Summary
The stakes are raised a little in a family reunion, but the show still lacks energy and intrigue.
This recap of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches Season 1 Episode 4, “Curiouser and Curiouser”, contains spoilers.
Family is a funny old thing, isn’t it? For Rowan, it’s something she has always craved, even before it was revealed that the life she had with her adoptive mother was full of fabrications and secrets. But meeting the entire extended Mayfair clan at her biological mother’s funeral probably wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. “Curiouser and Curiouser” is largely about how Rowan’s family reunion is, to put things mildly, less than ideal, while also beginning to establish more of a relationship with Ciprien and a better understanding of her own powers.
Mayfair Witches Season 1 Episode 4 Recap
What happens to Deirdre’s killer?
And it starts with a sex dream, which seems to be the show’s favorite way of establishing connections. It initially involves Rowan and Ciprien, but he quickly morphs into Lasher, whose spectral presence has shown up time and again throughout the first three episodes and continues to here. Case in point: When Ciprien goes to interrogate the seemingly possessed suspect in Deidre’s murder, the man snaps his own neck, and Ciprien’s touch reveals Lasher exiting his body. Dude’s just everywhere, involving himself in everything, though his actual motives – and even his powers – remain frustratingly unclear.
The Talamasca are willing to write it all off as revenge for Deirdre’s murder, but Ciprien isn’t convinced and starts digging into Lasher’s specific relationship with the Mayfair family, trying to uncover its origins and the significance of the necklace that Delphine was wearing when she brayed her head to pulp against the house’s basement walls.
What is a designee?
Rowan continues to walk herself right into danger against Ciprien’s advice. Attending the funeral is fair enough, but lingering after, mingling with the guests, and eventually accepting Carlotta’s invite to her home is just a disaster waiting to happen. There are all kinds of major rivalries among the Mayfairs, but the one between Carlotta and Cortland seems the most pronounced and important. Since we’ve already seen Carlotta be totally unmoved by Delphine’s death, which she caused, we know she isn’t exactly a nice person, but that isn’t to say Cortland is swell guy either. His relationship with Lasher seems more direct and he’s secretly cutting away locks of Deidre’s hair.
Carlotta essentially lures Rowan in by claiming she’s in possession of items that should be rights now fall to her, which turns out to be quite an understatement. Because of the way inheritance seems to work in this family, Rowan is a “designee”, and since Deirdre technically owned the Mayfair house, it’s not Rowan’s responsibility, along with Lasher’s necklace. Speaking of which, inheritance in the family also seems to complicated by Lasher himself, since there’s an implication that the women are “sacrificed” to him in exchange for his power. If this power is enjoyed by the family’s men, it would explain why Cortland seems so much more upbeat about Lasher than Carlotta does.
The ending
Not that Carlotta is particularly stable herself. While she prepares dinner and Rowan willingly dons Lasher’s necklace, Carlotta lets the mask slip. Over dinner, she explains how she was tormented by Deidre’s “wickedness” for years (Cortland had earlier mentioned that Carlotta deliberately kept her medicated despite there being nothing medically wrong with her.) When Rowan starts asking pointed, slightly accusatory questions, Carlotta gets steadily angrier, before eventually deciding to set the house ablaze and burn them both to death inside it.
Of course, Ciprien arrives in the nick of time to save her (and walks right onto a knife for his trouble), but I think it’s safe to say that the stakes are being raised here. Lasher clearly has designs on Rowan, and through the necklace, it seems she has given him carte blanche to invade more than her dreams.
You can stream Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches Season 1 Episode 4, “Curiouser and Curiouser” exclusively on AMC and AMC+.
