Mayfair Witches Season-Premiere Recap: We Need to Talk About Lasher
Welcome back, witches! It has been nearly 90 Lasher childhoods since we last met under the gray-blue filter of television’s most inconsistent magical universe, and, believe it or not, I’m absolutely thrilled to be back. It is the only show I can think of that dares to ask questions like: Is it incest to give birth to a reincarnated version of a man you fucked? Does the Montessori method work on demon children? Is this show secretly pro-Catholic propaganda? Should we feel bad for locking Uncle Rapey in a haunted hallway mind prison? I cannot provide adequate answers to any of these questions, but neither can this show, which is what makes Mayfair Witches fun.
What makes “Lasher” fun, in particular, is watching Rowan’s state of mind toggle between Reba (a single mom who works too hard) and Medea. When last we saw her, Rowan had just fulfilled her Mayfair witch destiny and given birth to a reincarnated version of Lasher in their stadium-sized family crypt and was granted all of his magical powers in exchange. This allowed her to turn her rapist uncle-father Cortland into stone and prompted her breakup with Ciprien. Now, while Ciprien has reverted to doing what he does best — stalking for a cause — and the rest of the Mayfair relatives remain morally inscrutable, Rowan is attempting to gentle-parent the Satan out of Little Lasher to precisely zero success.
I sort of wonder if Rowan’s magical delivery came with a lobotomy because this season’s Rowan is blissfully, idiotically naive. For instance, a pediatrician really should know that a human infant cannot tauntingly pronounce the word “Rowan” with a knowing smile on its uncanny valley, AI-generated face. Is he human? Rowan frets to her journal. Girl, obviously, no. He develops at a clip that would put Renesmee to shame, and you can’t watch this kid go from toddler to first-grader in one 30-second growth spurt and just be like, “They grow up so fast, don’t they?”
Throughout each of Lasher’s phases of development, Rowan is torn between feeling protective and feeling terrified. Terrified seems like the most logical reaction when your kid wakes you up in the middle of the night gleefully wrenching out his own baby teeth one by one, but it is this show’s contention that a five-minute pregnancy is enough to jump-start a maternal instinct so powerful that you can forget that this is a reborn version of a man you had sex with like two weeks ago. You can even ignore the foreboding warnings you read in previous Mayfair witch vessels’ journals.
It seems clear to me, at least, that Little Lasher has actually been Grown-Up Lasher inside a child’s body this entire time. “I remember them in pieces that fall apart when I look too hard” is the kind of thing children only say in fictional anecdotes told by parents on Twitter, which makes Rowan’s attempts to set boundaries about milk-throwing kind of hilarious in retrospect. Rowan still seems convinced that she contributed some kind of genetic material to this kid, though not so convinced that she doesn’t send off a blood sample for testing.
Meanwhile, as if disciplining your demon seed wasn’t stressful enough, Rowan is also getting conflicting versions of mom-shaming from two Mayfair relatives, one of whom is actually deceased. On one shoulder, she has the ghost of Aunt No. 2, a true Catholic, continually popping in to urge Rowan to kill Little Lasher because “it is not a sin to kill the devil.” On the other shoulder is Mayfair matriarch Dolly Jean, who is there to help Rowan protect Little Lasher but also, more importantly, to help him undermine her.
As Lasher grows from a real nightmare of a toddler to a particularly shitty kid to a creepy teen, Rowan is trying to find out why, exactly, he’s chosen to reincarnate. Should he tell her the truth? No, advises Dolly Jean, mysteriously. The one thing we know for sure is that he definitely didn’t give Rowan his power in exchange for a body so that she could cure childhood cancer, which she finds disappointing.
