I’m still trying to figure out exactly what is not working for me about Mayfair Witches so far. It has all the ingredients of a compulsively watchable show, but there’s something in the pacing or perhaps the direction that’s missing a certain drama. For a supernatural soap with no discernible layers beyond just [waves vaguely at the air] feminism, etc., it lacks juice. And also, occasionally, coherence.
We begin in 17th-century Scotland, an opening to which my main reaction was and remains, Why? This was the first of many questions that occurred to me as I watched “The Dark Place.†Questions like: Why does this dream sequence have Rowan in a prom dress? What’s the problematic quotient for a psychically shared mother-daughter Luciferian orgasm? Why did none of the beach partiers notice Rowan sleeping like three feet away? Did no one try to wake her up or maybe call 911? We’re saying they just parked their beer coolers and folding chairs around the unconscious woman and lit a bonfire like it’s whatever? I’m wondering what exactly happened in that final cliffhanger, of course, but I’m also wondering how this episode managed to feel so slow when, objectively, so many things happened.
“The Dark Place†toggles between Rowan, who has not yet gotten a handle on accidentally sending people to the ER (or worse), and the newly liberated Deirdre, whom Lasher spurs from her drug-induced vegetative state with a fresh sense of purpose. Not only is Deirdre’s daughter (who we now know is Rowan) alive, Lasher tells her in a dream visitation, but she’s in a place “even darker than this one.†There’s very little Deirdre can actually do without Lasher, it seems, and her fully dependent bond to him emerges in a variety of additional, uncomfortable ways throughout the episode. In one scene, he’s coaxing her to action with a fatherly hand on her shoulder. In the next scene, they’re banging. (This is the sexual encounter that Rowan physically experiences on the airplane, by the way, I guess to establish that if Deirdre is bonded to Lasher, then so is Rowan by proxy, but honestly the whole thing makes me feel weird and I would like to move on.)
While her birth mother is being puppeteered by the devil in New Orleans, Rowan is floundering around town, motherless. She hasn’t figured out how or why she’s been brain-zapping folks, but she has worked out that Ellie lied about her adoption. Rowan also notices she’s being casually stalked by Ciprien Grieve, which is discomfiting, because she doesn’t know yet that Grieve is a supernatural bureaucrat dispatched by her late mom to protect her. But then, everything in Rowan’s life is a little disquieting at the moment. There’s the constant creepy whispering in her ear; the sudden hailstorm of dead crows; that eerie dream about her mom while she’s passed out on the beach.
It’s not unusual to dream of loved ones who have died, but Rowan should have been tipped off to some unnatural activity when she noticed her dream self is dressed like a Bush-era Cinderella. Dream Ellie calls Rowan’s name, leading her to That House in New Orleans. “Rowan, come,†urges Dream Ellie. (“Rowan, girl,†I mutter at my screen.) She wakes up in the middle of a raging beach party and begins to shakily hightail it out of there. Rowan is slightly frantic, but not yet so frantic that she doesn’t notice Grieve following her from the shadows. She calls him out and so he tries, and fails, to convince her to go “talk in private†where he can explain. This would be a hard sell for anyone without Lucifer-level powers of persuasion, so she brain-blasts him instead — fortuitously, it turns out. Rowan performs CPR on Grieve until she can feel a pulse (doctor, remember?) and then uses his unconscious face to unlock his phone, which she has stolen.
If Rowan is freaked to find pictures of herself in Grieve’s camera roll, that’s nothing to how she reacts to a picture of Ellie and Deirdre outside the same house from her dream — That House. Egads! The photo is helpfully labeled “New Orleans†in calligraphic script that someone somewhere must have decided looked old-timey and mysterious. So Rowan hops on a plane to the Big Easy (her jerk of a Man Boss won’t let her work right now anyway for bereavement reasons) to find her birth mother at the same moment that her birth mother is breaking out of the aforementioned house to find Rowan.
Deciding that it will take too long for the possibly well-intentioned doctor to get his family-court lawyer to sue for conservatorship abuse (#FreeDeirdre), Deirdre simply waits for Aunt Carlotta to leave for her Rich Lady Convention and busts out. Stop one is Uncle Cortland’s house. Deirdre may trust Cortland completely, but I do not, mainly because he is, by all appearances, an actual agent of Satan. I can’t blame Deirdre for her faith in Uncle Cortland, though. As a little girl, he used to buy her all these beautiful dresses, Deirdre reminisces wistfully, swishing the floaty skirt of her borrowed blue dress. But Carlotta — the woman who kept her near-comatose for 30 years against her will — always found them and sliced them up with kitchen shears. But never mind all that; Deirdre doesn’t have time for small talk. Her daughter’s alive, which means it’s time for some witchy channelin’.
Would you believe that this is the first real witchcraft we’ve seen in this show? Deirdre kneeling on the rug, rubbing the skeleton key, and chanting something that sounds like Latin maybe. The important thing is that the chanting transports Deirdre into Lasher’s body and Lasher has appeared in Rowan’s hotel room. Deirdre can see through Lasher’s eyes but doesn’t seem to control his body — he was going to grab Rowan in the shower until she shouted “No!†— but she sees enough to get the name of the hotel.
Coincidentally, Rowan’s hotel is the same hotel where Aunt Carlotta is having her Rich Lady Convention, unbeknownst to Deirdre. So while Rowan is having a miraculously reassuring phone conversation with Grieve upstairs, Deirdre’s triumphant entrance is halted mid-glide by Carlotta downstairs. And at the same time that Rowan is agreeing to meet her benevolent stalker in the lobby in five, Deirdre is blowing past Carlotta in a cloud of malevolent vibes. Deirdre jumps on the elevator. Rowan locks her old-fashioned hotel door. It seems like they’re going to meet the moment the elevator doors open, and they do — and then Deirdre’s throat gets magically slashed and she crumples to the ground while Rowan screams, “I found you!â€
Where is this going? I literally have no idea.
Loose Ends, Predictions, and Concerns
• I’m not convinced that Daniel Lemle is actually dead.
• I’m not convinced Deirdre is actually dead, either, for that matter.
• Unfortunately, I’m beginning to worry that the hot bartender guy is not going to return.
• Where is Aunt No. 2 in all this?