By Paula R. Stiles

Tagline: Jamie’s revelation to Roxie about his true parentage inspires an innocent good deed from her that leads to dire consequences. Max talks Joanna into investigating the death of Jamie’s mother, Gloria, which leads to Eleanor and equally-dire consequences. Kat goes a little nutty with her new powers, which leads to definitely-dire consequences.

Recap: It’s still cold and snowy in Eastwick this week, which is only appropriate, considering it’s New England. I missed the teaser, but most of it apparently involves Jamie telling Roxie that Darryl Van Horne was his baby daddy. Roxie naturally assumes this is a wonderful thing (and Jamie doesn’t disabuse her of the notion). So, she arranges a surprise dinner for Van Horne and Jamie to meet and get to know each other better. She even goes to to Van Horne’s mansion (where he and his manservant are fencing vigorously) to offer the invitation personally and apologise for running out on him at the party he threw for her two episodes ago. Van Horne shows up willingly, thinking she’s finally taking him to her bed. But things go totally haywire when Jamie shows up, Van Horne calls him a con artist only pretending to be his son, Jamie smacks him over the head with an iron rod and starts ranting about how Van Horne killed Jamie’s mother.

Jamie tries to force Roxie at gunpoint to kill Van Horne, despite her attempts to persuade him to let her call 911 and get medical help. She believes Van Horne is dead (he certainly looks dead), but Jamie tells her that Van Horne can’t be killed by such straightforward means. Jamie draws out the wavy knife Bun and Eleanor gave him last episode and declares that only a person with “power”, as Roxie has (and Jamie apparently doesn’t), can kill Van Horne. And only Roxie is strong enough to succeed.

Roxie is shocked when she recognises the knife that she saw in her vision. She still balks, but Jamie grabs her and drags her over to Van Horne’s body. He turns Van Horne over onto his back (Van Horne indeed still looks very dead, though we know he probably isn’t). Roxie is terrified, convinced that Jamie is nuts, not helped by Jamie screaming and waving a gun and knife around. She raises the knife and it really looks, for a moment, as though she will stab Van Horne, but then she stabs Jamie in the leg instead (Go, Roxie). As Jamie falls down, howling, she runs out the door, screaming for help. She runs to her shop and locks the door, but Jamie smashes the window and reaches in to unlock it. As Roxie backs away, terrified, he slams her up against the wall and appears to stab her. As the screen whites out, we see that this was her first vision that we saw in the show.

Earlier in the day, Penny had met up with Joanna and noted that she seemed to be on the prowl with a new man in her sights. Joanna denied this, but, as it turned out, Max had come to her job at the bar and proposed they team up on a new journalistic hunt. Penny, meanwhile, goes on to have an afternoon bout of vigorous rumpy-pumpy with Jamie. Afterward, Jamie rather-clumsily tries to say goodbye, telling her that he cares about her.

Joanna drives a hard bargain with Max on his case, insisting on 50% of the profit and a byline above his, guaranteed in writing. They happen to be looking into the death of Jamie’s mother, Gloria. Max can’t get a look at the death certificate, but Joanna is able to access it by using her power of persuasion on the clerk. She and Max find out that Gloria was discovered in the town fountain (where Joanna and the other two witches made their first wish) with the word “witch” branded on her forehead and also bearing the brand Jamie put on himself early this season, dead of poison and demonstrating signs of having recently given birth. They decide they need to find Gloria’s child, unaware that he’s in Eastwick and he’s Jamie. The trail leads them to Eleanor’s house. Eleanor serves them tea and is very friendly and helpful, (uh-oh). She tells them that the mysterious millionaire who allegedly drowned on the same day as Gloria died, Sebastian Hart, was the child’s father and then confirms Joanna’s suspicions (in front of Max) that Hart and Van Horne are the same man.

Now, you know there has to be a catch and there is. Joanna and Max start to get off the couch to leave and go write up their scoop and, whoops, neither of them can feel their legs. Eleanor gleefully tells them that she poisoned the tea. She can’t have them interfering with her “plans”. She lays them out in her cellar and closes the trap door, off to do whatever she intends to do (probably go make sure Van Horne really dies this time). In the cellar, Max tries for a half-assed apology that, as usual, goes sideways until Joanna asks him to please just shut up (not least because she’s trying to TK the trapdoor). At that point, Max uses most of his remaining strength to hold her hand.

Kat, meanwhile, goes off to work at the beginning of the episode all pumped up about her new healing power, which she promptly uses on half the hospital. Home from her twelve-hour shift, she finds Raymond off to do his twelve-hour shift, oblivious to the fact that she’s tired. He takes off before she discovers that she has a nose-bleed right after she heals her son of a fever. Exhausted, she falls asleep on the couch.

Raymond comes home to find Kat still zonked out on the couch, dinner boiling over and the kids running around like little savages. Despite being taken aback at her pale and wasted appearance, he still chews her out and, when she points out that he had no problem claiming the right to some failings now and then in the past, gets mad. He brings up the times she accidentally electrocuted him, blew his date off the balcony, etc., and threatens again to sue her for custody of the kids.

