Witches of East End 2.12/2.13 “Box to the Future”/”The Gathering” Recap

“Box to the Future”

While Killian drinks the poison he got from the witch doctor, which causes him to collapse after becoming woozy, Joanna and Wendy share a drink of their own, as the latter finds a bottle of liquor in the stables. The two wonder about what life would have been like had they stayed in Asgard, though they’re okay with where they are due to their ability to make the best of a bad situation. Joanna comforts Wendy over her desire to see the king dead and reminds her sister that while they need to stop their father from doing any more harm, this revenge isn’t going to magically undo the hurt they suffered at his hands over the years. As Joanna goes after the box, Killian has a vision where he meets Freya in a candlelit, blue-tinged field, where the two embrace. However, he learns that she’s still alive and when she gives him a large red flower, she tells him to go find Ingrid and leaves.

Killian calls Ingrid and gets her to come over, but Ingrid has something else to worry about besides the fate of Killian, as Frederick informs the king that he suspects Ingrid isn’t being honest about her desire to return to Asgard. The reason? She’s been associating with Bastian, the man Dash was while in Asgard, and he believes that she could be swayed to stay in town rather than come with them. As such, the king reverts back to his Tommy form, while Wendy wakes Freya up to tell her that she lost the key to the time door. Even though the two do try to find it in the stable, a quick chant to locate the key’s energy reveals that it’s not anywhere near them and Freya gets shut down when she suggests picking the lock on the time door. Across town, Joanna feels as if she’s being followed by someone and sends a beggar woman to the bar to get a drink on her; it turns out that her feelings of paranoia are correct, though, as Tarkoff had been lurking in Baltimore and followed her hoping she would lead him to the box.

Ingrid visits Killian and brings along lotus root, a remedy designed to draw out toxins – it’s supposed to slow down the poison in his body, but since it’s not a cure-all, he’s got to administer the dosages himself while she’s gone. The king goes to Dash’s in Tommy’s skin and Dash quickly deduces that this figure standing before him isn’t Tommy – it’s Ingrid’s grandfather. The king spells Dash into a chair and warns him to stay away from Ingrid; he’s got big things planned for his family and he doesn’t want Dash to get in the way of that. After taunting Dash about the betrayal and destruction that he had been a part of recently, as well as the internal war he’s fighting, the king offers him a reward for remaining loyal to him and not standing in the way of his quest to win back his family. While Raven learns of Fair Haven’s occult history from a colleague, Ingrid goes to Dash’s where she hears about the visit from her grandfather, who Dash is ready to bring down. However, first they’re going to have to reconstitute the journals that Ingrid had them burn, with the purpose being finding a powerful and dark enough spell to send the king back to where he came from.

Over in the cemetery, Joanna takes the box from her past self, only to lose it to Tarkoff when he confronts her, grabs it, and disappears, just as Wendy and Freya run into Edgar Allan Poe in the bar. Freya, of course, can’t believe that she’s seeing Killian before her and makes a fool of herself in front of Poe before she and Wendy make it upstairs to the dressing room. Though they spot the key on a nearby table while hiding in the clothes racks, they’re not able to get it because Past Freya knocks it on the ground before picking it up and putting it in her cleavage. Ingrid allows Dash to keep the reconstituted journals at his place so as to avoid the prying eyes of the king, only for him to open them up as soon as she leaves; meanwhile, Killian has another vision of Freya, this time encouraging him to take the lotus root and give himself a fighting chance. He does just that, although he’s still more weak than he would like to be. Joanna, Wendy, and Freya reconvene at the bar where they swap their stories of defeat, but Wendy realizes that they have a shot at getting the key if they play within the boundaries of history.

