This episode was filled with flashbacks of Aidan and Suren. Now we know what Suren meant when she said that she knew Aidan would be the one to come for her. During the twenties, Aidan was part of her guard detail and seems is though there was some very heavy chemistry between them. Suren tells Aidan that she realized that the only way to be free was to give everything and that until meeting him, she had never seen a reason to make that decision. When he quietly rejects her offer, she moves onto Henry, who clearly only interested in the political gain he garner from being her lover. When Aidan moves to stake Henry, Suren jumps in the way telling Aidan that he made his choice, and now she has made hers.
In present day, Suren wants to take control of the city and to cull the orphans. She realizes that Aidan is daily growing weaker because he keeps getting paler and paler. She suggests turning a mobster who promises to clean up after the vampires and to get them political connections. This appeals to Suren because she believes vampires are better off when they hide in plain sight. Aidan is not a fan of this plan believing that the mobster will sell them out for the first good opportunity that he gets. In the end, he agrees to turn him after the woman that pays cannot give him blood and he is horrified to be offered a little girl instead. When he begins to consume the mobster everything is fine at first, until the blood lust begins. The mobster complains that something is wrong, and Suren smiles and says that Aidan is coming back to him. The two end up making love covered in the mobsters blood.
Though Aidan's decisions were exacerbated by his lack of access to blood, Suren very much still reads as the great temptress. She put that mobster in front of Aidan in the hope that he would drink again. Though the responsibility for drinking from the mobster was Aidan's, he would not have done so had she not provided the opportunity. This is yet another example of woman leading a man astray. It was almost biblical in its reading.
Josh is at work when he is approached by Brynn for help getting her brother Connor out of the psych ward. They invite him out for a drink and tell him that they are pure breds. Connor takes wolfsbane to calm and soothe him because otherwise he is always on edge and feels like Josh does before the full moon. Josh tells them that he is attempting to work on a cure and Connor is immediately excited and offers to fund his research but Josh backs off. After discussing the situation with Aidan, Josh decides to take them to storage lockers her rented to record the changes. He tells Connor and Bryn that he believes that there is some sort of trigger that causes the change. They immediately become excited, though they let it slip that their goal is to be in wolf form always. Josh is horrified but Bryn tells him that it is her human body that feels wrong. Josh only suffers one night a month when he turns, whereas; Bryn and Connor are suffering an entire month being human.
I thought that this was an interesting exchange. Josh like many supernatural characters suffers from self loathing and a rejection what he is. This of course goes part and parcel with the idea that lycanthropy is a curse. Bryn and Connor represent the only two werewolves that I have seen who not only welcome the change but wish that they could live like that full time. They actually see being human as an essential loss of who they are because they identify so strongly with wolf. These two may in the end help Josh come to to terms with his wolf over the season, but I also suspect that they will lead him down a very dark path.
Since last we say Sally, a few weeks have passed. She is no longer seeing the shadowy figure. Sally of course believes that this should put her on the fast track for reincarnation, but Zoe reminds her that they still don't know what she saw, or if it's gone for good. Zoe suggests that Sally needs to participate in a meeting that she runs for ghosts but Zoe implies that she is not accepting of who she is.
When Dr. Forest enters the nursery, Zoe talks very awkwardly with him and Sally notices this and encourages her to try. She tries to push Dr. Forest and Zoe together but Zoe is actually dating Nick, a ghost Sally dated for a short time in season one. At the meeting, a ghost talks about resisting the urge to possess someone as though he fighting an addiction. The entire meeting functions quite like an AA meeting and this amounted to appropriation. For the life of me, I don't understand why urban fantasy shows insist on making parallels to real life conditions. Addiction ruins lives, it destroys family and to juxtapose it with possessing people just belittles the seriousness of it.
On a walk with Nick, Sally tries to convince him that he is not doing right by Zoe. He is after all a ghost and she is a human being. He admits that this might have been the case, but apparently he has stopped reliving his death everyday. Now that Nick is with Nora he feels no need to do this. It then dawns on Sally that this means that he would rather die everyday than be with her.
This begins a solid round of wallowing. Later that day, as Sally walks through the hospital, she sees Nick and Zoe laughing. Later she sees Dr. Forest kiss a woman and leave with her. Sally stalks them both and watches as they kiss, just happy to be together. Finally, the loneliness gets to be too much for her and she possess the body, so that she can what Tim girlfriend feels. After making this big deal about consent, I cannot believe that Sally did this yet again. It is especially troubling because it is clear that this is going to lead to sex. Tim's girlfriend did consent to kissing, but we have no way of knowing whether or not she would have agreed to go further. I hope that next week we see some indication from Sally about the fact that possessing is a violation. I further hope that the writers are not going to turn this into an addiction for Sally, for all the reasons mentioned above.
It is becoming extremely hard to invest in Sally's character. She seems to spend her time worrying about a nebulous threat and reincarnation. The framing of reincarnation is extremely problematic and it is telling that Zoe is a White woman. What she is doing does nothing to support the religions for whom reincarnation is a significant part of their faith. Reincarnation is written as just something convenient the writers came up with to give Sally something to do. Of all of the roommates, I am least invested in her.
