Mayfair Witches EP Breaks Down Rowan's 'Wild Journey' in Finale, Hints at [Spoiler]'s Appearance in Season 2
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Mayfair Witches wrapped its first season on Sunday, and… well, it was a lot.
Yes, the man who shot Tessa was burned alive by Lasher at Rowan’s command, but that was probably the only positive to emerge from this nightmare of an episode.
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Because we as a society cannot have nice things, it was revealed in the finale that Cortland is not Rowan’s uncle as much as he’s her literal biological father. Through a series of unsettling flashbacks, the audience (and Rowan!) learned that he raped Dierdre the night she conceived Rowan in order to fulfill the prophecy and usher in Lasher’s arrival via the 13th witch. Everybody’s got family stuff, I guess.
Cortland gained immortality when Rowan gave birth to Baby Lasher in the finale, but she got the last laugh, turning her evil bio dad into stone and ditching him in the woods. Lisa Rinna’s husband will surely return to cause more trouble in Season 2 (“We can’t keep Harry Hamlin frozen for too long” executive producer Esta Spalding tells TVLine), but at least he’s out of the picture for now.
The Rowan who emerged from that mausoleum isn’t the same woman we met in the premiere, or even who she was last week. To put it simply, “she’s a witch now.”
“She denied it all season, going through that whole battle to get rid of Lasher,” Spalding says. “When she took on Lasher and went for vengeance at the end of Episode 7, she began to inhabit her witchy self, but I don’t think she really knew what that meant until she went through this wild journey and came out the other end still saying, ‘I want this power.’ This is really the beginning of the story of this Mayfair witch.”
Though Spalding insists that “absolutely nothing is nailed down about Season 2,” she suggests that it won’t take long for Lasher to hit a growth spurt. Moving forward, the story “really is about Rowan and adult Lasher, and we want to get to that. There’s a little bit of time to watch her become who she is and have that relationship grow, so we’re working on exactly how much time and how long it’ll last. Lasher grows up at the end of the first book. He’s almost born an adult man. We chose to freeze that moment and leave Lasher as a child for now, but we’re going to get to those other events.”
Just as Mayfair Witches‘ first season was largely based upon the first book in Anne Rice’s trilogy about the supernatural family, so too will its sophomore season borrow heavily from Rice’s second book, Lasher — with at least one major difference.
“In the book, Rowan is riding beside Lasher, and he’s the one driving the story,” Spalding says. “We need to make a show which is about Rowan. There are so many extraordinary parts of that book, and we’re going to honor them, but we’re also going to make Rowan an active part of that story, not just someone who’s beside him having it happen to her.”
Spalding won’t reveal whether the show’s second season will introduce Mona, a popular witch from the second book, but she teases, “We would not want to shy away from that character. There’s a reason we called Tessa Tessa and not Mona. I’ve seen a few people online ask if Tessa is a replacement for Mona. No. Tessa is Tessa, and Mona is her sister.”
As for how future seasons of Mayfair Witches might overlap with Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, Spalding reminds us, “The world of the Talamasca is in both stories, and we’ve talked about how that overlaps with other things being developed in the Immortal Universe. We’ve thought about ways next season that the world of Interview With the Vampire that existed in New Orleans could still be there in some form and enter the world of Mayfair Witches. We’ve looked at ways to use the city to have those overlap.”
Your thoughts on that insane finale? Season 1 overall? Grade them both in our polls below, then drop a comment with your take on Mayfair Witches thus far. What do you hope to see in Season 2?
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