A Discovery of Witches Season 1 Episode 4 Recap: In Which Matthew and Diana Visit Sept-Tours

Disc of Witches S1Ep4 Diana & Matthew

In episode 4, Matthew brings Diana to Sept-Tours, the ancestral French home where he was sired and where his vampire mother still lives. Matthew’s mother, Ysabeau, is a well known witch hunter, leading to a rocky start for her relationship with Diana. They leave Oxford in the hopes of avoiding further trouble with Peter Knox and the witches, but taking your girlfriend home to meet your mother isn’t exactly the most unpredictable move, so Peter and the Congregation discover where they are before long.

Recap

Matthew and Diana drive to Sept-Tours, rounding a section of road that overlooks the picturesque estate and village as they approach. Eventually, we’ll come to know this section of road very well, but for now, Matthew speeds through without giving Diana a chance to take in the view. As they drive through the village, she asks if the villagers know that the de Clermonts are vampires. He answers that they do- it’s safer for vampires to have a community, just like witches.

It’s also the only way the de Clermonts could have lived there through generations of humans without trouble arising.

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A Discovery of Witches Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: In Which Marcus Tries Again

Disc of Witches S2Ep8 Phoebe Feels Marcus' Heartbeat

In episode 8, we return to the present day, where Marcus continues to struggle with his new role as Grandmaster of the Knights of Lazarus and his new knowledge about Blood Rage. He’s also still thinking about Phoebe, who left an expensive scarf behind at his house. Sophie goes into labor and gives birth to a baby girl who is a witch, as predicted. The adults around the baby must now focus on protecting her from other creatures who won’t want her raised by daemons. Emily draws Sarah into her attempts to contact Rebecca using higher magic. The usual suspects continue their scheming and infighting. 

Recap

The episode opens on Diana in her bedroom in 1591, where she’s trying to read the now-damaged Book of Life without much success. The words run around the pages as they did when she got the book out at the library back in season 1 episode 1. When Matthew joins her, she tells him the book is resisting her. Her attempts to understand it are making her feel strange. He tells her that the book is making her ill, which I thought was basically what she just said. Daddy orders Diana to stop looking at the book and come eat something.

In Venice, 2021, Peter tells Gerbert what he’s learned from Edward Kelley’s letters: “Kelley claims to have bequeathed a single page to each of the three species.” He wonders if he was unable to summon the book from the Bodleian because it’s damaged, but Gerbert points out that it appeared for Diana. Peter assumes that Diana had one of the missing pages to facilitate her spell. They need to find one, too. Gerbert will try to get the vampire page from Ysabeau, because who else would have it? Peter says that he’s already searching for the witches’ page.

At Sept-Tours, Emily obsesses over the page that the Bishop house gave to Diana.

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Book vs Screen Review: A Discovery of Witches Season 1 vs Book 1

discovery-witches

It begins with absence and desire.

It begins with blood and fear.

It begins with a discovery of witches.

Both the book and the TV series A Discovery of Witches begin with this short poem, the key to the mystery that the All Souls Trilogy, by Deborah Harkness, spends solving. A Discovery of Witches is the first book in the urban fantasy series, which has now expanded beyond the original trilogy to include a fourth book. According to Deborah Harkness, several more installments, focusing on other characters and mysteries, are on the way.

A Discovery of Witches tells the story of Diana Bishop, a witch from a family of powerful witches in a world where there are three types of humanoid magical creatures: witches, vampires and demons. The creatures live secretly among humans, blending into normal human society. Under normal circumstances, members of each species spend time only with others of their own species. Intermarriage is strictly forbidden and even interspecies friendships are severely frowned upon.

Diana Bishop has always had difficulty wielding her magic. She turned away from the magical world almost completely after her parents died tragically when she was a child. She was raised in upstate NY by her mother’s sister, Sarah, and Sarah’s partner, Em. As an adult, she’s become a historian who is on the faculty and studies alchemy in the US at Yale and in the UK at Oxford. She sees herself as a non-magical person, but it overflows out of her at times when something unexpected happens, even though she is untrained in its use.

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Book Review- An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose Book 1) by Charlaine Harris

 

book cover of An Easy Death

The first thing Gunnie Rose does when she gets her own book series is get a makeover haircut, to show how her life is about to go through some drastic changes. Gunnie Rose, who is also known as Lizbeth, actually has multiple reasons for her new look. She’s a 19 year old woman who lives in what would be the southwestern US, if she lived in our world, and her work as an almost magical sharpshooter keeps her outdoors most of the time, so her long hair gets hot and sticky. Plus her hair grows in long ringlets, which her boyfriend paid more attention to than he did to the rest of her, so she figured it was time to remind him to pay more attention to the person underneath the hair. But probably most importantly of all, since she’s called Gunnie for a good reason, the ringlets are dragging down her job performance and her reputation. She’s NOT adorable, okay?

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