By Paula R. Stiles

[Spoilers for the episode]

Recap: It’s the Eastwick Harvestfest, one of those small-town New England autumn festivals designed mainly to part rich tourists from their cash and get the locals through a long, cold winter. Joanna burbles on about Harvestfest, but her bubble is burst a little when Roxie and Kat point out that the papier mâché “turkey” she created looks more like a vagina.

Roxie is suspicious of Van Horne, whom she deems “not of this world”, right before her shop’s front display unexpectedly collapses. She also has premonitions of being thrown into a grave and buried by the Johnny Depp lookalike she flashed on last week. Her suspicions spike when a man looking just like him named “Jamie” arrives in town and announces that he’s rented the room upstairs from her shop. Joanna and Kat are no help, declaring him “claw-your-eyes-out hot”. Roxie keeps Jamie at arm’s-length, but when she boldly pulls up his shirt to look for a Celtic-knot-like brand that she saw on his right hip, she sees nothing. This allays her suspicions, despite the vivid flashes she has all episode about him. But at the end, we see him branding himself – Roxie just pulled his shirt up too early.

Meanwhile, Joanna and her buddy Penny are investigating what Penny found out last week. Joanna susses out that Darryl Van Horne died as a baby. They also discover that handsome millionaire Sebastian Hart, who looked just like their boss as a young man, drowned off the nearby coast in 1984 – the same year the man known as Darryl Van Horne first appears in records. A nasty encounter with a guard dog at the Eastwick Historical Society also wins them a photo of Hart with three women. One of them is Bun. However, they run into some snags when they track down the journalist (Martin Mull) who wrote the articles. He doesn’t remember writing them. It’s not until Joanna tracks down another of the women in the photo – Eleanor Rougement (Cybill Shepherd) – that they get a breakthrough. Eleanor is a recluse who threatens them with a gun when they show up at her door. After Eleanor declares that she killed Hart, Joanna tries to get more information out of her with her newfound power of voice persuasion, but Eleanor just laughs at her and slams the door. Meanwhile, at the hospital, Bun wakes up from her coma.

Speaking of Joanna’s power, she struggles with Will’s attempts to get her to come to Harvestfest with him. She desperately wants to, but is sure that it’s the power talking not Will. It’s actually fairly clear that Will is truly interested in her (since his attempts to ask her out predate the pilot), but you can see this as yet another way of Joanna sabotaging herself romantically.

Kat is also doing plenty of self-sabotage this episode when she gives in to Raymond’s pleas to give him a second chance. She waffles back and forth and eventually ends up back in bed with him. This leads to a massive misunderstanding, as what she sees as “goodbye” sex, Raymond sees as a reconciliation. Kat sets him straight, but it appears that she goes back to him when Van Horne gives Raymond his old job back at the end of the episode. Bleah.

Roxie’s relationship woes also include more than her mysterious new neighbour. Daughter Mia is still freaked out from last week’s near-rape, not helped by her very-ex-boyfriend, Gus, taunting her and Roxie about getting off essentially scot-free. Unfortunately, Mia doesn’t want half the town to know what happened to her and Roxie is powerless to do anything without her cooperation.

Or is she? Roxie sounds off to Darryl about wanting to see Gus “strung up in the town square”, but fears she’s letting her anger get the best of her. Darryl points out that women are too often encouraged to suppress their anger and that it can be a useful weapon. This leads to an intimate moment involving clay (and clearly inspired by the movie Ghost) that Chad interrupts. Chad is upset with Roxie, especially when she tells him that her life is too chaotic for a boyfriend, even if she wanted one. She also admits that she still grieves for her dead husband, making Gus’ nasty insinuation that Roxie killed said husband all that more reprehensible.

Things come to a head of sorts at the Harvestfest dance when Chad arrives with a younger girl to make Roxie jealous and Roxie finally admits that she wants Chad as her boyfriend. Chad happily ditches his date and goes off with Roxie. Later, Gus taunts the three women from a lights-bedecked Harvestfest tower. But his triumph is shortlived. As they glare up at him, he suddenly stumbles backwards and falls, accidentally (?) hanging himself in the strings of lights in front of the whole town, just as Roxie wished for.

