By Paula R. Stiles

[spoilers for the episode]

Recap: This week in Eastwick, Kat came home to an empty house and freaked out. At first, she tried to be reasonable and call Raymond. When he didn’t return her calls, she called the police and reported a familial kidnapping. But just when the useless cop arrived there to interview her, Raymond waltzed in with the kids. The cop seemed to think this was just hunky-dory (have Eastwick police had no recent training in domestic abuse or disputes?) and left, thinking Kat had overreacted. Kat and Raymond then had a fight in which Raymond once again threatened to take the kids away and Kat snarled back, “If you want a war, I’ll give you one.”

Unfortunately, this “war” fizzled a tad when she had second thoughts the next day. Naturally, Van Horne was there to fan the flames and goad her into calling his high-priced lawyer, Ivanka. The woman duly arrived in Eastwick and took Raymond and his “lawyer” (a fishing buddy) apart with relish. Raymond’s response? Tell the kids that Kat hated Daddy and take them away (again), this time to Grandma’s.

In the end, after inadvertently giving Raymond boils via black magic and firing the lawyer, Kat “admitted” that she had been “cruel” to leave him alone the other night but that she still wanted a divorce. Maybe they could share “nesting” by living alternate weeks in the house with the kids.

I really rolled my eyes at this. Raymond has yet to show an ounce of love for those kids (who all seriously lack personality beyond being cute, little bargaining chips, anyway) and has so far not been above threatening to kidnap the kids (twice), actually kidnap them (twice), poison them against their mother, and still expect Kat to fetch him orange juice in the morning.  Normal men don’t do this – abusive men do this. And abusive men do not just quietly agree to an amicable divorce and joint custody. Instead, they make your life a living hell. Either the writers are being very naive here or they are portraying Kat as incredibly naive. Either way, I don’t much like it.

Roxie, meanwhile, had another dream of the future – Jamie spying on her through a window at Van Horne’s. But when she went over to Van Horne’s to measure him for her sculpture of him and saw something out through the window, it turned out to be a squirrel. Disappointed and confused, she asked Van Horne if perhaps her talent (which she now appears willing to embrace as real) could go awry. Van Horne, stirring the pot as always, suggested she stop relying so much on her visions and do a little detective work on her own.

And oh, my, what a can of worms that opened. Roxie snuck into Jamie’s apartment and discovered a book with the symbol from her dream on it. So, this confirmed her visions in a way. She showed the book to Kat and Joanna. It was full of spells. In the process of trying to figure out how the book worked, they tried out one of the spells, not realizing they’d just given Raymond the aforementioned boils.

Things went in an even more mysterious direction after Roxie figured out that the book (which was very old) had apparently belonged to Jamie’s birth mother (he was adopted) and that she was from Eastwick. Soon after, she had Bun over for tea after Bun had checked out of the hospital. Bun was now suffering from amnesia and couldn’t remember much of anything. But when she saw the book, she freaked out and insisted it was hers. And when she saw Jamie near the end of the episode, she insisted that she knew him and had held him as a baby in her arms. To thicken the plot, Joanna recognized the symbol from a similar one on the door of Bun’s former witch compatriot from a couple of weeks back.

Meanwhile, Joanna was grossly (and conveniently) distracted from both her investigation into Van Horne and her romance with Will by the strange and timely return of her scuzzy fiancé, Morgan, the mysterious person who grabbed her shoulder at the end of last week. Seemed he had left her at the altar when they both lived in Boston years back. Now he was in Eastwick with his latest fiancée, Charlene.

In due course, Joanna found herself swept off her feet yet again and into bed. But it all went sour when she used her power on him to ask why he’d left her in the first place and his response was both brutal and shallow. His attempts to continue to woo her the next morning (including dumping Charlene) fell flat and Joanna ditched him when he showed up at the paper. Unfortunately for her, she was supposed to be on a date with Will the previous night but forgot and stood him up. After hearing about the entire sordid affair during Joanna’s very-public fight with Morgan, Will dumped her flat and told her they had no chance together, ever.

The cruellest cut of all, however, occurred at the very end and totally unbeknownst to Joanna. Penny had been hounding Joanna all episode to continue investigating Van Horne, but Joanna was too distracted by her domestic drama to notice. Only at the very end did we see why Penny wanted this – it turned out that her confidential source was none other than Jamie, and that the two of them were having a passionate fling.

Review: Lots of new developments in this episode. I’m not sure I like all of them, but I do like that the story is moving forward. I also liked the mix of good and bad intentions, good and evil results.

Probably my favourite part was Roxie’s ongoing friendship with Bun, who has lost her memory. Even though Roxie trusts Jamie less than ever, this doesn’t change her protective feelings for Bun when she realizes that Bun is probably Jamie’s mother. It just complicates them. A lot. I liked this. These three witches are highly dangerous, but they can also be extremely loyal, especially to other women. This makes them very different from the characters in Updike’s original book. Better. More interesting. More powerful? We’ll see.

I was less thrilled to see Roxie’s daughter, Mia, effectively disappear this week. This seemed to be part of a pattern of dissolving the women’s previous relationships. Part of it seemed to have been orchestrated by Van Horne, but at least some of it stemmed from the women’s own faults or the less-than-loyal actions of others.

It also felt as though the writers have been introducing these women as loving, loyal people and now are conveniently ditching all of the incidental characters in their lives to streamline the story. This is all very well, but I like some of those characters. And others, I feel, I haven’t even been properly introduced yet.

For example, we’ve had far, far too much of Raymond, who needs to get off my TV screen forever, starting now. But the “amicable” resolution between him and Kat seemed engineered mainly to get rid of her inconvenient (in a story sense) five children. I’ll grant you that the kids are little more than cyphers now, but I think it’s cheating to introduce Kat as a mother of five and then simply make her kids disappear because she can’t engage in any fun non-domestic drama without them (though Joanna taking her in as her new roommate was sweet). Work with the situations you’ve got, writers; don’t change fundamentals in midstream.

I felt the same way about Joanna and Penny. On the one hand, I thought that what happened between Joanna and Will, while sad for both of them, was appropriate. I like Will. I like that Will’s not a doormat. And as much as I like Joanna, I don’t like what she did to him, even if Morgan was a rat. So, I thought he responded appropriately. And I also found the timely arrival of Morgan the Rat pretty intriguing. Why didn’t it ever occur to Joanna to ask Morgan why he’d come to Eastwick, knowing she was there (or ask him why he dumped her so many years ago before they slept together again)? Why now? Charlene’s story was just too silly to be believable. Surely, Van Horne was behind that somehow.

On the other hand, while the Jamie fling gives Penny a dimension outside of being Joanna’s friend and wasn’t entirely unexpected, it also ruins the cute gal-pal vibe between the two of them. Now, even though Joanna doesn’t know it yet, we know that Penny is as big a rat in her own way as Morgan was, and that makes me sad. I knew they’d find a way to ruin this friendship, but still…I’m bummed.

And yet, the plot is moving along, which is a good thing. Intriguing secrets are starting to pile on one another, helped by the fact that we do get answers – albeit only partial ones. Let’s see what happens next.

Next Week: Mooning and Crooning: Kat explores her newfound freedom. Joanna gets in trouble at the paper. And Mia is back. Let’s see what she and Mom can do without a psycho ex-boyfriend hanging around.

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