Rowan seems to finally lose faith in her own parenting skills about a day later when Teen Lasher tries to kiss her. She’s immediately repulsed, obviously, and orders him never to do that again, much to his confusion and distress (the incest meter with Mayfair Witches is all over the place). Anyway, Lasher needs somewhere to put all those newly acquired pubescent hormones, so he takes them out on a girl he finds at a Halloween rave, which somehow kills her. Details unclear. He brings the dead girl home to Rowan, who freaks out and locks him in the basement, earning her her first “mommy” from her theoretical “son,” as he begs her to let him out.
Elsewhere in the Mayfair-verse, Ciprien, like Rowan, is keeping a captain’s log to record everything he learned peering into her house from the sidewalk with binoculars. While Rowan is writing up Lasher’s development in her notebook with notes like, “normal for a human.?” Ciprien is holed up in the Red Stick Motel (seriously), speaking into a bible like it’s a tape recorder. He is recording all of the research he’s been doing into Rowan and Lasher so that if the Talamasca wipes his memory again, he’ll be able to touch the bible and get all of the info back. A thing you can also do with a regular tape recorder.
“Sip,” Ciprien tells the bible’s spine, “if you’re touching this bible and seeing this moment for the first time, that means your memory has been erased by Albrecht Escher [formerly known as Big Boss] … Don’t trust anyone.” Aha, I think, at last, Ciprien has learned to be wary of the Magical Bureaucracy. Alas, after being magically chloroformed and kidnapped, the next time we see Ciprien, he is sitting in Albrecht Escher’s office and agreeing to recruit a vulnerable Mayfair witch to their side. Our heroes’ naivete is catching, apparently. The vulnerable Mayfair he’s sent to woo is new character Moira, who’s been getting on everybody’s nerves by bad-mouthing Lasher for second-degree murdering her sister Tessa. (Remember Tessa!)
Moira, by the way, is my new favorite character, and the experience tells me she’s due to be brutally murdered in the next episode or two. Described by Dolly Jean as “nobody’s favorite cousin” (way harsh, Dolly J), Moira is a mind-reader with an attitude who returns home after being excluded from her own sister’s funeral, and she wants answers. This is more difficult than you’d expect, considering Moira’s mind-reading powers, because everywhere she goes, her relatives all immediately kick her out of the house.
“You’ve never had proper respect for Lasher’s place in the family,” Moira’s terrible mother tells her. “The Lasher upstairs isn’t the Lasher you’re talking about; he’s a child,” Rowan insists when Moira demands to confront him for abandoning Tessa. Even our beloved Josephine helps hustle Moira out of the house.
Near the end of “Lasher,” we have a brief interlude with Cortland, whom Rowan keeps in statue form in her basement. Being turned to stone does not, it turns out, immediately kill a person. Instead, we see that Cortland’s consciousness is being kept in a haunted hotel hallway with flickering lightbulbs and doors that won’t open. Bummer for him, but at least he’s no longer dying of ALS, one thinks. And then a bunch of nightgown-wearing women stampede out of an elevator door and attack. (Remember that he murdered Dierdre in a hotel elevator.) I don’t think this is going to kill him, but it does seem unpleasant.
But to get back to our main story, the episode closes with Rowan gently dumping the corpse of the girl Lasher killed in a large body of water amidst much fog and trembling hands. Back at the house, Lasher has finally grown to his eternal age of approximately 35 and climbed out the basement window ominously.
Additional Questions, Comments, and Concerns
• I learned in this episode that even though his full name is Ciprien, it is shortened to “Sip” and not “Cip,” like I’ve spelled it in previous recaps. Apologies.
• “We’re talking about a gene therapy cure for blindness, Paul!” — a man named Lark we’ve never met before with whom Rowan has some kind of nebulous romantic energy.
• Congrats to Rowan on her new neurosurgery job, which she acquired, like all of society’s most vital positions, through nepotism.
• I’m still laughing at Rowan having nine half-empty half-gallon jars of milk on her counter, a totally normal thing that all frazzled single mothers will surely find relatable.
• For legal purposes, it is important to note that I do not actually know if AI was used to animate baby Lasher’s face.