Blood Drive - Episode XI: Rise of the Primo - Review

'Rise of the Primo' marked a turning point for this young series as it heads into the last two episodes.

Faced with the last day of Blood Drive, Slink decides to up the ante - turning Club Mayhem into a coliseum and pitting the competitors in gladiator style combat. The story allowed the show to give us one of its more goriest episodes yet, while also adding in some surprises that takes Blood Drive in an interesting direction.

The reveal that the CEO of Heart Industries was actually Karma was an unexpected twist and it added some emotional punch to an otherwise gory, action packed episode. You can't help but feel for the younger sister - Grace did practically abandon her, which led to her ending up at the insane asylum, but still, what a psycho b#@$%.

That ending though left some serious questions to be answered. How was Karma able to be thrown into the grinder, only to come out of the soul reclamator in one piece?

Another emotional part of the episode, or at least, as emotional as a show like Blood Drive can get, was watching Christopher come back to his loyal sexbot Aki. There is an undeniable bond between the robot and former police officer and, for viewers, they do make quite the dynamic pairing.

Their storyline revealed quite a bit. The cannibalistic engines don't just eat up a poor soul for fuel, but it recycles them too. Christopher's line, "I think it makes hats," was the quote of the episode and one of the character's best delivered lines.

Christopher seems to have this innocent and unbreakable goodness about him, much like his partner, Arthur. However, at the end of the episode after refusing to kill his competitors, we finally see Arthur breakdown. This seemed out of place on a character standpoint. I mean, sure he was angry after thinking Grace had died, but to not come back to reality upon finding out she was still alive and after she had told him to leave with her seemed odd.

Nevertheless, watching Arthur give in to the sickness upstairs and going on a rampage was fun. Him being Primo takes the show into an interesting direction as we head into the final two episodes.

8/10

Other things of note:

*The humour, as usual, was on point in 'Rise of the Primo'. Got to love the self-referential commercials and those idiotic kids.

*We also saw the end of psychopathic couple Domi (Jenny Stead) and Cliff (Craig Jackson). Watching them stab each other in the neck, so they can spend eternity with each other was sickeningly hilarious. This show really does have a tendency to tap into a side in me I don't want to know exists.