Wendy uses her knowledge of Poe hitting on her the night she died and Poe’s loyalty to Freya in order to get the key back. She sends him over to Past Wendy and he gets handsy enough to snatch the key from her chest. Joanna, though, finds herself confronted by Tarkoff outside, where he suggests they defeat the king once and for all and rule Asgard together as its newest king and queen. When she rejects the idea, he uses the talisman he made for her to incapacitate her on the steps. Back in East End, Raven shows up to Dash’s to talk about her latest findings on Archibald Browning and she presses him for information, since the occult aspect of Fair Haven is town knowledge and he acts as if this is the first time he’s hearing any of this. The two end up having sex upstairs, since Dash is trying to distract her from her investigation, but since he left the evil journals he was reading out on the table, it’s only fitting that they’re gone the next morning – yet another breakthrough for Raven in the case she’s building.

After retrieving the key, Poe has to hear Freya say goodbye to him and the two have an emotional goodbye that she might not have expected when she learned about her past relationship with the author. When Ingrid returns home, her grandfather confronts her over her friendship with Bash and spells her against the wall as step one of his punishment for her; after cloaking her when Frederick comes home to, ironically, vouch for Ingrid’s good heart, the king sets about teaching his grandchild a lesson. While Killian gets too sick to administer the medication to himself, accidentally shattering the vial on the floor, Freya and Wendy find that the time door has disappeared, potentially signaling their end. Joanna, meanwhile, wakes up in what looks to be her bed and Tarkoff ties her off and shoots her full of heroin in order to drug her into loving him.

“The Gathering”

Ingrid wakes up in a trap laid down by her grandfather. The previous night, he tortured her, which caused the slightly hoarse voice she finds herself with; he does, however, insist that he took it easy on her, much easier than how he dealt with Frederick. The king also mentions that he’s known about Ingrid’s pregnancy ever since he arrived – it turns out that he knew about it even before she did, as she’s stunned at the news. Freya letting off some steam about the lack of technology in the 1800s causes Wendy to have an idea about how to reach Joanna, while Joanna and the crazy snake eyes she has from the heroin are forced to hear Tarkoff waxing nostalgic about their interactions as teenagers. When she protests against the idea of being with him, he injects her with more heroin, telling her that this would keep her mind calm and that he would be able to have her that night after centuries of waiting on her.

Raven’s colleague informs her that the black goo found on the floater matches the goo found in Dash’s fireplace. Fortunately for her, Dash calls and asks her to come over, which might give her a chance to further explore the idea of him being responsible for the murders. Wendy and Freya pay off a man in the bar to pass a message on to someone, while Joanna realizes that the room she’s in isn’t her bedroom – it’s a reasonable facsimile in a building not far from the bar, made by Tarkoff to ease her into the idea of being with him. As Tarkoff goes to find a dealer, since he ran out of heroin to give Joanna, Ingrid learns that her grandfather’s purpose in East End is to take the powers back from the family – powers that he insists weren’t meant for them to have. The previous night, he took Ingrid’s and when she tries to use her power, Frederick sneaks up behind the king with a dagger, in hopes of being the one to kill him and save the family. It doesn’t work out so well, though, as the king uses his newly enhanced power to make Frederick stab himself before leaving. Meanwhile, over at the Gardiner estate, Dash again tries to steer Raven into one of their sex games, only for her to deny taking the journals, produce a search warrant, and inform him that there are five federal agents waiting outside his door.

Frederick wakes up and heals himself, though there’s still the whole matter of needing the journals to bring down the king, which means that the two will have to go to Fair Haven. Once they get there, Ingrid’s disappointed in Dash for reading the journals, but all hope isn’t lost. Frederick can do a mind spell and extract the right information to help their cause. Before it begins, Dash confesses to everything with Raven and promises to protect Ingrid from any coming legal onslaught; the spell itself consists of Dash sitting in front of Frederick and Frederick placing his hands on Dash’s head, with the information he retrieves coming through his arms, into his brain, and out his mouth. Ingrid’s job is to translate what she hears and get Frederick’s attention when he crosses the right subject matter, which takes a while but eventually happens. The requirements? The dagger, the traveler, the bridge, and the key – aka the four Beauchamp women.

