**Spoilers ahead for both the books and the show.**
Episode four left off with Carlotta revealing her true self by attempting to kill both Rowan and herself by lighting the first street house on fire, with Ciprien and Rowan being trapped in the house, and Ciprien stepping between Carlotta’s knife and Rowan.
Episode five…well, it’s mostly an inventive way to share a huge chunk of the exposition Rice put into the novels. It’s no secret that Rice was verbose. I’ve made a number of comments about how she, herself seemed to get lost in her own prose sometimes. The novel presents Michael, Aaron (combined into Ciprien for the show), Deidre, the house, and Rowan, then comes to an almost complete stop for three hundred or so pages to allow readers to indulge in possibly the most complex and fascinating flash backs/info dumps in written form. If any other author had attempted this complete breaking of the narrative they probably couldn’t have gotten away with it.
It would be absolutely impossible to perform this trick and keep modern television audiences engaged. This is the first major issue with adapting this series. (The second being the immense amount of incest and yet maintaining the characters’ likeability without turning the whole thing into season of American Horror Story.)
This episode tries to accomplish that. On some level it succeeds. The mind bending feel of Ciprien and Rowan playing out a weird complex fantasy that slowly falls apart, is reset and falls apart again, of Rowan even once she’s aware of the tricks questioning what is real and what is tricks, what is her and what is Lasher, all match parts of the books very well. Lasher never played such tricks on his witches, but there are many stories of him affecting Julien’s lovers, the Mayfair enemies, and Talamasca members Stuart Townsend, Petyr Van Abel, and Aaron Lightner in this way. It also reveals Lasher’s ability to pose as other people when he appears to Rowan as Ciprien while the real Ciprien is dying on the stairway. It also presents the idea that Rowan can, to some degree either see through this, or stop it. It also raises questions of how much Lasher is actually able to affect the physical world, since some things, like the eggs they are supposedly eating and the char damage from the fire, are still present.
And most importantly it show Lasher courting this most recent Mayfair witch, in a character true way that displays he doesn’t actually understand human emotion. One of the most interesting aspects of Lasher in the books is how he is powerful, manipulative, grows in intelligence, but is always childish and stupid. Yes, he tries to seduce his witches by giving them what they want, but he never really understands who they are, what they really want, or why they want these things. He offers money, and physical pleasure, and protection from those who would be their enemies, but he never really understands that stealing, molesting, or killing the people a witch is merely mad at is not the wisest of choices. This is what gets Suzanne and Deborah both killed in the books, even as Deborah was much more intelligent and tried harder to control him. In the end, he read her mind and acted as he felt she wanted to him, which directly led to her death.
It’s easy to see all this in the show version of Lasher, and I have to admit seeing it through episodes like this, rather than endless text of people explaining this to other people via letters and journals, is much more direct and effective. But there’s a frustration that this episode is almost entirely an elaborate info dump.
Add to that a few hints at power that Lasher never had, namely teleporting Ciprien to safety, that just seem like convenient writing for the sake of the narrative. (I’m betting it will never be a power Lasher has again.)
Millie, Carlotta’s sister being revealed to be a ghost is an interesting twist. From the books ghosts and communicating with them was very common, but very rarely shown being done by the Mayfairs. Stuart Townsend appearing to Ciprien was in the books, except it wasn’t Aaron that he appeared to, but another Talamasca member, Arthur Langtry.
Also an interesting bit I liked was the psychic healing of Ciprien back in his apartment while Rowan was being seduced by Lasher. While devout readers of Rice could know a lot about the Talamasca, not much of it comes from The Witching Hour. Perhaps it’s easier to see new content added where there was a lack of if in the original material. But I went in rolling my eyes at this scene only to end up loving that moment where the healer pulls the knife from her wound. Not sure it should have been an insta fix though.
There are a few very intense and significant moments in this episode. The first being when Rowan confronts Lasher on whether he is doing all the tricking or she is. The second is at the end, when Carlotta reveals that she threw Antha off the third floor balcony. Everything Carlotta says is, spiritually at least, straight from the books. She did, ultimately, always believe her cruelty was worth it and she was saving her family from evil. She was such a blind apostate her her own truth that she never stopped to consider if she was evil too. She simply didn’t care.
One fact that never made it to film was that in the books Carlotta saw small bits of the future and always knew that Rowan was going to kill her. She revealed all these things to her, in part because she was old and tired of fighting Lasher and she was martyring herself to prove to Rowan that she was evil and needed to reform to stop from slipping into the life her family had lived. Carlotta is the first person in the books that Rowan completely knowingly chose to kill. Even with her death Carlotta tried to use that against Rowan to manipulate her. Perhaps the writers will find a way to work that in, or perhaps viewers will be satisfied enough that Carlotta was evil, without needed that degree of manipulative intent from her.
I was disappointed we didn’t meet Stella. Certainly it was her clothes that Rowan wore all of this episode (I loved it!) and for her to not even really be named was disappointing. I’ve heard rumbles online of people dismayed at this episode that didn’t really go anywhere. I get that. I’m not sure I disagree with it, but comparing it Rice’s infamous stop and dump from the book, this was much more tolerable than it could have been. The writers certainly signed up for a challenge when they signed on for this adaptation.