The one with the flashbacks...
This is probably the best episode of the mid-season slump (which won’t pick up again until after the Hartland arc) if not just because I love distant-past flashbacks. This has Richard, Kahlan and Zed finally reaching the much-discussed tomb of a former Seeker, intending it to be a secure hiding place for their Box of Orden.
It gets in some good ghost story clichés, from the opening Stinger with the hapless grave-robbers, to the eerie sight and sound of a weeping woman in white, and they also throw in something of a Rashomon Style backstory for Kieran and Vivienne, a Seeker and Confessor of ages past. Richard reads of them dying noble deaths, having won victory over their enemies and dying together on the battlefield, their last moments recorded by the wizard Amfortus – only it turns out that this is a complete fabrication, designed to hide their more sordid end.
The main problem with this is that the history of the Seekers is infuriatingly vague. Who were these guys? How many have there been? What exactly was their purpose? Are they always paired with a Confessor? Is Richard the first one since Kieran? How does each one get chosen? None of these questions are answered to any satisfactory degree, which is a shame for what could have been an important world-building episode. Instead, the trio of Kieran, Vivienne and Amfortus are fairly insubstantial stand-ins for Richard, Kahlan and Zed, giving us the chance to contrast and compare our current trio with counterparts that made all the wrong decisions...
So our intrepid heroes make it to Kieran’s crypt, use Zed’s key to enter his final resting place, and open his tomb to find that it’s empty. Sealed doors and strange noises quickly commence, along with the vision of a weeping Confessor and the appearance of the still-flesh-and-blood grave robber from the opening sequence. He tries to prevent them from opening a secondary door, and it soon becomes apparent that he’s possessed by the spirit of Amfortus, who is seemingly at odds with Vivienne – the spirit who led them to the door.
Who do they believe, Wizard or Confessor?
A nice note is that Zed naturally sides with the wizard, while Kahlan with the Confessor. Richard provides the deciding vote (going on the less-biased position that there’s no other way out) and they find Kieran’s real resting place: a simple casket into which his bones have been deliberately bound with a wizard spell that prevents his spirit from entering the underworld. Our heroes are baffled, and again, Zed is reluctant to go against a wizard’s decision.
But Richard advocates for Kieran, of course he does, once again with a mix of compassion and pragmatism: he posits that Vivienne has trapped them here especially to free Kieran. Zed is talked into doing the unbinding spell, and Richard is promptly possessed by the spirit of Kieran, who knocks out Zed, ties up Kahlan, and does the spell to bring back Vivienne.
This is not the most dramatic Body Swap-esque episode this show will ever do, but it does give Craig Horner a chance to demonstrate he’s not just a pretty face. Bridget Regan consistently outdoes him in the acting department (I’ve no doubt he would wholeheartedly agree with me on this), but there’s a slightly difference cadence to his voice and a dark gleam in his eyes that differentiates his performance as Kieran from his usual depiction of Richard.
He fills Kahlan in on his real history with Vivienne, and – yup – the world almost ended because they did the deed. Yes, I know it’s absurd, but you can’t say the show hasn’t set up this scenario. The truth of their history is that after Kieran became confessed as a result of sleeping with Vivienne, he was off his game: overly concerned about her in battle and letting enemies slip through his fingers.
In the scuffle that follows, Kahlan ironically can’t bring herself to confess Kieran-in-Richard to save herself from him, though she’s subsequently overpowered way too easily, to the point where Richard can restrain her with one hand while he ties her up. PLEASE. They should have extended that sequence and depicted a genuine fight between the two of them, which would have been all the more interesting considering neither one of them really wants to hurt the other. Or heck, make it brutal just to drive home how ruthless and desperate Kieran is in this moment.
Kahlan is duly possessed by Vivienne, and despite some requisite objections (mostly to do with the consent issues regarding the bodies they’re inhabiting) Kieran and Vivienne get down to it. And yeah, the chemistry between Regan and Horner is enough of an excuse for this, though Zed is outside with Amfortus desperately trying to... er... Coitus Interruptus.
