Monday, April 6, 2015

Bitten Season 2, episode 9: Scavenger's Daughter



Last week ended on a dramatic moment – the witches were all going to die! So clearly this week must begin with a flashback to one year ago

Alistair setting up a kinky sex video but turns into him apparently transferring a woman’s self into her body (or so I guess). I assume the woman is Clara, Alistair’s evil witchy mentor

In the present Jeremy is feeling a little guilty about trying to kill Clay but they patch him up with, apparently, no side effects except some weird eyesight stuff which I’m sure will develop ominously.

Savannah wakes up after being kidnapped by Alistair in a room with Clara and Clara has Savannah’s talisman. She also tries to peddle the idea that the coven just wants to control her. Savannah isn’t buying it and Clara goes to Alistair to demand he use more woo-woo on her. Alistair doesn’t really care about the witches who will be dead soon – he’s more worried about angry werewolves hunting him down.

Ruth lay down the deadline – they have until sunrise until all the witches die (at this point I am kind of tempted to have the werewolves say “well, good luck with that – door’s over there.”)

Jeremy asks Ruth how they can fight someone who can kill from so far away and she describes the “left hand path” to which Jeremy asks why they aren’t using this nifty path themselves and killing him already. She takes his advice and casts a nasty egg death spell

Alistair feels it and it’s very unpleasant. Time for a magic duel! Or using Savannah to contact Ruth to whine at her killing her own son (oh please, guilt trips after the mass murder spell?) Ruth still makes excuses for herself then asks that he just kills her not all witches. That doesn’t work and Jeremy decides to drop in for some vague threats. It does get Jeremy to see the location Savannah’s being kept in – but all he gets is “basement” which isn’t really useful. Also the communication spell apparently prompts werewolf change.

Apparently basement is sufficient and Clay, Elena, Nick and Paige go search a house. They find Alistair’s sex/murder/ritual basement and a mummified head. They also find the video of Clara possessing people mainly just to test the spell though not to permanently change. Of course it still involves killing someone. Thinking very slowly they realise that Clara intends to possess Savannah since Savannah and Alistair will be the only 2 witches unaffected by the Undoing. Also giving Clara magic again.

Rachel and Logan aren’t dead! But Rachel has gone back to her family and is trying to put some space between her and Logan. Even acknowledging he can’t help being a werewolf and that they love each other, she can’t escape the fact that she was kidnapped and experimented on all because Logan is a werewolf. She has also had an abortion (or so it’s implied).

Logan wanders off and intervenes to help a random damsel in distress. His fighting skills are noticed and he’s recruited into a bare knuckle fight club sold as some kind of ridiculously macho therapy. Worse, his opponent is Cain, the werewolf Clay castrated last season. Thy fight but in the middle of it Cain loses control of his werewolf and asks Logan to choke him unconscious so he doesn’t change in the middle of the crowd.

So random stuff with Clay and Cain and Jeremy are apparently linked, as Ruth expositions, to the werewolf curse being lifted as the witches die. When the witches are dead all werewolves will be stuck in the form they’re in – just wolves or humans.


They pass the information onto Logan who goes to warn Cain – pointing out that his injuries from the fight aren’t healing either. Cain also has Amber, the woman he loves, on life support. Leblanc bit her last season to change her but, like most people and all but one woman, she didn’t survive the change and is now brain dead – and, despite what Logan tells him, Cain can’t let her go.

Logan gets another call from Rachel – something’s wrong with the baby. And, no, she didn’t have an abortion (on television it seems easier to show the ritual murder of tiny babies than it is to have a woman have had an abortion). When Logan is gone, Cain turns off Amber’s life support. A scene which could have been far more moving with better acting

Among all this Elena and Clay take a moment to reflect their lives would actually be easier if they weren’t werewolves but Elena can’t forget that the wolf saved Clay from Alistair – and that being a wolf has now become a major part of their identity.

To make things more confusing, a magical wall appears to block the basement – trapping Nick and Paige downstairs and Elena and Clay upstairs. All made worse by Paige who can barely stand, staggering to her feet so she can collapse with appropriate amounts of drama (I have to admit that I laughed). So Nick has to have a big loving moment with Paige

Alistair sends a random possessed minion to attack Clay and Elena. He dies. And Nick gets the door open and finds Paige some medicine

Ruth isn’t doing so well either but she still keeps throwing dark magic at Alistair. She needs a bigger battery so thinks about going to her coven’s catacombs for corpse batteries. But Jeremy can’t take her because Logan arrives with Rachel who is in a lot of pain from the cursed babywolf – and Logan is also looking forward to the curse being lifted. This is heard by Jeremy who isn’t exactly thrilled by that pronouncement, announcing that Logan has made his choice. Ruth sneaks out while they’re dealing with the drama. Because her fainting behind the wheel is such a great idea.

Still she seems to be the only one still actually focused on stopping Alistair so kudos for that. She goes to her magical battery in Boston just as Alistair decides the best way to attack the werewolves is to lead a one man assault against Stonehaven. Again Jeremy is pretty helpless in the face of Alistair’s magic – but Logan leaps on him in wolf form (but doesn’t bite him? Whyyyy?) Instead he gets stabbed in the chest

Ruth finishes her magical death spell now empowered by dead people magic. It still doesn’t kill him but it drives Alistair away

But Logan is fatally wounded. Of course for extra pathos Rachel has to accept his wolfiness on his death bed.

Alistair and Clara figure out where Ruth must have gone to get the power boost and head to Boston, just as Jeremy sends Elena & co. Well as soon as they finish dramatic speeches to each other. At least Cain shows up on Stonehaven’s doorstep to ask to help fight the witches. Someone else focused on the mission









Ok, I know there was no chance of the werewolves kicking the witches out, but at the same time the werewolves have little reason to feel anything other than anger towards them. Alistair was and is a witch problem because the witches were incapable of handling their own business, in turn his machinations caused them some difficulty with the Alpha Council. Helping rescue Elena and the afterthoughts Rachel and Logan was something of a side quest to finding Savannah and, again, she only needed rescuing because the witches couldn’t take care of business. I would like to see some acknowledgement on the part of the witches that they’ve dragged the werewolves into their troubles and the werewolves have not only gained little from that but the witches have treated them in a pretty shoddy fashion.

I think a lot more could have been made of Elena arguing in favour of the wolf (even while acknowledging it’s an amazing concession for Clay to make since he has been a werewolf sine he was a small child). After all, a huge part of the first season was defined by Elena running from her wolf, trying not to be a wolf and avoiding the pack – this concession from her, this embracing of being a werewolf is a huge character shift for her and shows how much she now rests on the pack. Even accepting the losses of the pack as part of her past and history rather than blaming them on her wolf. There’s a lot in that little scene, a lot of Elena’s personal story that has been lost this season.


So, Logan has been pretty much a side character in two seasons, disappeared for several episodes and now they bring him back expressly to kill him? Well he lives longer than in the books but it’s still a pretty shameful criticism on this show’s already very limited racial diversity. Are we now replacing Logan with Cain?