Talon, Janzo and Garrett continue their quest for the Book of Names, but nobody said that the path was going to be easy. Dred and his men continue to terrorise the Outpost and its inhabitants. Gwyn remains hidden, but who can she really trust?

It’s possible that I have slightly misjudged The Outpost. For all that it seems to just be a loosely assembled bunch of meandering subplots that go nowhere, I’m starting to get the feeling that maybe the writers are actually possessed of eternal optimism, and that this scattergun approach to narrative is actually them trying to build little bits of the world to develop later. It’s not working, but it might better explain their approach.

At any rate, this week focuses (as the title might suggest) on the Book of Names and our trio’s quest to get it. Unfortunately, as we saw last time out, Dred’s agent has beaten them to the temple. Even more unfortunately, they find that their own path there isn’t exactly clear. Of the two encounters they have on the way this week, one is with a piece of CGI even worse than the normal standards of the show and the other is with a more familiar enemy. There’s something that happens in that second encounter which makes me wonder about this worldbuilding thing, although if that’s the case they’re leaving it awfully late in this ten episode run, almost as if they think there’s a second season in the offing.

Mainly though, the impression I get is almost that the show’s writers know that they might have lost some momentum by this point, as Garret spends quite a lot of his screen time shirtless or as near as damn it, while Talon’s cleavage gets hoisted more into view with each shot she’s in. I guess there’s a certain boldness about this that one could admire, if everything else wasn’t so terrible.

Meanwhile back at the Outpost Dred’s men continue to terrorise the populace, lining up all the women they can find to administer a brutal test as they search for the blackblood. It’s honestly difficult to care too much, so generic is the brand of evil practised by the First Order, but at least we have the minor distraction of Gwyn and whether or not she will escape to distract us. There’s even a twist or two as she learns some lessons about who exactly to trust, but it’s all a little half-hearted and obvious.

An uprising towards the end of the episode against the First Order promises excitement, or at least a change of pace, but that promise never really gets delivered on. Back with Talon and Co, there’s an ‘unexpected’ twist that a blind man could have seen coming a mile away, and as the credits finally roll, you shake yourself awake as you realise that another episode has expired with a hackneyed whimper.

Verdict: What’s left to say? As with every other episode of this absurdly cheap-looking, po-faced show, it’s a collection of terrible dialogue, shonky sets, appalling special FX and a complete lack of self-awareness or anything approaching originality. Bad. 1/10

Greg D. Smith