Just then, the man Wendy and Freya paid to pass a message along knocks on the door and gives Ingrid the message he had held on to for the past 160 years. Back in Baltimore, Wendy turns into a cat with the intent of sniffing Joanna out; the plan is for Freya to meet them in the alley by the time door, with the thinking being that she’ll be most protected this way. While trying to sneak out, though, Freya notices Tarkoff buying heroin and she ends up following him, Poe nipping at her heels. Wendy locates where Joanna is being held and finds herself able to sneak into the room since Tarkoff cannot read animal minds. She hits him with a log and injects him with heroin before destroying the talisman that was holding Joanna to the bed and running for the alley to meet Freya. Freya, though, is already feeling the effects of being in the past, as she begins bleeding out and urges Poe to go on without her; she doesn’t want him to see her this way and as the two are about to part, she assures him that she’ll see him again in another life and that their love is something that will continue on for centuries to come.

Freya makes it to the alley where the door is supposed to be and warns her approaching mother and aunt of Tarkoff being on their tail. After Ingrid opens the new time door, Joanna throws a wagon in front of him and the women are able to make it back to East End in one piece, Tarkoff not being quite as lucky. Except for the fact that Joanna dropped the box in the scramble to the door, thereby defeating the entire purpose of them being in Baltimore in the first place. But the Beauchamp victory isn’t quite as satisfying as what it could’ve been, not when the king kidnaps Wendy and places her in a similar trap to what Ingrid was in earlier. He taunts his least favorite child, comparing her to a cat with how her affection is never genuine and informing her that he made her infertile to spare children the horror of having her as a mother. Once she insults him back, he smacks her and begins preparing the first round of torture.

However, Ingrid informs Joanna and Freya of the spell she found and the trio quickly find Wendy and do chanting related to their position in the family – Ingrid being the key, Freya the traveler, and Joanna the dagger. They’re not able to penetrate the circle Wendy finds herself in, thereby unable to hurt the king with their magic, but Joanna moves breaks her sister out of the prison and the four pelt the king with their magic. Though he begs for his life, they don’t stop until his soul has been vanquished. Freya and Ingrid then go to check on Killian, who they find dead in his bed. As she hears about his motivations for taking the poison from Ingrid, Freya kisses Killian and brings him back to life; the two, expectedly, begin pawing at each other, but that joy is short-lived when Ingrid receives a call that Dash had been arrested for murder thanks to the DNA match, his obvious motive, and the information pulled from his ISP. Back at the house, Joanna tries to call Frederick, who wasn’t allowed to participate in the spell because of how dangerous it would be for him. Unfortunately, while his other family members were fighting for one of their own, someone broke into his place and stabbed him to death, writing Death To Witches in his blood beside him.

Wendy apologizes to Tommy’s dead body for altering his fate and getting him as mixed up in this as he was. To make amends, she sacrifices herself for him and gives him her one remaining life. Joanna sees the end result, including Wendy’s now-black necklace, and mourns for her sister with Tommy, while Killian does end up visiting Dash in jail. He feels like he’s already won since he came back to life and possesses everything he ever wanted, so he doesn’t think he can be angry at Dash anymore. Dash, though, needs his help and reaches out to grab his brother by the shirt; after doing some chanting, Dash gets himself and Killian to switch souls, thereby forcing Killian to go through the legal system while locked away in a tiny cell. Dash gets the freedom, the girl, and the life that he wouldn’t have had had he stayed in the cell and done his time, and when he goes out to the waiting room after leaping into Killian’s body, he’s able to fool Freya.

While Ingrid confirms her pregnancy, Wendy wakes up in hell, where she reunites with her sister Helena.

Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Oh, I’m sorry, Freya. After you killed me, I guess that wasn’t the biggest thing to happen to me that day.”
-“She probably got caught up kicking Tarkoff’s ass.”
-“Get the soul suck-y box thing.”
-Here’s series creator Maggie Friedman talking with TVLine about everything that happened during the finale. There are some spoiler-y things for the (hypothetical) third season, so proceed with caution and whatnot.
-Y’know, I was going to come in here and complain about the show overlooking its policy on consequences coming from the dead being brought back to life, but I think you can argue that this finale was the universe rebalancing itself. Frederick died and Wendy definitely did something (changed forms?), so good for the show for keeping true to itself and remembering what’s been an important rule throughout the first two seasons.
-I will say, though, that they have to be careful as far as bringing characters back from the dead and having the main characters die. Used sparingly, each device can be a tremendous asset to a genre series – ways to raise the stakes and mine some interesting emotional territory. Go to either too much and you run the risk of making a mockery of death and robbing death scenes of any type of power, impact, and stakes.
-I was into the whole gender-flipped Sleeping Beauty thing that they did with Freya and Killian. A little cheesy and too easy a solution, but hey, I didn’t mind it.
-Can we get a flashback to Bad Girl Freya (TM) in this mythical third season? Because last week we learned that she did bad in English and this week we learned that she’s able to pick locks because she was a juvenile delinquent – I would be very open to a Witches of High School storyline, especially if it meant 30-year-old Freya and Ingrid found their way into 15-year-old Freya and Ingrid’s consciousness.
-This show has never met a candle it didn’t love. Why exactly were there candles in an open field during Killian’s vision? Out of everything he could have thought of while under the influence of the poison, his mind went to mood lighting, for some reason. Ever the romantic, that Killian.
-The next time I lost something in my house (which will probably be 8 minutes from now given my track record in situations like this), I’m going to do the chant that Wendy did while looking for the key and tell those I live with that I’m trying to find the item’s energy. I’ll report back how it goes, of course.
-Okay, so let’s talk about the weird editing of Joanna’s journey to the cemetery. Last week ended with Joanna going to the cemetery and getting the box immediately followed by a scene where she mentions that she’s going to get the box, which made me think that Tarkoff had shifted into her form and used that as a way of procuring the item. However, we saw Joanna getting the box in this episode and I was a tad confused, which could have been solved had the last episode flipped the final two scenes or the last episode ended completely differently with the cemetery visit solely occurring in the finale.
-Another editing thing: did this finale feel choppy to anybody else? The second half of the finale was especially jumpy to me and even though exciting stuff was happening, it was hard to get into any kind of rhythm thanks to the constant back-and-forth.
-You want to know why I love Witches of East End? A scene where a character has to say goodbye to Edgar Allan Poe made me quite sad. On another show? That would be ridiculous. But for some reason, this show is able to make me care about every aspect of its universe and watching Daniel Di Tomasso and Jenna Dewan Tatum have to translate their Freya/Killian chemistry into a whole other dynamic was a lot of fun to watch. And they did a marvelous job at selling not only Poe as a character rather than a caricature, but his love for Freya and how that commented on who she was back in the 1800s, all of which made the final goodbye between Poe and Freya, where you know he’s not long for this world, all the most poignant.
-The reveal that Tarkoff and Joanna were still in Baltimore was actually well done. I assumed that he had taken her through the time door as a way of keeping Wendy and Freya stuck in Baltimore, so learning that he set up a replica of her bedroom was just the right amounts of creepy and surprising to be effective. It showed the depths he’s willing to go to force this woman to be with him and it framed his previous appearances in a slightly different way, which was a neat wrinkle to add in. Also, it gave James Marsters the meatiest material he had all season and he, of course, did the absolute most with every second of screen time he was granted.
-Who puts a large, unidentified key in their boobs? I mean, c’mon, Past Wendy. You don’t know where that’s been.
-Oh, Dash. I can buy Dash’s stupidity this season because his mind was frayed by the first days after he realized he had power and he seems like someone who’s so used to doing everything right that doing one wrong thing and having to cover that up by doing other wrong things really dug into his psyche. I just hope that his character arc is slightly cleaner next season; I don’t need him to be perfect or anything near that, but he made quite a few plot-convenient mistakes (not cleaning up the goo, leaving his journals out, having the evidence on his computer) that betrayed the intelligence of the character that was established in season one.
-I did like, though, that he thought he could bang Raven into not wanting to investigate the murders. Because Dash Gardiner, Sex God is my favorite storyline on anything ever.
-Tarkoff’s interactions with Joanna while she was high made me think of two things: 1) Ashur and Lucretia on Spartacus: Vengeance and 2) Steve Urkel.

