Summary
As Nathan and Jessica both begin their (very different) training, a bloody episode raises the stakes in a flurry of body parts closely-guarded secrets.
This recap of The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself season 1, episode 2 contains spoilers.
The last we saw of Nathan in The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself episode 1, his caravan was being surrounded by the hunters of the Council of Fairborn Witches, with no feasible way out in sight. It was a pretty cool cliffhanger to leave things on, but it’s resolved almost immediately in the opening of the second episode. And, in true young-adult fantasy style, it involves a prophecy.
The prophecy is, essentially, that the wolf’s own blood will kill him. So, instead of killing Nathan, Reutger wants the Council to train him and turn him on his father. Nobody is keen on the idea, from Gran to Nathan to the Council hunters, who stop their cars while transporting Nathan to his destination in order to beat him half to death on the roadside, knowing his wounds will heal before he gets where he’s going.
And these are the good guys?
The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself episode 2 recap
So, this episode is about training, but not just for Nathan. While he’s kept in isolation to be trained by Ceelia, Jessica joins the next wave of the Council’s cadets, and justly begins to suffer ostracisation from the others because of her association with Nathan. In a brief conversation with Soul, we come to learn how he will always be known as the man who allowed the wolf into their home since he was instrumental in setting up the Wolfhagen peace summit. Like Jessica, his past hangs around his neck, and both seem to have a chip on their shoulder about it.
Nathan and Jessica’s training scenes are neatly juxtaposed to evoke, quite unsubtly, the idea of Jessica shooting her brother. But she has other problems. I don’t want to like Jessica, and I don’t think we’re supposed to, but the novel way she owns Hazel, one of her locker room tormentors, by shapeshifting into naked versions of her, her boyfriend, and her father, is a fun and mean-spirited sequence. A subsequent conversation about it with a privileged cadet named Kieran also reveals a little more about Jessica’s psyche and why she has such a chip on her shoulder.
Nathan is faring even worse. He can’t stop thinking about Annalise, he’s fed up with being held prisoner and essentially tortured under the guise of training, and he’s still in denial about being a Blood Witch in the first place, though nobody seems willing to even consider that possibility. The situation isn’t ideal, to say the least.
At about the midpoint of the second episode, the hunters and cadets are summoned to Wales in response to reports of Blood Witch activity and potentially even Marcus. They storm a house and find a beheaded corpse, a woman dying of a suffocation curse, and an attic full of blood and severed body parts belonging to the first team of hunters sent to investigate. It’s a lot of almost unexplainable carnage. At Annalise’s giving ceremony, Reutger and Soul discuss it in whispery, vague teams. Since the victims still had their hearts in their bodies, it doesn’t seem Marcus himself was there, but Soul is visibly shaken. When he suggests that the Ten should be called the Twelve and that he and another, Aoife, carried out the order that the Ten gave that has Marcus so angry and keen for vengeance, it becomes obvious that the Fairborn Witches are hiding something about this conflict.
Speaking of Annalise, while she initially can’t figure out what her power will be, it seems to manifest quite by accident when her friend, David, tries it on with her in a car after bowling. She shouts his name in anger and something happens to him, almost like he’s in excruciating pain, and he crashes the car, injuring them both.
The hunters track the Blood Witches to a cornfield where they move in teams through the tall leaves. There’s a lot of deliberate confusion during the ensuing fight, but what is very clear is that Jessica stumbles on Hazel being strangled by a Blood Witch, her life force seemingly sucked through her skin and into the chanting witch’s mouth, and smilingly watches her die before she shoots the Witch. When this is reported to Soul, the loss of a cadet makes him worry that it might have been Jessica, which strikes as odd. When he goes to give Reutger the good news, though, he finds her dead, the scene similar to the one we saw in the magical re-enactment in the previous episode. It seems like the events in Wales were a diversion to make Reutger vulnerable. And it also seems like Marcus may now know about the prophecy and consider Nathan a threat to him, so more hunters are sent to where he’s training to “protect” him.
We also learn that a brief scene we saw at the very beginning of the episode, of a wolf noisily chewing through body parts, was Celia’s view of the Wolfhagen Peace Massacre, which she witnessed as a child. Through her, we also learn a little about how powerful Marcus is, as he can take the abilities of any witch he kills, and has already accumulated a fair few which have given him control of elements, the weather, extremely fast healing, potion-brewing knowledge, and all kinds of other fun tricks. So, we know that Marcus killing her parents is why she’s so ticked off, but it’s very obvious that she’s beginning to care for Nathan.
The episode ends with Soul and his brother Rowan discussing a book of their father’s that they found as children — a leatherbound spellbook with a symbol on the front that he beat them both for looking at. Soul has kept it, and he intends to use it. But it seems like the use of it requires him to shoot his brother dead and collect a vial of his blood. With his hand, he draws Marcus’s X symbol on the greenhouse glass in Rowan’s blood.
You can stream The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself season 1, episode 2 exclusively on Netflix.
