Yavalla’s powers are tested by confrontation with our heroes. Tobin  becomes increasingly frustrated. Falista tries her hand at politics.

This largely feels like one of those episodes that are particular to this show, being oddly both stuffed with things happening and simultaneously feeling like it’s running in place, padding out the run time. I think it doesn’t help that everything that does happen ends up feeling oddly inconsequential, for a variety of reasons.

To avoid spoilers as far as possible, I’ll use just the one illustrative example. Janzo creates a thing that’s very difficult to create in his lab. Thing gets wasted. Someone says ‘well can’t you just make another one?’. Janzo points out that he’s in the middle of nowhere, not in his lab, reels off improbable list of things that he’d use to do so and in doing so realises that conveniently, yes he can and does so really quickly. Rinse and repeat, for almost everything in the episode.

It’s difficult to buy into an omnipresent existential threat such as the one supposedly posed by Yavalla when she’s so relentlessly easily thwarted in so many of her little side schemes. Oh no, she’s infected that important cast member. Oh phew, they’re OK now. Rinse and repeat.

Back at the Outpost itself, Tobin really can’t catch a break. Having basically accepted that his true love is a little annoyed that he sacrificed his own happiness to get an army he thought she desperately needed, he tries to do something else positive and helpful, but Gwynn decides he’s only doing it to make himself look good so she still has a major case of the grumps with him. Enter Falista, who has a plan of her own to *checks notes* talk the woman whose man she just stole into giving said man a reward. Sure…

And of course Gwynn and Garrett are spending lots more time together, Garrett planning ways to better defend them from the incoming doom and Gwynn basically just keeps making moony eyes at him. Between that and Talon and Zed getting all smiley at one another as they combine forces to beat people, it seems the writers are determined to give us a repeat of the previous Love Triangle, having relegated Tobin to the sidelines with his new bride.

Remember that one of the Three is wandering the countryside with her loyalist soldiers, and that Talon has learned of the existence of a final Kinj that can destroy everything (including, presumably, other Kinjes)? Well good, because it’s been completely forgotten about here, presumably to be picked up later. Oh and Falista’s Kinj keeps randomly activating to give people a bit of a headache every time she gets angry. So maybe that’ll be something, at some point. Or maybe not. This is The Outpost, after all…

Verdict: Though by no means the worst episode of the show to date, certainly one of the blandest, and curiously empty-feeling considering how many ‘things’ occur. 5/10

Greg D. Smith