Talon is the last of her kind, on a mission to avenge the murder of her entire village at the hands of a band of armed men thirteen years ago when she was still a little girl. That mission will take her to The Outpost, a lawless fortress on the edge of the civilised world.

In the first minute of this pilot, this show shoots itself in the foot with its dialogue. There’s a basic maxim of storytelling known as ‘Show, don’t tell’. It’s not an inflexible law, but when your lead is saying something about having to find the origin of a mark so that she can track down the people who murdered her family when there’s less than sixty seconds on the clock, you’ve done something wrong.

Making it worse, after the opening scene which packs in as much brainless cliché as I think is humanly possible in five minutes of fantasy-based TV, the show then reverts to a ten minute flashback in which we get shown the slaughter of Talon’s village, and her own escape. Stick this in before the opening credits, then move forward to present day and Talon tracking the band of men responsible, and you’d have no need for clunky expository dialogue.

It’s only one of the show’s problems though. The fact that Talon is the last of her kind – ‘Blackbloods’ – and has inherited some sort of chosen-one type supernatural power that she doesn’t yet know how to access is straight from the Big Book of Fantasy Tropes. That her kind are indistinguishable from humans except for – and I’m not making this up – pointy ears (with a double point, to be fair) just adds to this, and of course, the land is under the thrall of an evil, apparently religiously based order called the Covenant, whose soldiers seem to just roam the land looking for innocent people to murder because… reasons?

Being the CW, I was surprised also by the clear budgetary restraint on display. Arrow, The Flash and others have all consistently displayed a decent level of FX and stunt work throughout their time. This veers between terrible (CGI creatures) and merely lazy (costumes that look like costumes rather than actual appropriate outfits worn by people in this sort of world) and the fighting is oddly mostly bloodless despite a lot of stabbing going on. There’s the occasional graphic bit of violence, which just makes its utter absence everywhere else even more bewildering.

The dialogue is mostly terrible as well. Talon is mainly just snarky, but in an odd way, like she’s doing it for effect, rather than out of a genuine sense of apathy towards anyone. She also seems oddly unaffected by the loss of people around her – maybe because the loss of her whole people so early in life burned out any sense of loss moving forwards, but somehow this doesn’t feel like a show that goes that deep.

Jessica Green does her best as Talon, but you sense that her heart isn’t really in it. It’s like she was promised the lead in a cool fantasy series and jumped at the chance, but now she’s there and she’s read the script, it’s too late to do anything but force her way through it. I could be wrong – perhaps it will get better. Certainly there’s a small frisson of intrigue about the identity of one mysterious stranger as the credits roll on this opener, but this show has its work cut out for it if it’s to become even moderately intriguing from a start like this.

Verdict: Cliched, lazy, poorly written and with a lead who looks like she’s really rather be in something much better. This isn’t a promising start. 3/10

Greg D. Smith