Witches of East End 2.07 “Art of Darkness” Recap

Frederick brings home his new girlfriend Caroline and when the two begin getting intimate, he has another seizure. Luckily, Joanna pops in at that exact moment and does a quick healing spell to get him back to normal. Over at Killian’s, he and Eva finally take a break from their lovemaking in order for him to stake a shower. However, when the two get playful on the bed, Killian sees Eva as an old woman and the vision, which might be the result of the potions she keeps feeding him, weirds him out and then some.

The following morning, Joanna finds herself feeling jealous of Wendy’s newfound bond with Frederick, as it means that she’s now the odd one out. She didn’t know about the existence of Caroline, an environmental science professor, before the previous night, so she decides to have her over for dinner and play a little catch-up. While Wendy denies that she’s in love with Tommy, even as she slept with one of his sweaters due to him being gone on a camping trip with his daughter, Dash finds Ingrid at the library and invites her to an art benefit gala thrown by the East End Coalition for the Arts, as she had been holing herself up since everything with the Mandragora. She accepts under the pretense of them going as friends, just as Caroline expresses worry about Joanna seeing her in a compromised state the previous night. Frederick then explains that his mother isn’t judgmental and that going to dinner would allow two of the most important women in his life to get to know one another.

Caroline reluctantly accepts, but when she leaves, Frederick is confronted by the presence of Tarkoff, one of the king’s minions. He gets spelled into submission, with Tarkoff mentioning that he’s there to ensure that Frederick’s mission of bringing the king back through the portal and into East End is making progress; it turns out that Tarkoff, a telepath, has been in East End for the past 400 years, acting as something of a liaison for the king. Though the Mandragora sent through the portal was to find a suitable host for the king’s return to this realm, Frederick explains that he had to put the creature down due to its killing spree and the fact that his family were hunting it anyway. Since the king isn’t exactly happy with Frederick’s performance, the next avenue he’s exploring involves weakening Joanna so that Ingrid and Freya can be brought back to Asgard more easily. His plan? Use a potion to dull Joanna’s powers and Tarkoff implores Frederick to take care of it that night – the night of his dinner with Caroline and Joanna.

Ingrid walks in on Freya getting ready for the event, as she’s going as Wendy’s plus-one after Wendy receives two tickets from a secretive admirer, and the two talk about the former’s desire to go to the gala with Dash. Even as Ingrid explains that she has no intentions of making this a date and that it was just her going out with a friend, Freya puts her foot down and tells her sister that she doesn’t want her to go – she doesn’t trust Dash after what he told her while under the influence of the Mandragora venom, but Ingrid doesn’t care and pledges to go to the gala regardless of what Freya wants. Meanwhile, Killian gets out of the shower and finds a message on his mirror that says not to trust Eva and to check his phone. After drying off, he sends her out for takeout and checks his phone to find a video that he made of himself when he was in Santo Domingo, a wild-eyed plea to not trust Eva. The reason? He doesn’t love her – he’s been spelled to love her all this time when, in actuality, he loves Freya.

At the gala, Ingrid and Dash are especially friendly, as he tells her that she deserves so much after everything she did for him, while Wendy and Freya walk around by themselves. Though talk is initially of the latter’s possible jealousy at Ingrid being with Dash that night, it’s quickly replaced when Wendy notices that she’s the muse for the exhibit they’re looking at. Her lips, her eyes, her necklace – they’re all there and it turns out that the artist, a secretive man who only goes by Seamus, is her ex-husband Ronan. Thrown for a loop by the origins of the art and the fact the husband she divorced three times stands before her, Wendy hears from Ronan about how much of an inspiration she was to his creative process, how he had to channel how much he missed her into this work in order to keep himself from going insane. This, he claims, is his love letter to her, his attempt to get her back into his life. Elsewhere, Caroline is quickly charmed and calmed by Joanna, only for the evening to take on a different tone when Tarkoff arrives. He claims that he heard about Victor and wanted to pay his respects, but all he succeeds in doing is ratcheting up the pressure on Frederick to slip the vial of potion into Joanna’s wine. He’s unsuccessful at getting this part of the plan together, though, as Frederick opts to “accidentally” break Joanna’s glass during a toast after putting the potion into her drink to begin with.

Back at the event, Ingrid and Dash giggle about a strange art buyer before getting on the dance floor together. She broaches the topic of their status and he claims that they’re more than just friends – they’ve been through hell and back together and they’ve bonded more than the word friendship can quantify. Yet Dash doesn’t want to label what they have, not when they both need to get a little lost without having a label to guide them. Dash’s good mood gets ruined, though, when Kyle Hutton’s father William comes up to him regarding the disappearance of his son. Kyle’s car was found near Fair Haven and he believes that Dash knows something that he’s not saying. When he gets back to Ingrid after being pulled away, Dash is noticeably distracted and ends up claiming a hospital emergency in order to get some time by himself. Elsewhere, Killian tears up the home he shares with Eva while looking for damning evidence about her motives; when she comes home from getting takeout, she grabs a shard of glass from the pitcher he broke, cuts her hand, and flings the blood into his eyes, incapacitating him. She then gets the magical ingredient she uses to spike his drinks and feeds it to him with her finger, causing his entire disposition to change. He forgets about what he learned from the video and falls back in love with her again, never to question what it is he saw on his phone.

