Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Stegall
Eastwick
ABC, Wednesdays, 10PM
“Tea and Psychopathy”
Written by Maggie Friedman
Directed by Michael Katleman
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
Until the credits were rolling and ABC ran a promo for the next episode of Eastwick, I thought the series ended with this episode. Since the show has been canceled, I thought this would have been a fine episode with which to close out the storylines, but no, we’re going to be left hanging with one more. The ending of “Tea and Psychopathy”, however, left us with all three witches and Darryl Van Horne at the point of death, so I will definitely be watching next week to see if all four survive.
The story, as usual, is straight out of soap opera, but with a supernatural twist. Jamie (Jack Huston, Twilight Saga: Eclipse) tells Roxie that Darryl Van Horne is his father, and that his mother died three weeks after he was born. Roxie plans a private dinner party for Van Horne and Jamie so that father and son can meet. This sounds like a bad idea already—this kind of news is seldom a pleasant surprise. Jamie has other plans, however, that involve a wickedly curved knife that Roxie keeps dreaming about. Meanwhile, Kat is reveling in her newly acknowledged healing powers, and goes around “curing” everything from a hangnail to a heart attack at the hospital. Even Joanna seems to be getting back on her feet, despite her whining, as Max (Jason Winston George, Eli Stone) begs for her help in investigating an old murder case. The case involved a woman named Gloria who was found dead on the same day Sebastian Hart “died”, with the word “witch” carved into her forehead. Eastwick is such a charming place.
Joanna uses her powers on the sheriff to get information Max could not; he thinks it’s her “rack” that’s doing the job, but we know it’s her telepathic/telekinetic powers. They discover that Gloria had recently given birth when she was killed; and now the audience is ahead of the team as we put two and two together and realize that Jamie must be her son, come home to avenge her. They visit Eleanor the witch (I love the fact that witches have rusting washing machines in their front yards), who listens eagerly and serves them tea. Anyone with any experience of a) soap opera or b) the supernatural would have known better than to eat or drink anything in a witch’s house, but Joanna was established on Day One as being dumber than a box of hammers. Sure enough, Eleanor drugs Max and Joanna with a slow paralytic poison (I’m thinking hemlock, as it works its way up from the feet, like Socrates’ death). Eleanor cheerfully bids them goodbye and gets back to work on her spells. The last we see of them, Max and Joanna are lying side by side and confessing things to one another, as Joanna tries to figure out how to make her telekinetic powers work.
Meanwhile Kat, blithely healing people right, left, and center, discovers that such power carries a heavy price. She ages visibly before our eyes, with her eyes hollowing, her hair graying, and her step slowing. She falls asleep almost in mid-word, and develops a chronic nosebleed. When she tries to “heal” a man who has just died, she nearly passes out. She goes home, climbs into a hot tub, and apparently succumbs to a stroke.
Sure enough, the dinner party at Roxie’s turns out badly. Jamie nearly brains Darryl with a poker, and then pours out an hour’s worth of backstory in a few lines. Jamie knows Roxie is a witch, that Darryl has been drawn to Eastwick by their powers, and he says that Darryl will drain them all of their supernatural powers and then kill them. I will confess that this was the most interesting part of the story, as I sat waiting for Jamie to say the words, “devil”, “demon”, or even “Satan”. Alas, he only says that Darryl is “not natural” and that only a person with witchy powers can kill him. When he tries to force Roxie to stab Van Horne, she stabs him instead. In keeping with the horror show rule that escaping females are as clumsy as pregnant camels, she runs, trips, falls, runs, staggers, falls, etc. for a good five minutes before Jamie catches up to her. The last we see of Roxie is when Jamie has her pinned to a wall, and the dagger is coming down. Roll credits.
Like I said, that would have made a dynamite ending—who will survive? Will Darryl avenge “his” witches on his son? Will they save themselves? Will they save Darryl? As delicious as these questions are, I almost don’t want to see how the writers answer them. Part of me would like to have ended the show here, with questions and relationships unresolved, to linger in memory like the scent of magic. Alas, we will probably get some heavy-handed resolution next week which will introduce less interesting problems, and the show will end on that note.
I’m surprised to say that I will miss it. On its debut, I thought Eastwick was awful. I still think there were major problems with characterization: Joanna in particular was badly written from Day One. The smarmy Darryl took a long time to start acting human enough to be charming; Paul Gross only really hit his stride with this character last week. The Kat character also took a long time to grow into someone the audience could identify sympathetically with. And the guest stars were woefully underused—Cybill Shepherd in particular was criminally neglected. But some parts of the show worked from the beginning, most significantly Rebecca Romijn’s Roxie. Romijn showed herself well able to give us a deep, complex character who was both empathetic and smart, who was foolish enough to love the wrong man and steadfast enough to be the anchor her daughter needed. I will miss Roxie, who at the end was not a “witch” so much as a very human woman trying hard to hold a complicated life together.
So what went wrong? Part of the failure of this show can be laid to its concept: was this supposed to be a supernatural comedy? A romantic comedy? A mystery show? A fantasy show? There were so many elements mixed in, we were never sure what to expect. And while confounding expectations is a good thing, it’s also confusing when we don’t know if a mystery is going to be solved by journalistic investigation (Joanna, Girl Reporter!) or clairvoyance (Roxie) or sheer luck (Kat). There was some vague idea, I think, that this series was somehow all about female empowerment, but no female with an ounce of self-respect was ever going to identify with Joanna Frankel, and many would have found Kat bland and conventional. Darryl Van Horne was supposed to be sexy and seductive, but came on more like a frat boy with entitlement syndrome. The threaded mysteries were hard to follow against the background of willful ignorance imposed on the three protagonists; it would have been far more interesting if Kat, Joanna, and Roxie had realized much earlier on that they shared supernatural powers. Finally, the comedy was too broad, too obvious, and often downright insulting to a female audience, which was the target audience for this show. Missteps on every side made it impossible for this show to survive.
Eastwick ended the evening with 3.69 million viewers for a 1.3 rating and 4 share. More proof that this show belonged on a cable channel: Vampire Diaries, which is being called a runaway hit for the CW, pulled in only 1.34 million viewers. If a show with half its numbers can be called a hit on another channel, it’s clear Eastwick was a niche product from the beginning.