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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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King Silas gets a birthday party this week, and everything goes well until the Queen’s brother shuts off the power during a monster hissy. As the Queen tries to keep things together, both her kids slip away to knock boots with their boyfriends, and her husband starts having acid flashbacks to the time he promised Death to give up his crown if only Death would spare his daughter. (Man, looking at his daughter, I bet he regrets that now.)

This episode was Dark. It was so Dark they turned the city’s lights off (it’s a metaphor!). It was so Dark that everyone got their heart broken in quick succession. It was so Dark that the King and Death, the Sabbath Queen, had a heart-to-heart. Darkly.

The episode opens with King Silas gritting his way through his birthday party, though he refuses to invite ex-exile nephew Macaulay Culkin. His brother-in-law William gets so pissy about the slight that he orders the city’s power shut off. Even for a character who exists only to provide obstacles, it’s a pretty obvious plot contrivance, but it’s the least of this episode’s problems, so we’ll let it slide.

The moment the lights go out, Jack and Michelle bolt for their subplots (not a huge self-preservation instinct on these kids). Michelle takes David to the conveniently-unlocked country house five blocks from the center of town so they can get Biblical. He takes a series of racy pictures as she poses like it’s a Facebook-off. It’s so mind-numbingly dull that I almost missed her Big Reveal: she can’t be with David because she’s promised herself to God. Raise your hand if you didn’t see that coming.

To this, David says, “You’ve made God my enemy.” To this, I say, “Dude, seriously, think for a second before you open your mouth.”

Jack’s liaison with Joseph, the boyfriend he denied in “First Night,” is much more interesting (“The lights are out,” Jacks says by way of explanation), but because NBC doesn’t like its gays too gay, we don’t see him again until the end of the episode, when he’s on his way back to the palace to check in with his beard and the folks.

As soon as the lights go down, Silas starts to hear eerie piano music. He loses his mind (Silas: not a patron of the arts), and as he falls in and out of flashbacks, we get some long-overdue background filler: Michelle’s life-threatening illness, the King’s utter distraction, some atrocious David/Silas retconning, and Rose’s behind-the-scenes rule.

Rose rules twice this week in the name of the King. She deals efficiently with the blackout in the present, right down to threatening her brother for his quasi-treason, but it’s in the past she surprises—we find out she singlehandedly ordered the country into the continuing war with Gath. I hope that this gets addressed before the series wraps up, because that’s chilling (and awesome).

Meanwhile, the flashbacks detail how Death (who’s been practicing her J-horror faces recently) and Silas made a bargain that she would spare Michelle if Silas would give up his crown to the better man. Now, Silas did seal the deal, so I understand if Death comes to collect. But I also understand why Silas is reluctant to give up his crown. I mean, David? Really?

Still, I found this head and shoulders above the rest of this episode. The rest of the subplots move dutifully forward, but this is clearly the halfway point of the series, and the crux of the matter has come to light: Silas knows his days as King are numbered, and we’re just in it now to see what happens as he comes to terms with that, or not. (My vote: not so much.)

The message here, unlike others in this episode, is ably delivered. The book Silas reads to Michelle is a child’s adventure with the deathly Sabbath Queen, and it provides both an entry for Death to speak and pages for the blood contract. Once out from under the special effects, Saffron Burrows plays Death with seductive reasonableness, and Ian McShane really excels when you give him the material, from the first insinuating, familiar “You,” to the moment at episode’s end when Silas sidles up to David the Daughter-Deflowering Bummer-Bargain and shoots him a look that could crack stone.

Oh, it is on. (She said, hopefully.)


And Saul saw and knew that the LORD was with David, and that Michal Saul’s daughter loved him. And Saul was yet the more afraid of David; and Saul became David’s enemy continually.
1 Samuel 18, 28:29

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Genevieve Valentine

Author

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, Apex, and others, and the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, After, and more.

Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (out from Quirk Books). She is an occasional columnist at Fantasy magazine, and sporadically updates her Twitter. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog. More information can be found at www.genevievevalentine.com.

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