Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Secret Circle: Season 1, Episode 8: Beneath




Full Scooby meeting! Well no. full Scooby meeting except... Melissa. Uh-huh, apparently her mother has been worried about her so took her out of town for a while. Ye gods, they're not even giving her screen time any more! But we do have Jake – who will now be known as Evil Scooby.

Mean Girl Faye decides to blame the kidnapping, demons et al on Cassie for... well, no apparent reason. Because she's Mean Girl What, we  need reasons now? This becomes a recurring theme in the episode with Faye blaming Cassie because Jake likes her.  Anyway, after lots of constant snapping and yipping, the Scoobies decide to go looking for Cassie's grandmother (who is missing after going to check on Faye's grandfather who was killed by Evil!Parent 1, Dawn, Faye's mother waaay back in episode 2)

Dawn is less than pleased with the body-finding road trip and calls Evil!Parent 2 (Charles, Diana's father) who has kidnapped Jane (Cassie's grandma. I keep including these reminders of who is who since none of the characters are especially memorable enough on their own) and hidden Henry's body. But they do have the crystal Jane found which makes the Evil!Parents verrry happy. Evil!Parent Charles uses the crystal and Diana's spell book to alter Jane's memories. I think we're also supposed to be seeing Charles as becoming more unstable

The Scoobies arrive at the cabin – that has no power and it's during a storm (DRAMA!) They can't find either Jane or Henry but they decide to have a good rummage anyway. Against  and Faye starts to hear the voice of a little children in trouble. And seeing phantom footprints to the background of spooky spooky music. And weeds in the bathtub. Honestly, this is like the least spooky haunting known to mankind. There are wet wellington boots up the stairs! WET WELLIES guys!

It turns out she's being haunted by the ghost of... herself. And Cassie can see her a well (of course she can, we can hardly have a storyline that doesn't involve Cassie now can we?) After chasing the girl around for a while cassie uses her super-special magic and finds the body of Henry

Just in case we missed how special Cassie was, we get more of Jake telling Cassie how powerful  she is and more of Cassie's explorations of solo magic – of black magic (apparently)


Mean Girl is still Mean. Melissa is still absent (even more so!) Adam is still Pining after Cassie. Diana is still mooning about Adam. Adam is still being sappy about Diana. And there's tensionm and jealousy and lust. And Faye is jealous of Cassie and wants Jake. And Cassie and Jake are doing the not!flirting thing and Sparky is doing the Not!interested thing. There's a game of truth or dare that allows all the Scoobies to prove just how much they don't like each other. Teen drama! Yay!

Unsurprisingly the Witch hunters have not run away, despite the assurances of Evil!Scooby. And yes, Evil!Scooby is still working for them because witchcraft kills witches! So witch hunters should kill witches instead!

I'm going to try and not mark it down because of the interminable amounts of teen angst and drama here. Maybe people like it and it doesn't make them slowly lose the will to live. However, even putting that aside the fact that nothing actually happened in this episode is a problem. This whole episode can be summed up with “The Scoobies found Henry's body” and that covers the plot. The rest was endless teen dramangst with little or no plot advancement, world building, character development or anything else particularly appealing.