By Paula R. Stiles

Tagline: The three witches finally admit to each other that they’re witches – just in time to save some lives. Joanna’s life keeps going downhill. Bun and Eleanor kidnap Jamie. And Van Horne tries to get Kat to save Greta’s life after Jamie poisoned her last week.

Recap: After getting out of the shower, Roxie has a vision in which she falls through the ice of a pond. Later, she catches Mia fooling around with Josh in the living room and grounds Mia for breaking rules they had already established about the relationship. Josh’s mother is still angry about Chad’s death and Mia is not allowed to see him outside of school to keep the peace. Mia acts like a stereotypical teen and flounces off. Apparently, she thinks she’s Juliet to Josh’s Romeo. Ha.

Meanwhile, Van Horne rushes into the hospital with Greta, who has been poisoned by Jamie (who is horrified when Roxie and Kat unknowingly fill him in). Van Horne demands that Kat heal her; he even visits her at home to beg for Greta’s life (Greta has no hope without magic). He declares that Kat is extremely powerful, perhaps the most powerful of the three: “It’s always the quiet ones.”

Kat is confused (she thought she was the only one who knew about her new powers). They scare her. She sees too clearly their dark side. But even when she relents and tries to heal Greta later on, she can’t. Van Horne slices open his hand to let her “practice”, but though she can heal him, she can’t heal Greta. Something is missing. She knows she has the power inside her, but she can’t find the key.

At her new job (as a bartender), Joanna is harassed by Max, who comes in and gloats over her new station. Goaded by his mockery of her blog, Joanna unwisely lets slip that she has a scoop on a corrupt senator. She is hoping to use this to bargain her way back into her old job. Naturally, he steals it, because that’s the kind of low-down, rotten snake that he is, and she doesn’t find out until she gets to the paper to make her pitch.

He seems to think this is perfectly-acceptable journalistic practice. I’d say stealing other people’s work is riding the razor’s edge, both morally and legally, and if he doesn’t watch it, he’s going to fall off on the wrong side. Unfortunately, he gets no comeuppance this week. Well…aside from an angry Joanna TKing him in the nuts with a file cabinet drawer. Her explanation later to Roxie and Kat that she doesn’t whammie him because she wants to get her old job back and fair and square seems a little weak. But all three of the witches do seem t0 see-saw back and forth about their powers and she did do something pretty unethical with “Guy” last week.

Van Horne is angry. When he goes back to his bedroom, he susses out the poison used (African Artemisia) and visits Bun. He threatens her, telling her that she was never any good at trying to kill him – just look what happened to “Gloria”. When she protests that she didn’t try to kill him, he doesn’t believe her. He coldly tells her, “We both have our secrets, Bun. I’ll keep yours if you keep mine.”

As he leaves, Bun screams after him that “those girls” (Roxie, Joanna and Kat) aren’t dumb. “They’ll see through you! Just like we did!”

Bun, now angry, herself (and scared), goes banging on Eleanor’s door. But Eleanor claims she didn’t try to kill Van Horne, either. She did, however, see a young man rooting around in her garden a week ago. Her description matches that of Jamie (”lanky, long-brown hair, goatee – nice ass”), whom Bun recognises. The two of them pay him a visit at his car (leaving town, perhaps?), taser him and stuff him in the trunk to bring back to their house. Wow, they sure don’t mess around.

At Eleanor’s house, Jamie wakes up tied to a chair. But he soon discovers that Bun and Eleanor are in a friendlier mood than when the three of them first met. They’ve figured out that he is the son of the late Gloria, the third witch in their coven. Bun wrote him the letter that brought him to Eastwick and they give him all sorts of things that belonged to Gloria. Yet Bun keeps to herself what Van Horne hinted at – that she accidentally killed Gloria while trying to kill Van Horne. Jamie wants to try again, with a dagger that they show him (the same one Roxie saw in her vision at the end of last week), but the two women tell him that he can’t kill Van Horne – only Roxie can.

Roxie’s mother has arrived in town and she’s a bitch who keeps interfering with Roxie’s parenting. It doesn’t help when Roxie accidentally reads her mind. Unfortunately, this leads Mia to think she can just go out and rebel. She and Josh break into Joanna’s apartment (apparently, Mia has been taking care of Joanna’s cat) and get loaded on her considerable stash of liquor and liquor manuals for her new job (including a drink called “The Mind Eraser”). Then they go out to the local frozen pond and – what do you know? She falls in, just as Roxie saw in her vision.

