Talon and her allies must fight against the combined power of the ‘Gods’ as they throw the dice to save the world one last time.

So here we are, 49 episodes on the slate and that’s a wrap. The Outpost has been an infuriatingly inconsistent show at times, mostly cheaply costumed, awkwardly scripted tosh filmed on cheap sets but just occasionally rising well above its natural station and surprising this viewer with depth, charm and even a little genuine humour. So, does it stick the landing, or does it revert to its normal levels of nonsense and end on a whimper?

Yes. And yes.

Let’s be honest, it was never a show that especially held my affection. At times it was painfully bad to watch. But after a couple of seasons, I’d grown used to it, able to occasionally even laugh along with it rather than at it. As it kept getting renewed, I was forcibly reminded time and again that opinions differ all the time in genre, and that just because I wasn’t enjoying a thing didn’t mean it had no value. This season, after a poor start, the show had finally found a groove it could work with. The ‘Gods’ became the best villains the show had ever seen, their backstory the richest, most coherent bit of narrative it’d ever had. Then the previous episode sort of reverted mostly to type, and I feared it would really do something predictable and awful with its ending.

Happily, I was (mostly) wrong. Don’t misunderstand me – silliness does abound here at several moments, and there’s the usual contrived elements that serve to push all the plot pieces where they need to be. And yet…

At its heart it has been a genuine pleasure to watch central character Talon’s complete journey from lonely outcast to saviour of the realm. Her ending here feels earned in a way that it might not have had Jessica Green not put so much energy into a character that was often poorly written. Anand Desai-Barochia has taken a character I instinctively loathed in the first episodes and made him something else entirely. Janzo started as a creepy, red flag-covered mess, but the actor has made him sweet, charming and even a little heroic as he needed to be. Janzo started as comic relief and then, for a time, became the implausibly smart Deus Ex Machina of the show. It was with the introduction of Izuka Hoyle’s Wren that he truly started to come into his own, and it was unexpected to say the least to see that Janzo’s getting a relationship was the missing piece of the character.

Others have shone too. Jake Stormoen’s Garret became something more than an over-earnest himbo, Reece Ritchie’s Zed became less nasty and more sort of smugly prickly in a likeable enough way. Adam Johnson’s Munt was clearly the standout in terms of character progression, going from dim recurring background character in the first two seasons to genuinely affecting protagonist in 3&4.

It lost some of its stronger characters along the way, never a show afraid to kill its darlings (or at least some of them) even if it did occasionally contrive to bring them back again afterward. In its finale, the show resisted some of its worst impulses – heroic sacrifice is only meaningful if it is a sacrifice, and whereas The Outpost never sought to rival Game of Thrones in terms of body count, many good souls were lost along the way.

But what of the episode itself? An audacious plan by Aster, the conflicting desires of Wren and Janzo who wish to save Marvyn’s people, and the weight of the world (quite literally) on Talon’s shoulders are all strong elements. Against them is the fact that this is one hour of television in which everything has to be wrapped up, and the fact that in Hollywood generally, and the Outpost writers’ room particularly, happy endings are the best endings. Had it started from the beginning with the ‘Gods’ as a factor, the four seasons of this show could have been used to develop a deep and rich narrative around these figures. Instead, we had the Three and their religious fanaticism which was clumsily retrofitted into the story of the ‘Gods’ later on, the Plagueling epidemic (remember that? I’d forgotten it already), and the confused introduction of other Blackbloods which only started to make sense in season three. Even the Loquiri are nowhere to be seen now – once one of the big plot points, now disregarded in favour of the new narrative.

Essentially, in this last season in particular there’s something of the Logan effect – the feeling of watching the ending to a much better, stronger and more coherent set of stories that went before it than what we actually got. I’m happy that the cast and the writers were able to finally hone in on this quality, but I can’t help but wish – for them and for me – that they’d got there sooner.

Verdict: A decent enough end to the show which only serves to highlight how much more we could – and perhaps should – have had. 7/10

Greg D. Smith