Meanwhile, Benjamin begins to set his twisted plans into motion, and the Knights of Lazarus gain a few new members. It’s nearly a devastating affair when Baldwin arrives, but following a promise from Diana to keep those with blood rage in line, he finally acknowledges Matthew’s scion. Diana’s hippie-Wiccan aunts, touchingly played by Kingston and Valarie Pettiford, live in one of the tale’s more charming inventions: a funky, sentient house that rattles the crockery when it’s irritated and supplies flashbacks by conjuring up life-size holographic scenes in situ.In this week’s episode of A Discovery of Witches, we return to Sept-Tours for the christening of Rebecca and Philip. (Shooting in Oxford and Venice, where the creatures’ HQ occupies a hidden island in the lagoon, helps.) As the action, physical and supernatural, picks up in midseason, the writing and direction start to lose some of that restraint, taking a turn into pulpy, B-movie territory.Įventually the scene shifts to upstate New York, which is a loss in terms of landscape but a plus for the story. While those veterans engage in the kind of dignified slumming that makes material like this enjoyable, Palmer gives Diana - on whom the story hinges - the flat affect of a lesser CW heroine.Īdapted for the screen by Kate Brooke, who also wrote or co-wrote five of the season’s eight episodes, the series lays out its world and characters briskly and intelligibly, and the early episodes invest the fantasy clichés with some elegance and picturesqueness. They are not equally talented performers, though, and that’s a problem for “A Discovery of Witches.” Palmer is a little out of her league in a cast that includes, along with Goode, the top-flight actresses Lindsay Duncan and Alex Kingston and, as the bad guys, the polished scenery chewers Trevor Eve and Owen Teale. It’s a love for the ages that starts out kind of stalkery, the way these things do, and graduates to torrid but clothed canoodling enacted by the commensurately gorgeous Palmer and Goode. The real action, however, involves the interspecies affair - banned by centuries-old tradition! - between Diana and Matthew. Matthew, who’s not just a fatally handsome 1,500-year-old French nobleman but an Oxford biochemist, is researching why magical creatures seem to be losing their powers. That détente is threatened when the historian Diana Bishop (Teresa Palmer), a daughter of witches who seems to have no significant powers herself, finds in the Bodleian Library a dusty volume that the supernatural elite has been seeking for, well, centuries. It should meet the requirements of those who like their high-class cheese fests wrapped in European accents and antique locations.īased on the novels in Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy, the series imagines a triumvirate of nonhuman species - vampires, witches and demons - among whom peace is maintained by a centuries-old power-sharing arrangement. “A Discovery of Witches,” which was made for Sky in Britain and begins streaming Thursday on both Sundance Now and Shudder, is an action fantasy in the multi-monster category of “Twilight” and “True Blood,” with a focus on Harlequin-style, time-jumping romance that may make it of interest to the “Outlander” audience. That he’s played by that tall drink of plasma Matthew Goode (“The Crown”) is just overkill. The idea of the vampire as perfect lover is pretty old by now, but really, lovers don’t get much more perfect than the vampire aristocrat Matthew Clairmont in “A Discovery of Witches.” He listens so well he can hear your heartbeat rise, he’s so sensitive he can feel your heat and he’s so passionate he can just barely stop himself from ripping into your throat.
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