Roxie shows up at Joanna’s job, then Kat. The three of them commiserate. Joanna is angry enough to kill Max. As the three of them drink together, Kat admits that she tried to heal Greta. This leads to Joanna also ‘fessing up about her TK and whammie power and the three of them realising they’re witches. This soon proves critical (remember the thing with Mia?).

Max shows up on the street, unapologetic (at least outwardly) about “scooping” Joanna. Not even her whammie gets anything else out of him. But their fight is interrupted by Joanna seeing a light on up in her apartment, which makes her understandably nervous after her Halloween kidnapping. Max goes up with her and they discover the mess Mia and Josh left behind. Joanna, worried, calls Roxie, who has no idea where Mia could be…until she remembers, to her horror, her vision about the pond. She tells Joanna, who corrals Max into taking her down there.

There they find Josh trying to pull Mia out of the water. Joanna gets Max to tie a rope to his truck and she goes out to rescue them. But the ice breaks and she loses her grip on both Josh and Mia. In desperation, she uses her TK and pulls them both toward her. Roxie and Kat arrive, which is good because Kat says Mia’s heart has stopped. Roxie begs Kat to do something and Kat, to her surprise is able to revive Mia. Later, at the hospital, tests show that Mia will be fine. This act also gives Kat the idea for how she needs to heal Greta. She tells Van Horne that she can only heal those to whom she feels an emotional connection. She asks him to tell her about Greta. It turns out Greta had a horrible childhood and had to claw her way up the ladder in the New York art world. While listening to this, Kat is able to heal Greta. When Greta wakes up, Kat tells her, “Welcome back.”

At the hospital, Roxie’s mother admits that Roxie had visions when she was a little girl. This scared her and she held Roxie at arm’s length, especially after Roxie predicted that her father would leave them for another woman. Mom apologises. Max, however, sees no reason to apologise to Joanna, who still rates him “a bastard”.

Review: Some very intriguing developments, some annoying characters. Most interesting, I thought, was the new dynamic between Jamie, Bun and Eleanor. We finally discover the third original witch’s name – Gloria – that she was apparently Jamie’s mother and that Bun apparently (accidentally) killed her during an attempt on Van Horne’s life. Or, at least, that Gloria died during an attempt on Van Horne’s life. This darkens Bun in a strangely satisfying manner. Bun began the season as a bit of a victim and is now turning into a character with nearly as many dark secrets as Van Horne.

Bun’s darker mirror is suitably complimented by a new side to Van Horne. He is even scarier and more sinister than ever, especially when he grabs Bun by the throat and tells her to stop screwing around. But he’s doing it (at least, as far as we know) to save someone else – Greta. It seems that he can have true feelings for others. It’s also intriguing that he is extremely powerful and dangerous, and practically invulnerable, but he’s not omniscient. He knows a lot but not everything. It makes him that more interesting an antagonist.

Jamie also gets a little more depth, though it doesn’t flatter him much. He is childlike in his utter willingness to believe Bun and Eleanor, and doesn’t seem to notice the strong hints that Van Horne is his father. He feels badly about Greta’s poisoning (apparently, he didn’t anticipate Van Horne having a bed partner that night, which was stupid and reckless of him). Still, that doesn’t exactly motivate him to turn himself in, either, or otherwise help Greta. In short, he remains a little weasel, but one with some more depth. And the revelation about Roxie is very interesting. No wonder Van Horne is trying so hard to isolate and seduce her – she’s the only one who can kill him.

Max, on the other hand, just remains a weasel. I think we’re supposed to believe that he’s cute under the cocky demeanor and that there’s some kind of Lois-and-Clarke, love-hate chemistry under all the banter between him and Joanna. Well…there isn’t. Cocky is okay. Insensitive, unethical and smug aren’t. And I have serious problems with the idea that Joanna would fall for a guy who took her former job. That’s stretching even the limits of romantic comedy and makes Joanna look pretty sad (the fact that her drinking has increased a lot since she was fired doesn’t help). Speaking of which, Penny disappeared this week. I’d say I hope she comes back soon, but I’m not even sure when ABC will be showing any more of Eastwick, so…

The conversation between the three new witches about their powers was pretty cool. And the way they teamed together to use them to save Mia was even cooler. However, both Mia and her grandmother were annoying. Remember Lassie? Well, at this rate, Mia is turning into the show’s Timmy. The next time she does something incredibly stupid after her mother tells her not to, I think the witches should just leave her down the mineshaft.

In two weeks: Tea and Psychopathy: Roxie learns that Van Horne is Jamie’s baby daddy and tries to get them together for a chat. Max ropes Joanna into investigating a local Eastwick celebrity, which puts them both at odds with Eleanor. Meanwhile, Kat tries to help her patients with her new power – which, naturally, goes badly.

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