As Satu tortures Diana to try to get her to reveal her secrets and the extent of her powers. Matthew begins the hunt to find his love and rescue her from whatever fate has befallen her, with some help from an unexpected source.

Finally. After five long, grinding episodes of mournful middle distance stares, long drawn out conversations about more exciting things that happened centuries ago and lots of brooding, things are actually happening in A Discovery of Witches. Ish.

The episode doesn’t waste any time in getting down to business, Satu roughly dropping Diana off in a nice secluded spot and proceeding to interrogate her with a mixture of gentle appeals and outright nasty torture. Diana, for her part, is partly unwilling to reveal anything to the other witch and partly unable to fathom what on earth it is that she is after, but the ticking clock of Gerbert waiting in the background for his turn makes Satu more desperate and more cruel. However, the consequences for her are unforeseen and shocking, and that’s before she discovers what Gerbert is keeping locked away in his study.

Meanwhile, Mathew wakes up to find Diana gone and no idea of who took her. The arrival of Baldwin does nothing to calm his mood, convinced as he is that the Congregation must be behind this latest outrage, but then when things have settled down a bit the two go off in search of her, having deduced the most likely place for her to be, with a little help from a phone call from her aunts (I don’t honestly recall them ever having been given his number, but that’s far from the most egregious failure of internal logic the show asks us to ignore).

Having watched poor Diana get brutally flung about the place and tortured and having heard so many tales of what a nasty piece of work Matthew can be when his blood is up, one can be forgiven for expecting some sort of epic showdown when he and Baldwin literally leap into action from a helicopter, but unfortunately there isn’t much (or indeed any) beyond the rescue of Diana and returning her back to Chez Clairmont. Then there’s a bit of sibling bickering that goes absolutely nowhere and I’m left feeling strangely unfulfilled as the two again start talking about adventures from ages ago that sound more appealing than what I am watching on the screen.

One thing has become clear though – Diana is potentially extremely powerful, and her inability to access her magic may be down to more than simple reluctance or inexperience on her part. We already know that her parents were murdered by witches who then made it appear to have been humans, and now it appears that there is even more mystery to be unravelled about her past. I just wish they’d get on with it – this is at least the third episode so far that has rammed home this message (albeit in a slightly different way) about her being some sort of mega-powerful example of her kind, let’s actually see some evidence of it on the screen please!

Verdict: Moving along, at last but still not really delivering on what it promises in terms of action. Still, stuff actually happens here, and there’s a smattering of revelations and hints to things maybe being not quite as straightforward as they seemed. Here’s hoping they get fulfilled. 7/10

Greg D. Smith