When the planned exchange between Talon and Rebb goes awry, Rebb decides to approach the problem from a different angle. Ambassador Dred doesn’t receive the welcome he might have hoped for back at the capital, although he hasn’t returned altogether empty-handed.

So hands up if you can guess whether or not Talon decided to actually hand over the power to control the demons to questionable Blackblood Rebb? Yes, it goes about as one might expect, with the added bonus that Talon is able to retrieve the Dragman. Once the little girl is back safe with Talon and Janzo, she starts revealing actual genuinely intriguing fragments of plot, which relate to her own role, passed down through a family line, the reasons for her having gone so willingly with Rebb and the reasons she equally readily went back to Talon. There’s fascinating stuff bubbling just beneath the surface there.

Equally, cheated of her prize, Rebb decides on another, faintly surprising route. She approaches Rosamund direct, offering her fealty and that of her people and their demons in return for Rosamund’s command of Talon to hand over the power she possesses. Making the case that she can control the demons when Talon cannot, and that she can also command an entire army of her own people, she certainly has Rosamund thinking.

But never mind all of that, because here comes some more ‘comedy’ with Janzo trying his best to get some romantic attention from Talon, advised by Nya. In perhaps one of the more wilfully stupid elements of obvious plotting, Nya is spending so long trying to makeover everyone’s favourite walking plot point resolver that she is clearly starting to develop feelings for him. Hang on a second though, isn’t she spying on Rosamund for the Prime Order, at Dred’s behest? Oh well.

Speaking of Dred, he gets a good telling off and thrown in the cells when he returns to the Capital having failed to either kill the ‘false queen’ or the last Blackblood. The three, looking like nothing so much as Blackadder’s puritan relatives in their white cloaks with far too much pale face makeup, are most displeased, even when he brings them another ‘prize’ in the form of – well guess who isn’t quite dead after all?

This then lays the groundwork for another subplot which is so teeth-itchingly obvious from the very first scene that you may well need a lie down to recover from watching it. Suffice it to say, a character who has always appeared dumb to me in a cast full of not terribly bright characters does nothing to appear any smarter here.

Verdict: The usual Outpost nonsense frustratingly seeded with bits of genuine interest which are then immediately neglected in favour of more nonsense. Irritating. 4/10

Greg D. Smith