“An army of seventy time seven beasts to free thee…”
Just when you think you know what’s going on, they get you with the swerve. As Manny tries to figure out why Kai killed Creek, Fiji channels her inner bad girl with Bobo trying his best to reign in her darker side and Joe, with a trailing Walker, tracks down the fully demonized Chuy before the latter can cause any more damage.
As it turns out, our protagonists fail spectacularly in their individual plotlines.
Getting the weakest storyline thus far out of the way, Joe is desperate to track down Chuy before his husband of more than a thousand years can cause any more damage. Walker follows in Joe’s footsteps, determined to put down the demon as Chuy’s not graduated to killing innocents. When the pair finally catches up to Chuy, the demon goes after Walker. Though the demon hunter has a chance to end it, he doesn’t, knowing Joe loves the demon. That hesitation nearly gets him killed as Chuy lunges for him, only to be stopped by Joe’s dagger into his heart. There are no goodbyes as Chuy dies quietly. It’s a shame too, as the Joe/Chuy dynamic was poorly used, especially as the pair had strong chemistry, much more so than paint-by-numbers connection between Joe and Walker. Joe has always been a more interesting character when he played off Chuy but now that he’s no longer there, we’ll have to see if cutting his wings off and banishing Walker will bring forth a side of the angel that we’ve yet to see.
It should have been easier to spot but, the good girl southern accent and charm Patience carried pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. Though it seemed like she had her own secrets from the start, she seemed so earnest that suspicions of her fell by the wayside. Add into it Kai’s secret monster stash and it was easy to point to him as the real antagonist. It wasn’t until Patience went to see Manny after Creek’s wake that her act fell flat. As it turns out, she’s been playing everyone in Midnight, though no one more than Kai who, for the dozen years they’ve been together, has thought he was helping her revive her brother Theophilus who’d been cursed by the dark witch Delilah.
Yes, the reveal that Fiji’s patron of the Dark just so happens to be the twin sibling of Patience was a great twist and seeing her and Fiji together at the end, ready to take down Lem, Bobo, and Olivia was the way to do a cliffhanger. Add to that the fact that the dark witch has chosen Manny to become the vessel to which Theophilus is bonded and there is a significant amount of story to work with as we come down on season two’s homestretch.
Midnight Mile
- In what world is it a good idea to put an unconscious woman in the same room you have another woman staked to a table? Even if Patience wasn’t a dark witch, that’s just bad form. Add to the fact that Lem, as a vampire, doesn’t hear an iron stake being pulled out of a wooden table ten feet away is very questionable writing. If you’re going in that direction, at least have Patience throw out a spell or something to muffle the sound.
- It’s both a wonder as well as a disappointment watching Parisa Fitz-Henley channel her inner evil. While she’s clearly having fun and doing a bang-up job with it (save for a touch of overacting when she’s first restrained), I’m missing that sweet, gentle Fiji as well. Hopefully, their solution doesn’t end up banishing this version of Fiji permanently but working in some of her less arresting traits in with the old, to give the sweet Fiji a bit more attitude.
- It’s always chuckle-worthy when two characters are set on beating one another’s brains in only to find out that they’re on the same side. It’s also a bit sad that Kai, for all these years, thought he was helping the woman he loves. Now he discovers she was using him the entire time? Talk about a gut punch. At least he’s free, which is more than I can say for Manny. The moment Patience insisted he wear her charm wiped all traces of doubt about her motivations. She’s a bad, bad witch and it will take all our Midnighters to take her down lest she (and her brother) become unstoppable.