Wendy explains to Freya that her relationship with Ronan, while fun, didn’t bring out the best in her and initiated at a weird, vulnerable time for her. However, when he cuts into the conversation and reminds her of a trip to Paris they took that ended with Wendy taking a bullet, the two begin kissing, with Ronan saying that no one will ever know Wendy like he does. But Ronan’s lips don’t have as much power over Wendy as they once did and when she learns that Ronan has been using her hair in his paintings to make up for his lack of artistic talent, she says goodbye to him once and for all. Dash confronts William outside the gala and when the powerful East End figure claims that he won’t stop until he finds what happened to Kyle, Dash kills him using his powers and makes it look like a heart attack. Given his reputation in town, no one thinks to question anything about the scene and Dash finds a way to cover up the crime he committed, which had to be covered up by Ingrid. He sticks to his story even with Ingrid and explains to her that he thought about saving William but that he didn’t want what happened with Sam to happen again. Having bonded through both being the anchors of their respective families, Ingrid and Dash then kiss.

In the Beauchamp kitchen, Joanna grieves over Victor due to Tarkoff’s presence reminding her of her former husband. When she goes in for a hug, Tarkoff gets a lock of her hair and pledges to stay for a while in East End. After Frederick kisses Caroline goodbye, Tarkoff confronts him about not going through with the plan, yet he cannot kill Frederick without there being a host body ready for the king. Since Frederick is carrying the king’s spirit in his chest and no one else knows how to handle it, he’s safe, especially since Tarkoff can’t cut the spirit out without greatly injuring himself. Frederick saves himself from injury when he says that they can Mandragora Walk and find the host body themselves, though he threatens to kill himself and leave Tarkoff for the king to devour should any harm come to Joanna.

Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Oh, bite your tongue, Joanna. Love is the worst.”
-“To make an omelet, you have to kill some people.”
-“Maybe between you, me, and your breasts, we can persuade him to stay in town for a while.”
-“So, was that a no on the hair?”
-Even though I’m not usually a fan of mid-season time jumps, as they rob certain storylines of their emotional heft and feel like a reset button more often than not, I was cool with Witches skipping ahead a few weeks after the fall of the Mandragora. The changes to the characters (e.g. Wendy and Frederick’s peaceful relationship) were slight enough to feel natural and not draw attention to the time jump, while it set into motion the rest of the season in a way that made the Mandragora killing feel less abrupt.
-The only time Bianca Lawson has aged in the past two decades has been her brief moment in old age makeup here. Also, was that vision a side effect of the potion? Or was it more about Killian’s subconscious trying to send him the message that this woman he thinks he’s in love with is not who she claims to be? (I lean toward number two, especially with the message on Killian’s mirror. But wouldn’t he notice a strange video appearing on his phone?)
-I love the fact that this show undercut the Tumblr-ready Dash/Ingrid storyline (oh, the gifs that will be made) with the fact that he’s crossed over from being someone too green to know how to use their powers to an unapologetic killer. Granted, William’s death was more about self-preservation than Dash’s blood lust, but he still killed this man, hid behind his pristine reputation around town, and lied to Ingrid about what he did to protect them both, all of which is a far cry from what the Dash of season one would do in that situation. Evil Dash from last week was maybe my favorite version of Dash that the show has trotted out, so I think exploring that side of him and seeing how much his experience with the dragon’s blood has impacted his psyche could make for an interesting back half of the season.
-The show will have to be careful, though, because it’s very easy to make someone with this type of storyline irredeemable and I don’t exactly see them killing off Dash after having already killed Hudson and Victor and setting him up as a romantic interest for Ingrid. Having Ingrid start to lean toward the “bad” side with Dash, especially if things between her and Freya don’t improve, could be an interesting little wrinkle for the show to explore, though after spending half a season at the mercy of the Mandragora, I don’t know if another storyline about her not having any agency would be wise this season.
-I love that they didn’t forget about Kyle. It’s all very Edgar Allan Poe, the whole “dead body in the ocean continuing to weigh on the lives of those who killed it” thing, and Dash’s mental state will be something to watch in the coming episodes, especially after he intentionally killed vs. having his lack of knowledge about magic be responsible for the chaos he creates.
-The Mandragora Walk is basically the Monster Mash, right? Please say yes.
-James Marsters! Not only did he bring his handsome face over to East End, he brought along two info dumps that made me excited for the rest of the season. It wasn’t hard to guess that Frederick was working with the king, considering the seizures and whatnot, but to have that confirmation, in addition to knowledge about why the Mandragora was there (e.g. looking for a host body for the king) and what the seasonal end game is (e.g. the king returning to East End/reuniting with his family), was valuable and timely enough (I’d much rather have something like that during the first episode of a second seasonal arc than anywhere else) for me to be able to look over the exposition.
-Also, Frederick keeping the king’s spirit in his chest was bad ass in a way that Witches isn’t always. Once they find a suitable host for him, will the king be able to appear in East End this way and bypass having to enter through the portal?
-Wendy’s storyline was cute. I always like when comedic characters get moments to show some personal growth and it was a fun way of getting some backstory on her without the need for a full flashback episode. Though I would give anything to have a Wendy-centric flashback episode sometime in the near future.
–Witches of East End will be off next week for Labor Day weekend, but when the show returns in two weeks, Freya and Frederick celebrate a milestone birthday, while Ingrid and Dash grow closer, Tommy gets a surprise from Wendy, and Joanna faces one of her worst fears.