Kat is finally fed up with him. She follows him outside and tells him that he needs to be careful. After all, she’s someone whom it’s dangerous to make angry. She sees that Raymond is standing under a whole raft of icicles and taunts him. When he snaps back at her, she brings the whole cluster down on him, showering him with ice. Raymond starts to freak out, but Kat coolly asks him who will believe his crazy stories that she did anything? When he demands she stop acting all innocent, she tells him she didn’t do anything and he can’t prove it. Then she goes back inside.

Her victory is hard-won, though. Back at the hospital for another shift, she discovers that her healing power no longer works and she is unable to save one of the fathers of her children’s friends. He dies even as she stands over him declaring that she has to save him. Back home, she draws a bath. As she sinks into it, she falls unconscious, her nose bleeding more than ever.

Review: As you can see, it’s Cliffhanger City this week. The good news is that the next episode will apparently wrap up this initial major storyline involving Jamie. The bad news is that we’ll have to wait two weeks for it and that it will be the last episode for the near future. The network doesn’t have the last two filmed episodes scheduled and is sticking Ugly Betty in that time slot from January 6 onward. Yippee. I hate to break this to you, ABC, but there was good reason why I stopped watching Ugly Betty a season or two ago.

Anyhoo, this was quite a suspenseful episode of Eastwick, what with all three witches trapped in three very different (but related, at least in Roxie and Joanna’s case) cliffhanger situations. So, this is one that will probably work a lot better once we have both parts. That said, there were some satisfying moments, anyway. Kat finally giving Raymond a piece of her mind and laying down the law with him was a notable example. Raymond is so ridiculously stupid and insensitive that it’s impossible to see what Kat saw in him when they married. That makes me lose respect for her a bit. Surely, even a decade ago, she should have seen through the kind of man who wouldn’t even notice (or care) that his estranged wife looked like a Stage 4 leukemia patient. Well, regardless, she sees through him now. Let’s hope Raymond has finally learned his lesson, though I rather doubt it. The man is too stupid to live and, if the series were to continue, I’d look forward to Kat getting him committed to a nice, little Lovecraftian asylum.

Also satisfying was Roxie’s refusal to kill Van Horne and the promise that we will get some payoff for this storyline before the show goes bye-bye. Not that I think Van Horne is on the up-and-up, but I like him a lot more than Jamie. I fully agree with Roxie that killing Van Horne for no other reason other than to save her own hide is wrong. Jamie had a brief moment of sympathy when he was with Penny (he didn’t need to leave her with the assurance that he loved her, or at least cared about her). But he was even dumber than Raymond, not even stopping to consider that Eleanor and Bun might not be telling him the whole truth, or even any truth. In his confrontation with Bun last episode (the episode before? Damn these hiatuses), Van Horne strongly indicated that she (and probably Eleanor) were the ones who killed Gloria, however accidentally, in an attempt to kill Van Horne/Hart. Jamie seems to be barking up the wrong tree and clueless about it, which makes him an unsympathetic pawn.

Jamie is also very unsympathetic because of his bullying of Roxie. I’m sorry, but there’s no excuse for that. I don’t care who Van Horne is (or, perhaps more accurately, what); Roxie is an innocent in this. Further, if Van Horne is Jamie’s father, doesn’t that mean that Gloria is the one who had a sexual relationship with Van Horne, which means that she is Roxie’s analogue in the current trio of witches? Why doesn’t Jamie see that he’s attacking the current version of his mother? And why did he say that Roxie was the most powerful of the three witches when she has the power that seems to be the weakest? Though, if you think about it, the ability to see the future is quite powerful in a subtle way, but only if you can change it. The question remains whether Roxie can change her fate or whether she is a Cassandra figure cursed to foretell what she can’t change.

Interesting that Jamie, who appears to be the son of the Devil, comes across as an ordinary human with no powers and even sees himself as one.

Speaking of friendly older witches in gingerbread-like houses, it was chilling, after the way Bun and Eleanor fêted Jamie last week and set him up to go after Van Horne, to see Eleanor showing exactly the same attitude toward Joanna and Max even as she was poisoning them. She really is a bit of a psychopath, herself, isn’t she? No wonder Bun dislikes her. I’m not feeling Joanna and Max getting together, though. The actor is charming, but the character is not and the chemistry between them lacks due to Max’s inherent jerkwadness. That said, it was nice when he took her hand. The two of them are in a real bind and it’s refreshing to see people in such a situation being kind toward each other instead of sniping to the bitter end.

In two weeks: Red Bath and Beyond: Roxie is kidnapped and buried alive by Jamie while Joanna and Max are trapped and dying in Eleanor’s cellar and Kat lies moribund in the bath. (This is the last episode scheduled, though there are two more filmed and Ep 1.12 is scheduled in some places for 1/6/10. No, I don’t know what’s going on, yet.)

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