One thing Salem has always excelled at is not dawdling for too long on one singular storyline. Take Mary’s undercover mission into her son’s house. That is something that could have easily occupied half of the season, but Salem is impatient as ever and decides to have Mary’s ulterior motives discovered in one episode. This could have felt rushed in the hands of a less talented writer (the screenplay is credited to co-creator Adam Simon), but Salem somehow makes it work. “The Heart is a Devil” belonged to Janet Montgomery, and she brought her A-game.
Resurrection couldn’t be that easy, could it? While poor Mary Sibley was brought back to life in the closing moments of last week’s episode, it came with a price. Confining Mary to Salem for the rest of her life is a cruel plot twist for the character, but at least it ensures that she’ll never leave the show, right? Before she does anything (even bathe), she heads straight to John Alden for a quick lovemaking session. Their reunion was a touching one, and solidified their relationship as one of the more stable parts of the series, even if John is still lacking as a character (more on that in a bit).
It wasn’t long before Mary was put through the wringer again. The episode jumped right into her infiltration of the Dark Lord’s house, with quickly arousing the suspicion of his brother (apparently named the Sentinel). Screenwriter (and co-creator) Adam Simon did a commendable job building suspense with every scene in the Dark Lord’s house. The Sentinel is proving to be a more formidable opponent than the Dark Lord himself, and it was a nice callback to the pilot episode to have him be all of the bugs that crawled over Mary when her baby was snatched from her womb.
Oh, and he can pull giant millipedes out of his mouth and shove them in people’s ears to get the truth out of them. It’s a grotesque form of torture, but for some reason didn’t work on Mary. Her failure of the Dark Lord’s final twist was a good one (though it would have been preferable had the twist been that she actually did kill the right person), so it’s alarming to see that for once, Mary is in over her head.
John spends the majority of the episode drinking and sexing (see above). The sub-plot involving people flooding the town because of invading French and Indians was put on the backburner this week, with screen time favoring Mary. Because of that, John’s storyline didn’t get to evolve much in “The Heart is a Devil.” It will undoubtedly become a more central aspect of the season (and no doubt affect the Dark Lord’s master plan) in future episodes, but this episode seemed more focused on getting John out of the bar. It’s about as interesting as it sounds.
Shane West is a fine actor in other things, but he’s never fully succeeded at making John Alden a compelling character (the writing does him no favors either). Were it not for Mary’s feelings for him, he would be completely useless. One would hope that in its third season Salem would be able to make him more than just Mary’s love interest, but it hasn’t been able to do that yet. His scenes end with him training the local militia to fight off the refugees, so maybe that will lead somewhere, but when the Devil is in town, a war between mortals just doesn’t seem all that exciting.
One of the more interesting sub-plots of the week saw Cotton (poor, poor Cotton) wise up and start playing along with Anne’s game. It isn’t believable for one second that Cotton is actually turning a corner and falling for Anne again, but it’s nice to see the character stop acting like a whining child. You don’t make it out of Salem alive unless you play the game properly, and Cotton has just entered the playing field. Once again though, it’s all setup with very little payoff (unless you consider him taking a lock of Anne’s hair “payoff”). That is to be expected in the second episode of the season though, so the episode can’t be faulted too much for it.
“The Heart is a Devil” essentially served as Part 2 of the premiere. It finished moving all of the pieces into position to set up the rest of the season. While we got more Mary and a more satisfactory Cotton storyline, the rest of the episode failed to make much of an impression. That being said, it has set up enough storylines to keep you interested.
Random Notes
- Grossest Moment: Definitely that giant millipede crawling into Mary’s ear. The runner up was Tituba pulling the eyes out of that poor cat.
- Number of times Tituba was called a bitch: 2
- “What have you done to me now, Queen of Bitches?” -Oh how I’ve missed Mary’s acid-tongued barbs.
- “You conniving bitch.” -John Alden, upping his insult game.
- So what’s up with that boy who is actually a girl that kept trying to buy John a drink? She’ll probably be important later, right?
- Not a lot of Mercy tonight, but she did give Hathorne a wicked case of the boils. Go Mercy!
- Isaac is playing detective with Marilyn Manson’s mortician, leading him straight to Alice. Might he cross paths with Mercy soon? Methinks he will!
- I yelled “Take a bath first!” during Mary and John’s sex scene. So unsanitary.
- Sebastian’s face when he saw a very much alive Mary was priceless.
- “You lying filthy whore!”
- “Lay a finger on Cotton and I will paint these walls with your insides. That boy be damned.”
- “I’ve been alive, dead and alive again and right now all I want is to feel you inside me.”
- “Welcome to my bird’s nest. Do you see any birds you’d like to share a nest with?” -This was a terrible line of dialogue, even for Mercy.
- “As an unmarried man you cannot hope to understand the unbreakable bonds that hold a man to his wife.” -Was this Cotton trying to let John know that he was trapped? I couldn’t tell.