The Bones arrive at the Outpost to hunt out the last remaining Blackblood, and this results in a couple of reunions along the way, neither of which is happy. Withers continues to worry away at the problem of what Gwyn’s secret is, but the answer is not what he expects. Talon continues to struggle to control the Lakiri, but the arrival of the Bones presents an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

Last week, we left Talon apparently dying in a pool of blood having been stabbed by the Lakiri as she tried to tell it what to do. This was the second episode out of four to date in which the credits rolled on our heroine bleeding out on the floor, which in another show might have felt silly and excessive but in The Outpost felt pretty much par for the course.

Of course, you can’t have a show without its central character, so Talon isn’t dead because…well, I’ll have to get back to you on that because the show never really bothers to explain. It can’t even seem to maintain any sort of consistency as to exactly how bad the injury is, one minute having Talon staggering along looking as if she might keel over any moment and the next having her seeming only slightly inconvenienced by the wound. Still, there’s plot to get through, so the show just sort of waves its hand and moves on.

Withers. My god, this character is just…well, something. This week, he indulges in a little bit of breaking and entering to find out whatever secret lies in Gwyn’s bedroom that her maid when she was a young child wasn’t allowed to clean it. Yes, really. Anyway, after a short search, his assistant finds a ludicrously obvious secret compartment (honestly, only by actually having a label that said ‘SECRET COMPARTMENT’ could it have been any more apparent) in which lies something he really didn’t expect. I won’t spoil it, but it leads us on a path that I suspect the writers thought was quite edgy and Game of Thrones-y but which in honesty comes off as poorly-conceived, nonsensical, and wipes away any trace of sympathy one might have had for several characters in one swoop. And that’s without considering the actions of Withers himself, which firmly cement him in the asshole category.

Meanwhile, the arrival of The Bones means that things get more exciting in the Outpost. Or at least, they get marginally less badly acted. Cokey Falkow manages to be legitimately impressive as Shek, leader of The Bones, even in spite of some of the more awful bits of dialogue with which he has to contend, and his interaction with Withers sparked a modicum of genuine interest in me. Unfortunately his interaction with another character just confirms what I’m sure the show felt was a massive reveal which was literally obvious to me from episode one, but ho hum, it helps to have an actual honest-to-goodness dramatic actor around.

Oh, and the Lakiri. Yes we get to see more of that wandering around in cheaply rendered CGI. Talon still doesn’t really seem to have much control over it, but that won’t stop the writers busting it out to remind us of exactly how little budget they were given for the show. It is rather comical seeing how much every character in the show quavers in theatrical terror at the empty space where they’ve obviously been assured the beastie will be rendered in later in post-production, but otherwise its appearances are mainly deadly dull.

Oh, and Garret Spears is there. Literally. His main function now seems to be to stare mournfully at people. Bless Jake Stormroen for sticking with this role, I genuinely hope his career rewards him for it in future.

Verdict: It’s marginally better this week by dint of having an actual honest to goodness decent bad guy around for a change, but even he can’t lift the rest of it up too much. Still dumb, still cheap and still endlessly cliched. 3/10

Greg D. Smith