With Gwynn and Tobin rescued and back at The Outpost, it’s time for Tobin to be truthful. Talon and Zed set off on a mission to execute Yavalla even as Wren works desperately to find a cure for the Kinj that might save her.

Love triangles. The writers of The Outpost love them, and it’s perhaps one of the reasons why the show has failed to appeal to me, and yet remains enough of a draw to its target audience that it was greenlit for a fourth season even before this third season had begin to air. At any rate, the show clearly feels it hasn’t beaten this horse quite enough yet, and so there are parts of this episode where blatant signposts are erected to a revival of old romantical tensions.

Of course, the first romantical tension is Tobin and Gwynn (and Falista too). Tobin, entirely failing to find the right way to tell his true love that he went and got married to try to help her, finds the task taken away from him when Falista gets all huffy again (her only apparent purpose aside from picking up an errant Kinj she seems neither aware of nor able to use in any conscious way). Gwynn predictably gets very upset and decides that love isn’t for her and she must concentrate very hard on being Queen, which she then immediately screws up by making an awful (and obviously so) decision which ends up causing trouble and costing lives. Ho hum.

Meanwhile Zed and Talon determine a new plan to find Yavalla and kill her after Gwynn and Tobin both have dreams apparently connected to their possession by the kinjes which show them that she’s in… a mountain. Like, not to be funny here, but there are quite a few of those around the place guys? At any rate, this piece of information allows our two Blackblood Heroes (and Kinj Bearers) to formulate an entirely unrelated plan to track the errant priestess down and murder her, with the help of a device prepared by Janzo.

At the same time, Wren is having sleepless, frantic days and nights trying to find a cure so that her mother’s death can be avoided, even though she doesn’t much like her and can agree that she wasn’t even all that nice or good a mother before all this nonsense. When she and Janzo do stumble upon an apparent cure (and stumble is absolutely the right word) they dash off themselves in pursuit of Zed and Talon.

All of this of course leaves Talon and Zed and Gwynn and Garret alone with one another. The former to get all sweaty and fighty as they compete with one another for who can do the most stylish sword moves and the latter to reminisce wistfully about the good old days when everything seemed so much simpler and yes they are going for this reheated love triangle (or I suppose, square or possibly even star if we include Tobin).

Other lowlights include Talon being told by someone she has absolutely no reason to trust about yet another kinj that basically sounds like the One Ring, Gwynn compounding a mistake with another even bigger one and Falista delivering a speech to Tobin about…well, I’m not really sure because it honestly isn’t clear if she’s more annoyed that he doesn’t love her back or that she’s not at home in Aegisford instead of at The Outpost.

Verdict: As soap-opera-ish as ever and getting duller by the moment. 4/10

Greg D. Smith