This episode takes the time to re-establish all our mid-season players and predicaments. It’s a jumping on point for the complicated web the producers have woven in Season Two, one much more entrenched in family and core rivalries than Season One. Each player stands for a specific point of view.
Hayley leads the wolves, and with her comes the wild men and the swamp dwellers. Marcel doesn’t lead New Orleans anymore, but he’s raised a new band of baby vamps. Kol and Davina represent the good witches (well, sort of in Kol’s case), while Vincent represents the bad. Klaus is a big marshmallow (never thought I’d type such a thing) because of baby Hope, and golden-tressed Camille, and he’s even being fairly big brothery with Hayley.
He’s not so happy with their mother, so he’s left her infected near a bag of blood in a tomb. You can’t be both witch and vampire, so turning her negates most of the power she’s been directing against him. It was a smart move. But who reckoned on how sinister and severe a force Finn would be. Genuinely shocked at her hypocrisy, he somehow subdues both Esther and Mikael, using them as the source for a curse that traps the hungry vamps with the wary wolves just when they’re trying to make peace. Yusuf Gatewood is a revelation for the show, and he is selling all the weirdness and mystery of this unlikely Viking family of immortals, who also switch from body to body as needed. When he says he’s planning the destruction of all vampires, even Klaus believes him.
Klaus has left Camille with Elijah for safekeeping, unwise since Elijah is an open wound right now. The only problem with this is it keeps him from interacting with a larger cast, so the actor has to aim all his nervous ticks at himself. Which is fine, but the funniest parts are a toss-offed line about murdering a diner full of trailer trash (lack of style seems a punishable offence) and that he knows the answer to every question in Trivial Pursuit.
And he can’t be with Hayley, who has to marry Jackson anyway. That Jackson loves her without the feeling being returned means a lovely engagement ring, and Klaus musing that the object of unrequited love might suffer as much as the lover.
Rebecca, meanwhile, is in a new (but wrong) body in a cursed asylum of witches. None of this is too shocking to her, and the actress channels Claire Holt’s confidence and imperial sense of command well, but when she tries to use some scrabble squares to ask for help, she instead wakes up a ghost also confined to the house. A ghost named Freya. Who is the missing Mikaelson sister, btw. Oh, yeah, we’ve still got the evil aunt on the way, don’t we? This must have something to do with how Kol started the house in the first place, in the flashbacks only available online.
There’s also time for a very sweet scene between Josh and Aiden as our Romeo and Julian of gay forbidden vamp-wolf love, that then gets weird when the hungry vamp spell hits, but not that weird, if you know what I mean. This show is very intently doing what it does; I just hope it can keep it up without losing track of all the spinning plates.