This episode has a surprisingly excellent unified theme –
people coming to terms with what fighting monsters means, especially Molly.
Molly is having trouble in school, she’s angry, she’s
upset and a little stroppy. Diana is rightly concerned and tries to jolly Molly
out of it: but Molly is looking at a world that has monsters in it, a world
where her dad is just a monster in disguise where she’s plagued by depressing
and terrifying visions of the future and everything is scary and awful. She’s
not jollyable.
Diana decides to take her to the Vault where she can see
the cool toys and legacy there – by exposing Molly to the good/cool/interesting
part of the job at least she can show an upside. It’s a nice idea which ends up
with Ichabod and Molly being locked in by the security system being tripped.
Oops
Meanwhile Diana has other things to worry about – a monster
attacked Molly’s teacher and is now attacking her. The monster is Molly’s
childhood imaginary friend given life by Molly’s will – something we have seen
before with Ichabod’s son Henry creating a golam. Yes it normally takes more
than this but we’ll get to that
The creature is attacking Diana because Molly is mad with
her – which causes all the parental angst. But the star of this goes to Jenny –
who has obviously had the difficult childhood of knowing monsters exist, having
the confront that, be scarred by that etc. Molly can’t talk to her mother about
her angst? Well she’s hardly the first child to do so. And here Diana should
take the opportunity of knowing what Molly’s feeling rather than having to
guess
Jenny is awesome and has a really interesting role this
season as one-who-went-before. The flip side to that is that that’s crystalised
all of her roles. She’s more of a mentor to Alex and Jake coupled with therapy/advice
for Diana while removing any of her own actual storylines, wants, needs or
grief. This would have been vastly improved if she had someone with which to
address her own personal issues with – like Abbie.
Ichabod tries to talk to Molly through this and teases
out that she’s angry – with Diana’s attempt to spin everything to be nice, with
her lying to her and hiding things and trying to protect her.
Ichabod gets Molly out through a small hatch he can’t
follow and she manages to arrive on scene before her imaginary friend squishes
Diana. We have a nice little moment of Molly saying she should have spoken to
Diana about her issues rather than bottling them up and saying the problems she’s
been having while Diana does the parent thing and says she’ll always be there
to listen
I don’t think it’s the details that matter so much in
this episode as it is to show there are underlying issues with exposing new
people to the monsters and them having to deal with it. Especially laying the
ground for another threat – Malcolm has had visions of the future and he and
Molly together. He even makes friendly overtures to Molly – and planted a hex
on her to make the monster manifest. Malcolm is trying to convert Molly.
Another side plot to this is Jake and Alex. Having
learned about the previous agents Jake is stoked and training and determined to
be the best he can be - because they have such an awesome legacy which was
amazing and super and they’ve got to live up to it
But over the course of this episode they found what happened to the last agents in their job – dead, paranoid, on the run, forgotten, lost. Alex sees the inheriting not an awesome legacy but an extremely dangerous, thankless job which will end with them dead or fleeing, haunted by the words of their predecessor “evil always wins”
This becomes a dedication to them sticking together in a “we
know they’re going to have a relationship” way.
