Appeal to the Portsmouth Council and set a trap

The Appeal to the Portsmouth Council and set a trap turns a rejected request for protection into a deliberate act of baiting: Ava’s group leaves without Council assistance, but with a plan to make Venus come to them. The meeting exposes the distance between the Council’s public language of service and its reluctance to act, while the group turns that institutional failure into a way to spread its intended location to whoever is watching.

Background and Approach

The episode begins with Ava waking to sunlight and a growling stomach. Ezra remains under his blankets, while Lock is already gone; Ava dresses and goes to join him, hoping food and coffee might make the day seem more manageable. That ordinary morning frame gives way to a high-stakes appeal, but the practical details of the journey already suggest how much effort access to the Council requires.

Ava and the others have traveled by road and boat to reach the meeting. She enters with a controlled expression and presents an offer: in exchange for what the group needs, she says, she can get the Coterie off the Council’s doorstep. She explains the situation in deliberately limited terms, giving only its barest outline. The restraint is strategic: she wants the Council to understand the stakes without laying out everything the group knows or intends to do.

The Council’s Refusal

The accusations Ava raises are kidnapping, murder, and extortion. The green woman dismisses the case before Ava can establish it, arguing that she has no proof and portraying the Inferno as merely a nightclub. She suggests Ava is a disgruntled employee inventing charges after being denied a raise. The exchange replaces an inquiry into the alleged crimes with an attack on the credibility and motives of the person reporting them.

Ava acknowledges that she has no proof to offer. Had she not disposed of her phone, she could have shown the many messages she had sent Venus to report that she had completed a job; those messages, she recognizes, would also have reflected poorly on her. Her word is therefore the evidence she brings, and the Council treats it as insufficient. The missing phone becomes a concrete limit on what she can establish in the room, even as the messages themselves would have complicated the picture of her own involvement.

Alistair, whom the green woman addresses as a god, gives the refusal a more measured form. He notes that Ava’s group are strangers and that Duncan’s support for them carries only so much weight. The Council cannot charge into a serious investigation on testimony alone, he says, though it will investigate in time. Another member adds that people who approached through proper channels are already waiting and should be helped first. The formal rationale is procedure and competing priorities; the immediate result is delay when Ava is seeking urgent intervention.

Alistair rises to show the visitors out, apologizes for the distance they have traveled, and invites them to return if they obtain proof, during normal meeting hours. His polished courtesy and grin remind Ava of Venus’s predatory smile. The contrast is pointed: the Council presents itself as serving its people, yet its response leaves the visitors without protection and sends them away with a future appointment as their only stated recourse.

Turning the Meeting into a Trap

Before leaving, Ava hands over a piece of paper bearing her temporary cell number and the address where the group has chosen to direct Venus for a showdown. She presents the information as something the Council might need if it changes its mind. Lock coughs and gives her a warning look, but the address is not a careless disclosure: the group intends for the information to travel beyond the room.

The group waits until it is back in the parking lot to discuss what the meeting accomplished. Olive calls the journey a waste of time and asks why Ava did not burn the yacht. Ava points out that setting it on fire while they were aboard would hardly have been clever. More importantly, Ikka explains that they never expected the Council to help. They needed all its members to hear where Ava would be, because whoever was working for Venus could pass the information on.

The plan follows the logic of drawing an enemy out of a protected position. Ikka uses the image of a hare that cannot be attacked in its warren: the group wants Venus to believe she can surprise them, while making her leave the safety of her own den to do so. The Council’s refusal thus becomes part of the mechanism. The visitors cannot rely on its force, but their presence before the full body gives their message a route into the network they suspect is connected to Venus.

What the Appeal Reveals

The meeting is also an attempt to manage uncertainty within the Council. Sid explains that the group could not simply have called ahead, because they did not know which members might be in Venus’s pocket; they needed every Council member to hear the warning. This does not establish that any particular member is compromised. Instead, it clarifies why the appeal had to be made in person and to the whole body, rather than entrusted to an unknown intermediary.

Ava’s complaint about the distant dock and the boat journey changes as she considers the arrangement: she realizes that the difficulty of reaching the Council may be the point. Access is burdensome for ordinary locals, not merely inconvenient for her group. Olive, still dissatisfied that Ava did not make a more overt show of force, concludes that they are setting a trap and insists that fire would have made their seriousness clearer. The episode ends with the difference between appearance and purpose intact: the Council has not joined the fight, and the group has not forced it to, but the refusal has helped turn a warning into bait for Venus.