A sea of uncertainties.
What They Say:
Baba and family are betrayed. Queen Kane uses her cunning to face a new conflict.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The back half of the first season of See had some interesting moments in the previous episode as it introduced another person who has vision and is descended from Jerlamarel. It makes sense if he’s doing this big movement to bring in as many babies as he can in order to change the world and pass on his gift, but I’m wary of it being introduced so early into the show itself. It’s been something like twenty years for everyone else so it’s not as fast for them but for the viewer it’s skewed just a little bit. I do like the idea though and seeing how he ended up captured and abused, turned into a slave of sorts, put him in a very different environment than what the twins went through. And that will either make him a strong supporter of what remains of the Alkenny or the one that can easily betray them.
Events from the last episode certainly set for some changes as well with Maghra revealing herself to be a princess from the now destroyed dam people, which caused Tamacti to strike her down. Enough so that our new addition upon seeing it from a distance passes that on to her family. Baba Voss takes it as well as can be, knowing that he must protect the kids all the more now, but Haniwa is set to go after her mother and bring her body back at the least, if not get a little revenge. But while they get diverted from doing so, we see that Maghra has indeed survived and been “reborn” of sorts. That has her and Tamacti trying to come to some kind of understanding so that he doesn’t have to really kill her once and for all, and in some way to make sense of the twenty years of his life he’s spent as a Witchfinder hunting her down along with Jerlamarel.
With several stories in play, progress moves a bit more slowly this time around as each is given time to work with. Queen Kane is in the looming business now and is trying to understand the situation she’s in more while also generally causing trouble. She’s been forced into this thing with the silkworms but still has the haughtiness of her prior position which does nothing but grate on others here as she’s continually questioning instead of working, which causes everyone problems. While she does learn a good bit about the camp and how it operates, and makes a friend of sorts along the way as well, but she continues to struggle against the position she’s in and lashes out in a way that continually puts her in a bad place. That these wounds really are self-inflicted is almost comical if not for the terrible things that are done to her.
Baba Voss and his kids have now found themselves underground through a bit of ancient mechanical design and that makes it a bit harder as the kids are literally in the dark, unable to see at first. Which means they’re at a real disadvantage compared to their father. The further underground they go they eventually come across someone who is living down there, which one can imagine is a natural place to live in some safety with real walls all around. But while they’re hospitable at first, it’s just to lull them and draw them in more. The tales of clans that went down below and became less than human would certainly be interesting from what Paris says, but this group retain their faculties and have imprisoned them for the time being. There are a few answers writ small here, mostly in regards to Boots at this point, but it provides a path for them to follow. This episode had its hard moments with this group because of just how dark it was, but I loved the pullback moment we get where our sighted members take in a beautiful world under the tree.
Tamacti’s time with Maghra has him trying to get to the bottom of things with how that relationship worked and what she knows as he’s still intent on finishing it out. She does smartly get to say that the reality is that all the problems he has are really with Queen Kane and he needs to deal with her as opposed to Maghra. But he’s really known that the whole time and is simply unable to alter course in face of his mission. I like the potential that’s here and how it ties into some of what Kane had gone through and related that has left her as distrusting as she is. Her time is the shortest of the stories overall and bringing Boots into it at the end just leaves you incredibly wary of him once again.
In Summary:
There are a lot of engaging smaller moments here as we get the three main tales told but where the show felt it lacked something was with the fight that Baba Voss goes through. A lot of it is just far too obscured to really take in properly and that’s such a shift from the last few fights where the choreography stood out beautifully in its violence. We do get a decent sequence that lets Momoa struggle in moving forward in a way that definitely worked well and helps to reinforce the bonds between this family. Queen Kane’s story has plenty of paths where you see it going and how she just keeps making it worse and worse for herself. At least Maghra with her time with Tamacti handles it in a way that doesn’t make things worse for her or even him when you get down to it.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Apple TV+