-I didn’t like how the show cut away from Rachel Boston’s face when Ingrid learned about being pregnant. She had too good a reaction to cut away like that and to flash to all two of Ingrid’s sex partners this season was a little intelligence insulting.
-Funniest moment of the episode? Wendy hitting Tarkoff with a log. Because first of all, what? And secondly, good Lord. Also, stealth Twin Peaks reference?
-I love how the way to solve the main problem of the second half of the season (e.g. the king being dangerous) is to use something from the first half of the season (e.g. the dagger spell). This season was feeling a touch too disparate (the Mandragora feels like it popped up 100 years ago at this point), so anything to tie everything together is a good thing in my eyes.
-I also loved the guy that Wendy paid actually showing up to Dash’s and giving Ingrid a message from both 160 years ago and the present. Time travel can be a bit convoluted a concept for me when not executed well, but when it’s done in interesting ways, it can make for some cool moments like that.
-I always wonder about travel conversations on supernatural shows. Because, okay, Ingrid and Freya go over to Killian’s and find him dead. What did they talk about on the way there? They didn’t teleport or anything, so what was that car ride like? I’m willing to bet that Ingrid gave up control of the radio for once, given the circumstances.
-The ending of this season was very Captain Planet, no? And I don’t mean that in an insulting way, because I love Captain Planet. Just the whole “Dagger! Key! Traveler!” business felt very “Earth! Wind! Fire!”.
-Dash and Killian’s body switch was perfect. (The shhh from Killian/Dillian(?) was a delight.) I’m all about the show leaning into Dash being a villain and you could immediately tell when Dash took over Killian and vice versa thanks to how great Daniel Di Tomasso and Eric Winter are, so this storyline wouldn’t be a body switch/twin/doppelganger story where there were no changes from one identity to the next. And I like how it’s an obstacle in the Freya/Killian relationship that doesn’t revolve around a rekindled romance with Dash or another party coming onto the show – it’s a nice lesson for other genre shows that love triangles do not rule the world, nor are they the only option to bring drama in a relationship.
-Did you think that Frederick was going to be the one to die? Though he was my pick in the Beauchamp Death Pool, I thought he would have a more valiant death – something where he got to atone for his sins, prove himself to the rest of his family, and go out a hero while doing damage to or completely taking out the king. I do wonder about the witch hunter who killed him, since the figure we saw looked quite a bit like Raven. That could definitely add another dimension to the Dash storyline and give an interesting enemy for the Beauchamps to rally against.
-The final shots of Wendy in hell were gorgeous. Madchen Amick forever. I’m also curious to meet this other Beauchamp sister because you know she’s going to make it out of the Underworld at some point during season three and have some type of interaction with Joanna, Freya, and Ingrid.
-Speaking of Ingrid, I’m a little conflicted about her pregnancy. On the one hand, supernatural pregnancies can really go anywhere, so this could be an excuse for Witches of East End to go nuts and embrace its camp side a little bit more. (If I don’t get baby Mandragoras, I will shrivel up and die.) On the other, are we really doing another paternity storyline on TV? No show benefits from adding human children, not even shows centered around families and parenting, so the thought of this goofy romp adding a little rugrat just makes me sad. Don’t give in to societal pressures, Witches of East End! Fight the power!
-So, thank you guys so much for sticking with me throughout the second season of Witches of East End. I appreciated any of you who read, shared, or commented more than I can express and I sincerely hope that we can reconvene next summer to talk about this show some more.