Reviews
[TV Review] “Salem” Episode 2.07: ‘The Beckoning Fair One’
We are halfway through Salem’s first season and it just keeps getting better (and grosser). The first season had a noticeable dip in quality in its middle section, but the second season does not seem to be following suit. “The Beckoning Fair One” is Salem’s third strong episode in a row, so here’s hoping that streak isn’t broken anytime soon!
The biggest development of the episode is the return of Increase Mather. Typically, I’m not a fan of resurrections as it feels like it cheapens a character’s death (see: American Horror Story: Coven resurrecting characters ad nauseum), but Increase’s return works because he isn’t actually resurrected. He is brought back as a ghost zombie thing to do Mary’s bidding (how gross was her kissing his maggot-ridden severed head?). Seeing as they have a mutual enemy in Countess Marburg, he does some investigating to find the object that gives her eternal life.
Increases big moment comes not from anything Marburg related, though. Rather, the episode’s cliffhanger features Increase visiting Cotton. Salem hasn’t made the rules of Mary’s spell on Increase very clear, so I’m not sure what exactly he can do to him, but it’s an interesting way to end the episode, especially since Cotton has been one of the weaker parts of the season thus far. Increase’s involvement with his storyline might inject some excitement into it.
Cotton does get to interact with every major character this week, in a dinner scene that is becoming my new favorite TV trope. The reasoning for this is that it brings all major characters together to interact with each other. In one scene we have Cotton, Anne, Dr. Wainwright, Mary, Hathorne, Sebastian and Marburg at one table, trading barbs and having pleasant(ish) conversation. Also, they’re eating George. It’s a real Fried Green Tomatoes cannibalism moment. After Cotton proposes to Anne, Marburg and Mary have a neat little telepathic conversation. There is some pretty heavy foreshadowing that Wainwright and possibly Cotton will die before season’s end.
Proposals and pleasantries aren’t all that happened in the dinner scene. Baby John runs in the room and immediately attracts Marburg’s attention. I confess, I keep forgetting Baby John exists, so the fact that he will factor into Marburg’s plan somehow. Apparently, their Dark Lord is in John, which isn’t terribly surprising. I’m nervous that Baby John will become more annoying than interesting, but it’s too early to tell at this point.
One character who has yet to be really involved in the bigger picture this season (besides John Alden who….meh) is Mercy. For the first time since Salem began, Elise Eberle got to appear on camera with a full head of hair. At first I didn’t even recognize her, but I’m sure Eberle is happy. While Mercy doesn’t get to do much in this episode, she is quickly becoming a blood addict, as she kidnaps a little girl for Marburg but uses all the blood for herself. Looks like she’ll be crossing paths with Mary sooner rather than later, and the character will (hopefully) be served better because of it
Finally, I would like to say that I called it (sort of): Anne has a new nipple! Granted, it’s not on her thigh, but she discovers a nipple on her stomach. Dubbed a “witch mark” by Marburg, she is informed that it is the price she must pay (as all witches must) for having a familiar. It’s a weird, but creative trait for a witch to have, and I applaud Salem for not backing down from its weirdness.
“The Beckoning Fair One” was another fantastic addition to Salem’s already strong second season. We have been led into the latter half of Season Two with three incredibly strong episodes, so let’s hope Salem keeps it up throughout the rest of the season.
Random Notes
- Our very own Bree Ogden suggested this as a Salem hashtag, and I’m intent on making it happen: #WhatWillMarySibleyPutInHerMouthThisWeek? Make a guess for next week!
- Mary using the circle of salt to protect herself from Increase reminds me of Hocus Pocus.
- “You. Are. Dead. Snatched from the burning shit-pits of hell to serve me.” -Way to kick a man when he’s down Mary.
- “Oh I’ve already offered up my soul to Hell. You on the other hand must have been terribly surprised to find yourself consigned there.” -Mary’s back-and-forth with Increase was so cathartic. I loved it!
- Increase’s Hell is sitting in his own torture chair, being tormented by demons wearing his own face. He must bear the torments of his own acts. Yeesh.
- “A bone from Mary Sibley? Satan’s favorite whore?” -At least Increase doesn’t back down in the face of adversity.
- Wainright performs a vivisection on a living pox patient. Their insides liquefy. It’s sufficiently disturbing.
- Tituba doesn’t do much in this episode, but she still has John tied up. I like the combination of those two though. It could provide some interesting scenes in the future.
- “Mary Sibley, what a pot of piss, pox and poison.” -Mercy’s one-liners have a ways to go to match the quality of Mary’s and Marburg’s.
- “I think we can all agree what a terrible thing it is that people are dying of plague while we feast on this….fine china.” – Mary is right. That china is pretty.
- Common dinner table talk among the residents of Salem: treatment of Indians.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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