Diana becomes increasingly obsessed with Matthew as she spends more time with him, much to the disgust of the witch community and the worry of her aunt. Peter Knox’s agent goes to Venice to research Diana in the congregation archives.

For the first two episodes it was easy to forgive a little slowness in the pacing of A Discovery of Witches, as it laid the groundwork and emphasised the simmering tension-which-should-not-be between Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont. Now however, that pacing is starting to drag, with this third episode feeling positively glacial.

Let’s consider that the first episode saw Diana getting the Ashmol manuscript that has caused all this brouhaha and then returning it because she didn’t know any better. This event attracted the interest of Clairmont as well as the sinister Peter Knox. All that happened in episode 1. In episode 3, we still basically have a bunch of creatures waiting in the library to see if she will recover it. Sure, there’s the odd mild confrontation, but it’s mostly all just long establishing shots, lingering pauses between Clairmont and Bishop, and odd conversations everywhere else which carry the threat that maybe they’ll make sense at some point if you hang in there long enough.

Palmer and Goode remain captivating screen presences with decent chemistry, but it’s a chemistry the script seems intent on overriding with its ponderous ruminations on everything it touches. And frankly if I hear the exchange of ‘You prefer the company of HIM to your own kind?’ ‘Well I’m not a bigot like you’ between Knox and Bishop one more time I may well scream.

And not just because it’s repetitive – Knox, for all that the show clearly wants us to see he’s a bad guy, has a point. Clairmont is a vampire. What vampires do is pretty well known. Bishop herself confesses she gets a ‘cold feeling on her skin’ when she knows he’s watching her, yet she’s gone from telling him to go away in episode 1 to throwing herself at him at every opportunity now with no real explanation as to why in-between. It’s difficult to see what it is the script thinks Clairmont has done to engender this trust, especially when every one of Diana’s friends and family are telling her that he’s bad news.

I began the show feeling it was a mix of classic genre fiction and Merchant Ivory. To be honest, now it’s starting to feel more like Twilight by way of Mills and Boon, with a bit of Jonathan Strange thrown in for good measure.

Verdict: Derivative, glacially paced, and with a script that seems intent on strangling what life the leads bring to proceedings. This needs to pick up the pace quickly. 5/10

Greg D. Smith