Ok, Cassie is officially kickass-has-half-of-Lord-Voldemort inside-her cool. She’s got dark magic inside! Her dad was quite possibly a prick and her mom left town not just to escape the Circle and the fire, but him also. Cassie, of course, doesn’t know any of this, but she’s gonna have to start digging. She set someone on fire! In the confines of a safe space designed to rob her and the other Circle members of their powers!
I wanna make it clear I’m not a fan of Jake’s. He’s smarmy and thinks he can be smooth enough to charm Cassie. She’s young, but she’s no idiot. She might not be able to define what he’s exactly up to, but she knows enough not to completely trust him. I mean, he tried to implicate that Nick, his dead brother, as dabbling in withchunting. I was disappointed that she did confide in him that she thought she did magic on her own, but it wasn’t more revealing than a statement, an aloud observation. Plus, she’s 16, so I’m allowing her teenage missteps.
I am, however, getting a bit annoyed with Faye. She’s trying so hard to be the vixen with Jake, and even though I have no tangible context about what happened before with them, it feels somewhat fake. Maybe it’s because she’s hoping to break his heart his time around, maybe it’s because she’s young and still naïve. In any event, I’m just not buying there was anything real between them. It also might just be that Jake isn’t a very good actor. He’s not totally transparent, being a witch and a witch hunter, and even though both Cassie and Adam don’t believe in him, it’s just his overall scowl that is just untrustworthy. Plus, he’s a killer. But, to be far, so is Cassie.
We learned that John Blackwell is who Cassie’s real father was. We’ve only learned tidbits, but no hard facts yet. Besides his name, we know that she doesn’t know the truth, that the night of the fire he was trying to do something Bad, and that he’s wrapped up in dark magic. Calvin, a Chance Harbor witch, though not of the original Circle, leaves her a ancient map embossed with the initials JB, and he also visits Adam’s father to discuss it. He wants no part in enlightening Cassie. Calvin pays for trying to tell Cassie anything with his life, extinguished at the hands of Jake.
Cassie gets roped into throwing an impromptu Halloween get together that becomes a party. She’s hoping to reunite Adam and Diana, but that doesn’t work. Faye is hoping to score with Jake, and that also backfires. Faye also tries to set Cassie up again with Luke, and that explodes in the worst way – literally – as it turns out that he comes from generations of witch hunters. He and some other witch hunters manage to kidnap the 5 main Circle members, tie them up, and put them in a circle of some kind of sulfate that prevents them from using their power. While Adam tries to saw off his ropes with a screw protruding from his chair, whatever dark magic inside of Cassie comes out and prevents Luke from dropping the match in the “death jar” (a jar with mandrake, the witches blood, and a personal effect). When Luke tires to drop a match in another jar, Cassie’s scream sets Luke on fire.
What bothered me was the blasé attitude of everyone later. Cassie comments to Jake that he seems so calm, but so do everyone else. I mean, Cassie just killed someone. They all seem shaken up, but as if they narrowly-escaped-a-boulder-in-a-road-while-driving shaken up, not that someone-went-up-in-flames scared. I guess after Heather’s death by car they are just rolling with the norm that their lives will be filled with death and destruction. I mean, shouldn’t someone be a little more basket-case-y?
On a separate note, Henry, one of the elders, Faye’s grandfather, and the old guy I suspected that Dawn killed is definitely dead. Jane finds him at his cottage house, finds his crystal, tries to revive him but in the middle of her incantation gets knocked out by a mysterious figure who steals said crystal. The suspicion is that it’s Dawn or Charles, but since they didn’t show who, I wonder if maybe it’s the leader of the Witch-Hunting gang, or even Jake.
I hope that we soon learn more about this dark magic inside Cassie and more of what she’s capable of. Generally, though, I am really bummed that there isn’t enough spells or magic. Sure, Jake holds his hand over Cassie’s hood to prevent it from starting, but that required just an intense look. Luke’s death-by-fire was cool, but it’s just, well, not enough. My favorite scene of the episode was watching Faye and Melissa get a paper bat to fly, as they were finally having some fun with their magickal capabilities. I want to see more magic on this show, dammit!
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Aspiring screenwriter and seamstress, Sonia's dream is to write life-tweaking films while product-placing her own line of handbags. In 1999, she wrote, co-directed and co-starred in the short film Dr. Lovestrange, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bug, a satirical homage to Stanley Kubrick set amidst the panic of Y2K. She is working on her next short about the Mayan Calender that she hopes to finish before the end of the world. Ever the late bloomer, she finally started a blog chronicling her misadventures as one half of a long distance relationship (http://llddr.wordpress.com). She still struggles with which picture to kiss before bedtime: her boyfriend's or Bruce Campbell's. And, in the interest of time, she'd like to start thanking the Academy now. 
