Review: Blacktalon “Scourge”

Good lord. As much as I hate the release schedule WarhammerTV forces on us, the return on investment we get for that wait was well worth it. There was a lot of growth in the narrative this week, both with Neave and Hendrick.

Neave has a vision of her past life, where the forces of Nurgle infiltrate her home. This sends Neave on an obsessive search back home to find out more about her life before becoming a Stormcast Eternal. After getting himself involved, Hendrick follows Neave on this search. What follows is a big pile of “oh shit” smashed into the final two minutes of the episode.

Let’s do a rundown of what happened:

• Neave spirals into borderline psychosis because of everything she’s remembering.
• Hendrick begging and pleading for Neave to drop it and leave, ultimately forcing her to remembering her by shoving his sword through her neck.
• Hendrick meeting up with the rest of the team who showed up to help them.
• Nurgle’s forces splitting the earth and rising from underground ready to lay waste to everyone and everything.

This was a lot of bullshit to go down, but I’m all for it. The first three episodes were really slow, almost episodic. There were very few threads keeping the episodes tied together. However, “Scourge” feels like the linchpin that has tied everything together. Warhammer Storyforge has put together a really good narrative, with a shady figure with Hendrick, and Neave’s desire to figure our her past life as a mortal. Hendrick’s motives to do anything for his cause will ultimately doom either himself or everyone around him. I was calling it from last episode, and I think his actions will ultimately doom him.

“Scourge” was a great set up to a possible great ending. There’s a lot we still don’t know yet about what “the anvil takes.” Is it random? Because the one teammate that died during “Murder” came back with knowledge that plagueseeds were coming to Hammerhall. So a lot of the established rules are pretty shattered. I’m all for it, but some consistency would be nice.

I was thoroughly impressed with “Scourge.” From when Hendrick’s first line was uttered, you knew something was going to go down. And when he insisted to go along with Neave, you knew that something big was going to happen. I just didn’t think Hendrick would go as far as to kill off Neave so that he could keep the status quo. Now, one question remains: if Neave can remember her mortal self dying, what stops her from remembering Hendrick shanking her neck?

There are so many possibilities that spun out of the last few minutes of “Scourge.” What I am most excited to see is how the team are going to fight Nurgle’s plague forces. They literally split the area in half, and the pestilence cloud of insects and plague spewed out along with monstrosities. I literally screamed out “oh shit!” out loud. I’m deeply invested in where Blacktalon’s story ends up after this next episode.