Talon elects to make a sanctuary of The Outpost, inviting people from the realm to shelter within its walls from the spread of Yavalla’s Kinjes. Wren and Janzo continue to search desperately for a cure. Garro finds himself investigating a murderous cult operating within The Outpost.

This is one of those episodes of The Outpost that feels like the writers know they have to pad things out while they sort of dramatically pause the main plot because it’s at a dull part, so they drag in several subplots that get started, progressed and finished all in the space of an episode because narrative coherence isn’t a thing.

So Munt meets a girl! One of Gwynn’s ex-handmaidens, the episode seems to be telling us, though I’m damned if I can recall seeing her before. At any rate, now bereft of her former mistress and jobless, she of course decides that hanging around with Munt fluttering her eyelashes at him until he offers her a job is the way forward. The thing is, the show seems to want us to believe this isn’t even a wheeze – she seems to genuinely actually like Munt for reasons it doesn’t bother itself worrying about.

Meanwhile, the discovery of a dismembered hand leads Garrett into being put in charge of investigating some awful, murderous cult which seems to be kidnapping young women and sacrificing them to some thing or other. Gosh, I hope that this newly discovered existential threat to young women living in The Outpost doesn’t somehow impact on Munt’s new friend…

But wait, there’s more! As the investigation goes deeper, it turns out that the something to which these young girls are being sacrificed might be a rogue Lo’quiri. And one short conversation with Zed later, Talon knows exactly who the Lo’quiri is and of course, it’s a bad one. Nothing for it but for Talon to strap on her big girl boots and track it down. Maybe she can even bend it to her will. Wouldn’t that be handy?

In-between this mountain of connected, extremely quickly established and resolved subplots, there’s the usual guff. Janzo and Wren (who the writers feel the need to keep having remind us viewers are the smartest people in the world of The Outpost) are working on studying the Kinjes. It’s not going brilliantly, although they do come up with a way of detecting them in humans. Talon spends a lot of time being very angry at Zed for suggesting that the infected should just be killed before the Kinjes spread, then paradoxically is the first to step in and kill infected who are attempting to spread the Kinj to others. Oh and there’s a late shot of The Capital just to remind us all that it’s still there, suggesting that it’s going to play a part at some point soon.

Verdict: Week after week, I turn up to watch The Outpost hoping that somehow it’ll maybe be a bit better. Week after week, I’m disappointed. 4/10

Greg D. Smith