Summary
Mayfair Witches Season 2 continues to lack tension in Episode 6, which is tokenistically weird but dramatically inert.
A relatively big deal was made of Rowan, Moira, Cortland, and Lark making their way to Scotland for what one assumes will be a confrontation with Ian Mayfair and the rest of the pagan side of the family. But Mayfair Witches treats their arrival with a shrugging attitude that is deeply detrimental to Episode 6, “Michaelmas”, which is weird and off-kilter but sorely lacking any genuine tension or drama.
It’s certainly possible that the writers – or whoever – assumed the pagan festivities would be enough. And there’s definitely some odd stuff here, including masks made of skin, the overly enthusiastic consumption of milk, and the general eccentricities that tend to crop up around enthusiastic pagan worship. But it’s all presented in such a blasé way that it’s difficult to care, almost as if the gang doesn’t realize what they’ve stepped into. With Lark, you can kind of understand – the existence of witchcraft of any kind has only just been revealed to him. But Cortland, Rowan, and Moira should know better.
Then again, it becomes obvious rather quickly that Ian and co. would quite like Moira out of the way, presumably because her mind-reading powers are more trouble than they’re worth. The festivities around the titular Michaelmas – a celebration honoring the archangel Michael – and the creeping feeling of Mayfair influence stretching all throughout Donnelaith provide ample opportunity to steer Moira away and keep her isolated from Rowan.
All of this should work better than it does. Rowan’s gradual realization that something is amiss should mean something, and the extent of Ian’s influence should feel threatening. But none of it really takes. Rowan’s default state is a kind of ambling idiocy and that very much persists here, but it’s also so nakedly obvious that Ian is up to no good from the very beginning that there’s nothing for her to “figure out”, really. And this becomes especially hilarious when you consider the idea that Ian wanted Moira out of the way so that she didn’t expose that the Scottish Mayfairs were insincere in their niceties.
You’d think this would all matter a bit more to Cortland, too. He’s being reunited with his long-lost psycho brother, after all, but I never got much sense in Mayfair Witches Season 2, Episode 6 that either of them were particularly bothered by the presence of the other, however much they might bond about how awful Julien was. This stuff is supposed to feel slightly “off”, but not in this way.
Anyway, the Michaelmas celebrations are the precursor to a wedding that is of vital importance to the Scottish Mayfair clan, since the nuptials will unite Lasher, aka Ashlar, aka the last remaining Taltos, with a bride named Emaleth who has supposedly been waiting for him for like 500 years. I feel for him a bit here, to be fair. This reborn version has no idea what’s going on for the most part, is being walked around on what is essentially a lead, and is in an arranged marriage to a much, much older woman. Being the “chosen one” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, clearly.
The only thing I found moderately interesting here was the callous way that Ian defends his branch of the family tree from Rowan’s powers – they’re so tightly knit, magically speaking, that anything she attempts to do to Ian happens to his young daughter, Bonnie, which is a pretty good way of explaining why Rowan can’t just throw around a few targeted brain hemorrhages to take control of the situation, and also of depicting Ian as truly monstrous, willing to use the most vulnerable of his family as a shield.
I’m more interested in this than the “twist” with Hamish, anyway, since the entire episode is about how closely connected the Scottish Mayfairs are, so it’s a bit of a stretch that Rowan would even entertain the possibility of one of them being on her side. Whether it was a ploy all along or Hamish is just seizing on an opportunity to impress his psycho father doesn’t really matter. It was inevitable either way. And since that feeling of inevitability has really hampered this season throughout, there’s no reason to expect it’ll stop now.
RELATED:
