Matthew takes Diana to his family home, though there isn’t the warmest of welcomes waiting for her. But can she and Matthew’s mother find some common ground? The Congregation gathers in Venice as Peter Knox seeks to use it to locate Diana, but his dishonesty may prove his undoing.

While still slow and laborious, there is at least a bit more actually happening in A Discovery of Witches in this episode – what’s unfortunate is that there is still so much being revealed to us in info-dumpy exposition dialogues between characters.

Matthew takes Diana to the family pile in France – a massive castle looming over a village – wherein lives his mother, Ysabeau de Clairmont and the family servant Martha, who we presume is also a vampire as she is introduced as having ‘been with our family for centuries’. Ysabeau is neither happy to see Diana nor fond of Matthew’s ‘radical’ actions, and it seems we are in for a prickly relationship between the two.

Meanwhile, Juliette is turned loose by Gerbert to seek out Matthew in England, leading to an interesting confrontation between her and his two colleagues from the laboratory. Clearly there’s something deeper to Juliette’s obsession with Matthew which the show is teeing up to reveal more of to us later.

The Congregation gather to discuss the matter of Matthew having apparently ‘abducted’ Diana, and therefore having broken ‘The Covenant’ – it does get spelled out to us later in the episode in one of those info-dumps exactly what the Covenant is but suffice to say it’s pretty easy to deduce before that given what we’ve seen so far. However, Peter Knox’s calling of this meeting begins to backfire on him in two ways – first, his lack of total honesty leads to them not only learning that Diana retrieved the mythical Book of Life but that he kept this from them, deepening their mistrust of him. Second, there is conflict with his ally Satu, which is resolved in fairly brutal fashion.

Back at Chez Clairmont, it turns out that Mama Clairmont and Diana may have a lot more in common than first appeared to be the case – I don’t think they’ll ever be firm friends, but there’s definitely a suggestion that mutual respect may exist there. A surprise visit from a congregation representative demanding Diana be handed over to them for questioning stops everything getting too cosy, and then it’s on to more of that desperately broody emotion that the show likes to do so much of as the credits close.

Action-wise then, it’s still fairly light. The characters and plot it is slowly revealing to us carry a fair amount in the way of intrigue and things do at least seem to be happening (or beginning to). If only the script could spend some time showing us stuff instead of just telling – my main issue here is that the narrative is slipping not that most tiresome of clichés where it consists of characters describing events to us which are far more exciting than those we are seeing.

Verdict: I’m still on board, because there’s still intriguing stuff being teased out ever so slowly here, but this one really needs to get going and give us some actual stuff to get our teeth into (pun intended) before too much longer. 6/10

Greg D. Smith