Talon and Janzo make their way to the meeting with the Colipsum suppliers, who turn out to be not quite what was expected. The discovery of the body of Gwyn’s handmaid causes problems for Wythers and strains her relationship with Garret. Meanwhile, all is not necessarily well in the nascent rebellion, as dissenters begin to emerge.

Another week, another episode of The Outpost in which an awful lot happens without anything really mattering from one moment to the next. Talon and Janzo continue their road trip to meet up with the Colipsum suppliers, and Janzo continues to be possibly the creepiest male character in genre TV (itself a crowded category) while also being the show’s literal walking McGuffin, possessed of all manner of talents, depending on what the show needs from week to week. The journey also gives us an opportunity to find out more about Janzo’s background as if we actually cared, and it’s as blandly tragic and cliched as you might expect.

Nevertheless, when they meet the suppliers, there’s a surprise of sorts, although rather than then address it, the show sort of brushes past it because there are about a thousand other half-baked subplots for it to get through.

There’s Wythers, who gets a bit worried when it turns out that his silent associate decided to bury Gwyn’s handmaid in someone’s vegetable patch. Yes, you heard me right the first time. This scene is so exquisitely bad it feels unreal, Wythers openly berating his second in command for having buried the body where anyone could find it right in front of a crowd of onlookers in a tone and volume such that it is impossible not one of them heard him. And yet minutes later in another scene where he is summoned before Gwyn to answer her suspicions that he did it, he’s in full denial mode. There’s an oddly specific loophole in his blackmail then exploited by Gwyn, and we’re moving on again because the show has other things to show us.

At the encampment of rebellious soldiers, some of the soldiers have decided that a rebellion against the Prime Order isn’t what they signed up for at all, and elect that one of them should go and report the rebellion immediately. He gets inevitably caught and then the show commits its most egregious crime of all – it attempts nuance.

But it’s like nuance as applied by a toddler. With a big stick. Basically, our heroes are confronted with the moral dilemma of whether they can be better than or exactly the same as the Prime Order in their treatment of enemies/traitors. After a whole thirty seconds or so of earnest moralising on the subject they decide they’re better, then act in a way which directly suggests that they are not. It is difficult to believe what you’re watching.

Onwards again, it’s time for this week’s instalment of the Gwyn and Garret show. It wasn’t all that long ago that Commander Calkussar was threatening to do awful things to Garret if he so much as looked at Gwyn lustfully again, yet now that she’s actually (sort of) declared herself Queen (the show honestly can’t seem to decide either way on this point) they are apparently free to smooch anytime anywhere. Only Garret has some issues because of notions of honour and sacrifice and other stuff, to which Gwyn’s solution is a truly Blackadder-worthy ‘I’m Queen and I will do what I want to make myself happy’ flounce. Inspiring stuff.

Oh and there’s Dred. He’s there. Doing bad things. Sentencing people to death for illicit nookie while he was away because… the Prime Order is fine with murder but adultery is just wrong? I don’t know, honestly given they’re supposedly the big bad which the show wants us to rail against, seven episodes in it remains entirely unclear what the Prime Order are actually about other than sort of being generically evil. But anyway, Dred is suspicious about various things at the Outpost, so maybe the show will move on that plot a bit soon. It’s difficult to know/care.

Finally, Garret has a new problem. It’s a problem that might as well have been communicated by way of big neon signs dangling from helium balloons for the last six episodes, but it’s a problem nonetheless, and this being The Outpost, he’s going to do what he does best and go brood somewhere manfully and alone until inevitably I suspect someone will find him next episode and it’ll all be glossed over so this ADHD fantasy show can move onto the next bit of subplot.

Verdict: I’ll give it this much – the show is now so abundantly poor in writing, style and execution that it actually does make me laugh. The issue is that I’m laughing at it, rather than with it, and for all the wrong reasons. Dreadful. 1/10

Greg D. Smith