Hi!
after watching the last episode and being full of hope, I was sadly disappointed by this episode. there were a few things I enjoyed but there was also quite a few things that were so inaccurate when it comes to this show as an adaptation.
this discussion will contain spoilers for not only this episode but the whole Mortal Instruments series.
I’m going to start with some of the things I did like about this episode and then go into some of the things I didn’t really like about this episode.
throughout the episode we see Clary trying to go back to normal/how things were before the show started. I really liked this, we saw this in two scenes in the episode. The first time we saw this is when Clary is talking to Isabelle about how she “wants to feel normal again”, we then see Clary later on in the episode go to the Brooklyn Academy of Art to go draw and find her normal life again. This was really nice to see because I feel like we haven’t got to see her doing art for a while now.
I really enjoyed that we got to see more of Jace and Valentine’s relationship in this episode, I like how they’re showing their relationship on the show.
I love that we got to see more of Luke being a cop! Last season we got to see very little of Luke being a police officer, I felt like it was sort of just forgotten about, but we got to see him doing an interview (I believe) this episode which was nice.
the majority of the lines that I really liked from this episode were from Simon (as usual). I love the line when Magnus and Simon come out of the portal and Simon said, “Portaling is not really my thing, is there a YouTube tutorial I can watch?” Simon had some really nice lines throughout this episode and I’m really glad that they haven’t gotten rid of that.
I really liked seeing Isabelle kick ass in this episode! I really like how much the fight scenes have improved in comparison to season one. Last season they had this weird slow motion effect that they used and they seem to have gotten rid of it this season.
when it comes to the things I didn’t like about this episode, I have a few things I’d like to talk about.
the first thing I’d like to talk about is the scene where Clary finds out her brother has demon blood in him. In previous episodes we have seen characters use this “flashback rune” to show each other things from the past, it honestly makes no sense, because this rune has not been introduced in the books at all or in the show, and suddenly it’s being used with no actual explanation as to how the rune works. In this flashback we see Jocelyn holding her son who can somehow control nature, we see the child’s eyes go black and they kill the flower. Honestly, this scene felt weird and not like something that would be in Shadowhunters.
in this episode, we find out that Dot is actually not dead, but she’s been alive for ages and been experimented on by Valentine. Somehow Dot manages to take control of Clary and has her tell Jace that she can see the future, which was honestly such an annoying thing to add in.
during this episode, we kept cutting to Simon who needed to find Camille for Raphael, so Simon goes to Magnus for help. They end up using a portal to get to India to find her, but they never do, we just get to find out that Simon can Encanto now.
the whole scene with Simon and Magnus felt pointless and was just adding more to this which already felt too busy.
this is something really small but something that really bugged me. Jocelyn brings Clary a coffee, she says that it’s a black coffee with “lots of sugar”, in my notebook in captial letters I’ve written CLARY DOESN’T HAVE SUGAR IN HER COFFEE! I did like that Jocelyn mentioned Java Jones in this part because it was nice to see that little detail, but if you’re going to include little things like the way a character likes their coffee, do it correctly! (I do realise that I am being petty but this is just how I feel)
throughout this episode we saw almost every single character calling Vampires “vamps” I don’t know why but this felt weird, we saw Victor Aldertree call them that as well when he was having, what seemed like, a serious conversation with Simon. I just felt like it didn’t feel right, considering the fact that most people, if not all, called them Vampires before this episode.
There was a lot going on in this episode, we had not even five minute long scenes, the show jumped from character to character and there was honestly a lot going on. While watching each episode I take notes and I usually end up with only one/and a half pages of notes and I ended up with three pages of notes for this episode because there was so much going on. Like last season, they just dumped a lot of information on us and I ended up having to rewatch the whole episode to actually understand what was actually going on.
I definetly missed out a lot of things that I could’ve talked about here that I didn’t. I just wanted to focus on the things in this episode that stood out most to me.
Overall, I was disappointed in this episode. This is possibly because the last episode left me with such high hopes for this show as an adaptation and as a show.
Let me know if you agreed or disagreed with anything I just said in the comments!
Yasmin xx
read books and drink coffee 