Created by Michelle Ashford and Esta Spalding
1.03 “Second Line”
Teleplay by Sarah Cornwell
Directed by Axelle Carolyn
Starring: Alexandra Daddario, Tongayi Chirisa, Jack Huston, Harry Hamlin
New episodes available on AMC & AMC+ on Sundays

by Sam Morris, Staff Writer

In which nothing much happens and what does happen has little to do with the original novel…

Look, there’s not a lot worth talking about in this episode—it’s really bad. Ciprien tells Rowan about the Talamasca and his gift. Then he leaves, trusting that the most strong-willed woman to ever live will stay in the Talamasca compound because he told her to. Rowan stumbles upon a second line procession, gets high, meets Lasher, and makes out with him. Carlotta is a bad person, and stuff happened a long time ago in Scotland. The end.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about what didn’t happen in this episode but probably should have. Let’s start with Scotland: a newcomer to the story of the Mayfair Witches could easily deduce that these Scottish witches are the ancestors of Rowan, Carlotta, and Cortland. That deduction is correct, but Anne Rice spared nearly no ink on this storyline. The girl is most likely Deborah Mayfair, and her story gets wild. As a matter of fact, the familial line that Rice draws from Deborah to Rowan is the best part of The Witching Hour!

The story we’ve been provided in the last two episodes? This ain’t that. Deborah is a witch, and so is her mother, Suzanne. It isn’t exactly a spoiler to suggest what is going to happen to them, which is where Rice begins the actual Mayfair story. The prequel that has developed in the last two episodes is completely unnecessary. The Witching Hour is a doorstopper of a novel; there should be no need for filler in these episodes.

Speaking of filler, there’s also time wasted this week on Ciprien Grieve, private investigator. The Talamasca is a private detective agency of sorts, but Rice portrays them more as gentlemen academics who dabble in the occasional perambulatory investigation. In any case, Grieve P.I. is the Aaron Lightner side of his character finally showing through. One of the reasons that the showrunners chose to combine Michael and Aaron into Ciprien is expedience. In The Witching Hour, Aaron convinces Michael to come back to the New Orleans branch of the Talamasca to learn about the Mayfair family. Rice devotes several hundred pages to Michael reading the collected Talamasca history of the Mayfairs. It’s a clumsy narrative device, which works well enough in the novel, but was clearly a problem to solve for this adaptation.

Like I said last week, what Ashford and Spalding did to solve this problem makes sense. Combining the characters and employing flashbacks = problem solved. Except for the fact that both elements were mind-numbingly boring in “Second Line.” Not to mention that the Mayfair family history is roughly a thousand times more interesting than Rowan’s story.

Which is why, I suspect, that we are treated to a colorful second line procession in this episode. The second line is also a new plot contrivance for Lasher to make first contact with Rowan. There was an easy-to-miss reference in this episode about Rowan being the thirteenth witch in the Mayfair line. Thirteen is a prominent number in the world of the supernatural (yes, Taylor Swift is definitely a witch), and Lasher knows that that makes Rowan special. Why? Well, let’s just say that the answer will definitely not be the same answer that Rice provides at the end of The Witching Hour. The answer to that particular question is why, I suspect, many readers of The Witching Hour are sticking around despite this most recent dreadful episode.

Rowan and Lasher meet fairly close to the end of The Witching Hour; this version of their meet cute is… fine. (That reminds me: Is Alexandra Daddario’s lack of charisma a choice?) Would it have been better to stick with the original script and have the two meet in the Mayfair house? Probably, but this adaptation doesn’t seem to be too keen on local architecture. The Talamasca were relocated from a plantation location to an industrial space, which makes me wonder how much of the other plantation—the Mayfair plantation—we’ll see.

Yes, the Mayfairs owned slaves. No, Rice does not do a good job with this particular narrative. That might be why we’re spending so much time in Scotland as opposed to the first Mayfair plantation… in Haiti. That, however, is another story about some of the other Mayfair witches to whom we have yet to be introduced. Trust me, Mayfair witches three through eleven are way weirder than the four we’ve met so far.

Rice’s story is messy and problematic. The main concern that I have with “Second Line” and Mayfair Witches, as a whole, is that the solutions to the original text’s problems appear to make the story not very interesting. We’ll have to see what happens next week. Maybe Cortland will become his most flamboyant, gayest self, and maybe Carlotta will finally reveal herself to be the meanest, most evil person in this whole saga rather than one of the aunts from a local community theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace. One hopes.