With her back pressed to the wall by Rebb’s machinations, Talon takes a risky gamble to try to defeat her enemy. At the Capital, the conditioning of Garret continues.

So, Garret is alive and the Prime Order think that conditioning him to re-join them in the most obvious game of Good Cop/Bad Cop ever put to film is the key to solving all their problems. Given how legendarily dense the character is, chances are they’re onto something. At any rate, the game continues. Garret is partway there, having been fed lies in his cell by Dred about Rosamund’s true nature, and some more attention from his ‘saviour’ and her friends starts to tip the balance. It’d maybe be a tragic loss for The Outpost and the Queen, if he wasn’t such a blithering idiot.

Meanwhile, back at the outpost, Rebb decides that as her slightly more cunning overtures haven’t worked, she may as well try the more direct approach, kidnapping Rosamund and demanding Talon come to her to surrender the power she desires. This leaves Talon with the tricky choice of whether or not to risk opening the portal and using the name the Dragman had clutched in her hand when she died. When she makes the decision, she’s confronted with a whole new set of parameters to deal with.

Elinor has a sit down with her sister to try to prove just how well off she is, which goes about as well as you might expect as the two snipe at one another. It’s at this juncture that the writers also manage to slip in a bit of casual homophobia as the Baron’s adviser opines that perhaps the Queen is a ‘lady’s lady if you know what I mean’ given she hasn’t succumbed to the big beefy charms of the Baron himself. Janzo’s intervention, all disgusted face and ‘why would you think such a thing’ doesn’t make things much better, leaving me with the distinct feeling that any LGBTQ+ viewers who were still hanging about probably switched off at that point.

They won’t have missed much if they did. There’s another one of those ill-advised battles involving the badly CGI’s demons and actors fighting one another in awkwardly choreographed ways, repetition of the exact same CGI shot of the capital every time a scene goes there, looking like a pound shop rendition of Kings Landing seen through a greasy telescope lens, and more ‘comedy’ as Nya gets increasingly obviously interested in Janzo, despite his complete obliviousness. As with the last episode, there’s also genuinely interesting bits in there, but they keep being shoved off the screen by more silliness.

Verdict: It was bad enough when the show was just bad. Dropping in a little bit of offensive scripting makes it even worse. 2/10

Greg D. Smith