Talon and Janzo return to the Outpost with their Colipsum haul. The discovery of Garret’s potential infection adds to the woes of more than one person. Dred moves closer to the Outpost, intent on slaughtering anyone he finds until the Blackblood is discovered. Meanwhile, Dred’s agent moves closer to the Book of Names – will Talon be able to beat her to it?

Has it really been two weeks since the last instalment of The Outpost? It doesn’t feel like it was that long. At any rate, another episode brings another load of silliness which still makes the mistake of taking itself far too seriously at every turn.

Starting off, we have the return of Talon and Janzo to the Outpost after their adventures gathering Colipsum. They encounter the new Gate Marshal, blag their way past him with a lie about what’s on their cart, pay some tax, and drop the stuff off at the tavern where the Mistress is her usual ungrateful self. The issue here is that there’s no real reason for the Colipsum subplot, and it’s never really been adequately defined. Certainly it seems to be a sort of drug, we assume it’s illicit given the people who seem to trade in it, but there’s no real idea of the effects, no real suggestion of the downside (if any) and not even any real attempt to define how illegal it might be and why. What we’re left with then is a sort of suggestion that it’s a bit naughty somehow, but what impact it has on the overall plot is unclear. Even the revelation that Worm’s suppliers were Greyskins seems to hold no actual relevance. At any rate, the show’s bored with that now – onwards to:

Garret. He’s sitting alone in a room chained to a chair waiting to die, remember? All very dramatic and mournful. Except wait, turns out he’s just in Janzo’s cellar, so he’s discovered by Janzo and Talon, and must reveal his tale of woe and misery. So of course Talon decides that Janzo will absolutely cure him, even in the face of Janzo himself insisting multiple times he has no idea how, that there is no cure, etc.

Of course, none of that is really very important because the main point here is to draw out that love triangle that the show has been trying to get started since episode one. Talon getting all upset at the thought of Garret’s imminent demise. Gwyn being summoned by him to say goodbye before he turns, then almost immediately being dismissed by him because he ‘doesn’t want her to see him like this’ and worries ‘she might get infected.’ Talon’s wounded look as he tells Gwyn he loves her. The loaded looks that pass between all of them. Janzo wringing his hands and hunching comically in the background. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a parody show, but it’s all played absolutely seriously. By the time Gwyn and Talon are having the conversation about what they are to do about this conundrum they’re all in denial of even though they all blatantly aren’t, it’s just too much.

Still, there’s other stuff to be getting on with. Wythers needs to have a conversation with his benefactor which largely goes nowhere. All we really establish is that the FX budget for the show was running really low by this point, as Wythers stares out at a badly CGI’d drop from a perch in the wall. The script bravely takes a stab at him finding it difficult to shake the habit of being a copper, even though by this point we know he took – at best – a flexible approach to law enforcement depending on who was in trouble and what he stood to gain. Thankfully, it at least doesn’t labour the point, but it might have been better if it had left it alone altogether.

And then there’s Dred, and his ‘battalion of men’ who basically equate to about four men on horseback, a few more on foot, some clever angling of cameras and a bit more CGI for the long shots. Finally arriving at the Outpost itself, he causes quite the stir of course, being as generically evil as it is possible for a fantasy villain to be without actually being in a pantomime.

But of course by then Talon and Janzo and Garret have left to seek out further adventure, as they finally have a lead on the whereabouts of the Book of Names. Garret has to go with of course because he’s ‘about to die’ and also so that the show can push more of the love triangle and torture Janzo at the same time. Things get particularly creepy here – even by the standards of Janzo usually as a character – and it makes for actively uncomfortable viewing. I would be genuinely surprised if the actors involved didn’t need several showers afterward.

As I’ve said before, one of the main issues the show has is the ADHD nature of the scripting. It can’t ever settle to any single plot point, instead flitting from one to the other, never actually concluding anything. None of the actors here seem actually bad, and most of them in fact seem to be taking the material they’re given as seriously as they can. But all the earnestness in the world can’t make up for the poorness of the script, nor the shonkiness of the VFX or the cheapness of the set design.

Verdict: Still just terrible. Unable to focus long enough to actually develop any of its subplots, and with most of them making little to no sense in context anyway, it just bungles along from one cringe-inducing scene to the next. Actually painful to watch in places, this instalment set a new low. 1/10

Greg D. Smith