so brazen that it even manages to pierce Meg’s general disinterest to ask the question ‘is this normal?’. And when Meg – a girl who literally asks if Alison wouldn’t maybe mind ‘warming up’ her boyfriend for her while she plays her game – can ask that, you know things are bad.

Aside from these main plot threads there’s loads of incidental details that help make the episode as funny as ever, but also there are some genuine surprises along the way as well. Maybe there is life beyond gaming after all. Maybe something deeper lies beneath Meg and Nicky’s constant competitiveness. Time will tell…

Verdict: Big, clever and funny, while still being gleefully puerile in all the right places. 9/10

Greg D. Smith