Van Horne himself is hardly a shadowy presence. When Joanna confronts him at the Harvestfest dance about what she’s found, he warns her to “let sleeping dogs lie”, strongly implying he knows all about her break-in and confrontation with a guard dog at the Eastwick Historical Society. Early on, he also gives the three women significant gifts. Kat receives a beautiful silk nightgown, which she inadvertently uses to seduce Raymond even as her powers grow and become more subtle. Joanna receives some apparently-cheap perfume that Van Horne claims can persuade others to do what she wants. Roxie receives what look like cheap gaming dice that Van Horne calls “spirit dice”. Roll one die, he claims, and you can see the past. Roll two and you can see the future. Roll three and change fate – but this always leads to chaos. Joanna and Roxie are both very skeptical about their gifts, but the perfume and dice, particularly, will of course show up later on.

At the end, we see Van Horne rolling three spirit dice over and over while petting the dog who menaced Joanna and Penny.

Review: I liked this episode, for the most part. Roxie’s visions/dreams are scary and abrupt and we often don’t know what’s real and what’s a vision or dream until it has ended. Gus is a one-dimensional little creep, but I liked the fact that they had the Witches accidentally kill someone so early on. It brings a brimstone whiff of Mythos into what could otherwise be soap opera. I like that the stakes are already high.

I also liked that we have an older generation of witches in town (and that Bun is one of them). Nice to see not just one but two older generations of women (even if 30-something isn’t that old in real life) on a television show. Also, though Chad dropped his date at the dance like a hot rock for Roxie, it was rather nice to see the cougar outvamp the jailbait for once. You gotta give Chad credit for good taste.

This leads to something else nice: the three women didn’t really further their acquaintance with Van Horne so much as with each other and their other friends, lovers and family. Joanna and Penny running around playing two Nancy Drews together was cute and funny, especially every time they’d break out into an off-key duet of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (Willie Nelson’s cover of Patsy Kline’s “Crazy” also ominously underscored Jamie’s scenes). I like Joanna better for worrying that she’s magically roofied Will into liking her. It shows that she has scruples about her magic, already.

Roxie’s worry about her daughter and her conflicted feelings over Chad showed her genuine compassion under her brassy earthiness. Also, the women’s relationship with each other was portrayed as positive, and so was their anger, despite the fatal consequences of it at the end of the episode. I am all for a show that doesn’t promote passive-aggression as the healthy way for women to work out their problems.

Oh, and did I mention that Paul Gross was even hotter this week than last? I heartily approve of Van Horne’s attempts to seduce Roxie while she creates his bust by taking off all his clothes. Heartily. Not that Gross doesn’t also fill a suit out nicely, mind.

I should mention that I love the show’s title, with its wisp of smoke.

There are still wrinkles (little surprise, there; it’s episode two). I hate, hate, hate the way Kat waffled back and forth over her resolution last week to get a divorce. This isn’t helped in the least by the fact that Raymond is an unsubtly-played bully with no redeeming features. Kat’s marrying him in the first place, let alone having five kids with him and turning into an utter doormat, makes me wonder about her intelligence. Sadly, this undercuts the fact that the episode shows some subtler aspects of her power. When her daughter gets cold feet about going to the Harvestfest, Kat reassures her by conjuring up a whole flock of butterflies. The FX are a bit fake, but it’s a nice image nonetheless. Later, when she kisses Raymond, she makes the roses in her garden bloom. The fact that she doesn’t notice these things (but Raymond apparently does) is another nice touch, but it doesn’t rescue her character from being irritating and the least interesting of the three witches so far.

Another problem is Jamie. I will readily allow that Jack Huston is one hot tomato and the tummy porn involving his branding scene is certainly welcome. And he does look remarkably like Depp. But an actor of Depp’s calibre he ain’t. This drags down his storyline quite a bit.

Still, the episode overall is fun and watchable and I like that they are at least trying to balance making these women sympathetic with also making them potentially very dangerous. Van Horne, meanwhile, is becoming more and more mysterious. Anyone who has seen the movie or read the book knows what he is. But what he wants is another thing and what will happen when he decides to get it is still another. We’ll see how that goes. Right now, he’s still in stalking mode.

Next week: Madams and Madames: Joanna tries to get some answers straight from the horse’s mouth, which doesn’t go as planned. The witches go on a “sleepover” at Van Horne’s house, which definitely won’t go as planned. Meanwhile, Roxie is seeing a dead Gus everywhere. Is someone playing a prank on her or is there more to it?

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