Rowan’s a mom now! It’s been six days. It is not going well at all!

Season 2 opens with a weirdly paced episode that balances a tonal gear shift or two with some surprising, and complex, writing. Rowan living in the family house makes a ton of sense (she doesn’t have anywhere else to go, the set is right there) but it also reveals, in a nicely off hand way, that she’s not told anyone what happened to Cortland. Which also means she hasn’t told the family how strong she is now. It also, as a bonus, reveals that Cortland isn’t dead, just trapped inside one of the show’s fun representations of mental space as a building.

So, Rowan is raising a superhuman child who grows daily, in the house where the child’s previous incarnation abused generations of her family and where her aunt tried to kill her just about a week ago. She’s the most powerful witch on Earth now, her family don’t trust her and she doesn’t trust them. That’s a lovely, complex foundation of tension and the show is already doing some fun things with it. The most interesting so being the arrival of Moira. Played with big Eliza Dushku energy by Alyssa Jirrels, Moira is a Mayfair cousin with telepathic abilities and no time at all for Rowan. She’s the face of the directly antagonistic relationship Rowan has with the family now and she’s already enormously good fun,

Elsewhere in the episode, we get Ciprien recruited to a plan to capture the newly corporeal Lasher which I’m sure will go fine. There’s a nicely bleak moment where he’s knocked out by the Talamasca, wakes up and asks his boss if his memory has been erased. The jaunty ‘Not by me’ he gets in response tells us a lot about the organisation and Ciprien’s place in it.

And then there’s Lasher, who is cleverly sprinted through the Asshole Demon Child element of his plot into some very dark places. Teenage Lasher escapes the house, tries to have sex with a girl he meets and promptly kills her. His inability to comprehend mortality, and some careful direction, make it clear this was both unintentional and not something he can understand. It’s the darkest the show has got to date and the episode closes with Rowan locking her ‘son’ back up and disposing of the body. Even as a newly adult Lasher escapes and discover the woman he killed was a Mayfair cousin…

Verdict: Rounded out with a cameo from incoming cast member Ben Feldman as Sam Larkin, Rowan’s former boyfriend and some really smart new visuals for her abilities, this is a great start to the second season. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart