How do you mess up a confrontation scene between Meg Foster and Claudia Black? This is a sci-fi/scream queen throw down that should have been of the highest order. Meg, as witch Matriarch Josephine (who manages to flirt believably with young vamps Daniel Gilles and Gia in all of their prickly negotiations), gives her all in an attempt to create a historic tension between two old strong witches. But it’s all in the performance, as there’s nothing in the script to help her at all.
Josephine was a great new character, and when Dahlia finally shows up to kill her (and this after the indignity of much less important Eva daring to trespass on her sovereignty last week), it should be more than a by-the-numbers execution we’ve seen time and time again on this show. In fact, Dahlia should be so much more, period. I guess I’d freak everybody out if my slightest gesture triggered all the wi-fu telekinesis anybody could imagine, but that’s just about all she does. She’s not scary, we don’t know what her motivations are, and she’s not even being as stealthy as Freya was when she decided to wake up from the witch asylum and greet her family again.
I feel Black could do a lot with the role, if there were one. Why does she need babies? Why are things owed to her? What debtors can she have after a millennium? What’s the deal with her hatred of Vikings? None of it goes anywhere, and her appearance is a little too bland to compete with all the twisted witches and voodoo priests we’ve already seen.
The treats of this episode are to be found elsewhere: we finally see Aiden and Josh waking up in the same bed, and it’s totally treated like any lovers’ conversation between the sheets. The Originals innovates here on ground the parent show (too much prickly subtext already between Damon and Stefan Salvatore I suppose) still refuses to tread. Later nonsense between Aiden and Jackson over their alpha-ness really is hard to believe, but not so his love for Josh. The actors both have a chemistry that feels like intimacy already.
The other conflict is Klaus vs. Mikael, who makes an annoying return with his usual broken record of hate for his eldest son. In a way this is just as bad as Dahlia, as Sebastian Roche is also being mostly wasted in the role. But two interesting things happen: he decides to play along with the more collaborative Klaus of this season, and Klaus gets to kill him again with the White Oak Stake when he reneges. Which is some kind of purgatory for Klaus, always searching for a father while having to repeatedly choose fratricide instead.
I guess it’s only fair to the devastated Freya, since she came up with a similar final solution for their mother last week. Fine, both old dinosaurs are gone at last. Now think of something (anything) interesting to do with Dahlia, show.