Summary
With clever themes of duality and heavy content, this is a tough sit but a fascinatingly constructed bit of storytelling.
This recap of The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself episode 6 contains spoilers.
Following the barn massacre in The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself episode 5, Nathan, Gabriel, Odette, and Annalise — with Ceelia as a prisoner — are making their way down the river in a boat, but have all been touched deeply by what they’ve just experienced. The most pressing problem at the moment is that it’s Odette’s Giving Day, and if her brother, who survived the massacre, doesn’t ingest the family blood soon, they’ll both die. Are the Fairborns likely to let him carry out the ritual? Annalise thinks they might, but Nathan doesn’t think so.
The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself episode 6 recap
But really, Annalise might have something of a point. Just like Ceelia, Bjorn is becoming visibly sick of Soul’s nonsense, and especially of his fondness for a sadist like Jessica. He also doesn’t buy into the idea that their mission is suddenly to kill Marcus Edge, which seems a bridge too far, and completely contrary to what Soul is doing, which is ordering Bjorn — whose power seems to be freezing people in place — to set up camp around a local funfair while he clandestinely brews potions.
Oh, and meanwhile, Nicky, Hugo, and some of the other Parisian Bloods have made their way into the woods looking for Nathan. All roads must converge, as they say.
While Bjorn tries to get Max his grandfather’s blood, Soul cuts off his own pinky finger, puts it in a mixing bowl with Nathan’s, and grinds them both up with a pestle and mortar. Kieran, who is not feeling good about the whole massacre situation, reunites Max with his grandfather for the ceremony, but it’s clearly Jessica impersonating him, which means a) he didn’t actually get the blood and b) his private discussions are giving information about Mercury to the Fairborns.
This is pretty much confirmed back on the riverboat, where Odette is becoming increasingly ill, even after her twin supposedly drank the blood. Max starts acting the same way. Jessica sadistically watches him as he writhes in agony. Bjorn discovers all this too late when he stumbles on Max’s grandfather’s corpse in the woods. Both Max and Odette die, the flames briefly igniting in their palms and then slowly extinguishing as they fade away.
Nathan goes ballistic at this development and attacks Ceelia, which is a nice callback to their training sequences. When she starts getting the better of the fight, he tries to shoot her instead, but Annalise decimates the gun (that power absolutely rules.) Nathan says they’ll drop Ceelia off at the next Bloods colony, and whatever they do to her is their business — there must be some consequences for what the Fairborns are doing. Odette is laid to rest in the woods.
Continuing the theme of the same thing happening to separate people many miles apart, when Soul ingests his poison concoction, it sends both him and Nathan spiraling into a connected seizure, and Nathan is able to see his memories of the Wolfhagen Peace Massacre, where we see Soul was hiding alongside Ceelia, and of Soul and Aoife being assigned by Reutger to kill Nathan’s mother and make it look like suicide. We even see the act itself. By Nathan’s side, Ceelia implores Annalise to use decimation to pull the poison out of Nathan’s body. By concentrating, and with encouragement from Gabriel and Ceelia, she’s able to do it, though it also seems to pull the poison from Soul as well.
While Nathan reckons with what he saw, Soul gets excited about his sudden ability to hear heartbeats. He’s pretty full of himself now, and Paul Ready is really hamming it up, so when Bjorn tries to relieve him of his command, he’s able to win a majority vote through menacing charisma. When he has Bjorn chained up, he smugly shows off some of his new powers, then stabs Bjorn to death, cuts out his heart, and eats it right there in the time-locked motorhome where some oblivious holidaymakers remain in stasis.
As the episode ends, Annalise and Gabriel drink and dance, while Nathan watches both of them with equal attention, as an unlikely love triangle becomes much clearer.
You can stream The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself episode 6 exclusively on Netflix.