Thankfully, or disappointingly, depending on how deeply you were involved with Kahlan and Richard undressing each other, Zed bursts into the crypt with a hilarious Big NO!!!!! It’s pretty much over at that stage: Zed magically takes the sword, holds Kahlan/Vivienne hostage with it, and delivers Kieran an ultimatum: leave Richard’s body and he won’t harm Vivienne. Kieran complies, and Vivienne follows soon after, with a quiet thank you.
There’s a lot to absorb here, largely to do with that old favourite Love Versus Duty trope. Kieran and Vivienne chose love, which jeopardizes their mission and eventually ends in Vivienne drinking poison so as to free Kieran from her thrall. Amfortus is the man who preaches “duty” to the two of them, and yet (despite Michael Hurst’s emphatic and teary-eyed performance) goes too far in his attempts to control them. He made promises he couldn’t keep, manipulates them rather ruthlessly, and states that his “final solution” is to trap their souls in the crypt forever.
It’s a deliberate comparison that Kahlan, Richard and Zed all chose their sense of duty, but with far more compassion and open-mindedness (though I suppose you could argue that’s what got them into this mess in the first place, what with Richard insisting on unbinding Kieran’s remains and Kahlan being unable to confess him while he was in Richard’s body). Even Zed’s answer to the problem is to hold Vivienne at sword-point and threaten to kill both her and Kahlan if Kieran didn’t release Richard’s body.
After a lifetime of lies and perceived betrayals by Amfortus, Kieran understandably demands to know why he should trust Zed in this moment, to which his only answer is: “because you have to, basically.” I imagine all of this material would have worked better if Zed had been able to simply talk Kieran down, reminding him of the one thing Richard and Kahlan never forget: the lives of innocent people who need them (interestingly, Zed tries this with Amfortus when the latter insists that it’s better to deprive the world of the Seeker than to risk unleashing Kieran on the world...)
And there are some interesting lines of dialogue here and there. Kiernan telling Vivienne: “we’re all that matters” is clearly a selfish mentality that Richard would never yield to... or would he after a thousand years of being separated from Kahlan? Likewise, when Kahlan tells Kieran: “[Vivienne] violated her sacred duty” and “what you did was wrong” she’s clearly just intoning sentiments that she herself has been internalizing since meeting Richard, and is now quavering in her belief of. Kiernan and Vivienne aren’t what Richard and Kahlan refuse to be at this point in time, but rather what they could become should they not keep a handle on their self-control.
It comes to something of an anti-climactic end (no pun intended, I swear), though as Kahlan and Richard blearily wake up to find themselves half-naked and lying on a crypt floor, Zed gets a glimpse of the lovers standing together in the light of dawn, under the arch of the newly opened tomb door. I wish they had leaned more into the bittersweetness of all this: namely that existence as a spirit cannot give Kiernan and Vivienne what they were denied in life, but it all circles back to some of the main themes and ideas of the show (or at least this season) as a whole: that Richard and Kahlan can’t be together in any meaningful way, and that this is the sacrifice they must commit to if they’re to save the world.
Miscellaneous Observations:
There’s a nice thread of continuity that kickstarts the episode, what with the trio finally reaching the oft-mentioned crypt and Zed using the key that he retrieved earlier from his childhood home – but I wonder why they didn’t leave the Box of Orden in Kieran’s tomb, as originally planned. They could have done it immediately after shifting Kieran’s bones (before possessed!Richard shows his hand) but at the end of the episode Zed says: “we can’t leave the box in this cursed place”, even though the spirits had been successfully exorcised by that point.
It wasn’t until this rewatch that I properly heard the grave robber’s dialogue and realized that he’d been in that tomb for five years. That certainly alleviates the coincidence of the two groups breaking into the tomb at approximately the exact same time, but yikes – it’s a long time to be wandering around in a crypt possessed by a semi-vengeful wizard.
That was an awful lot of atmospheric candles they used to set the scene of the spell. Where’d they come from?
Flashbacks to the distant past are always a lot of fun, and the actors playing Kieran, Vivienne and Amfortus had only a limited time to convey the tragedy of their story – and for my two cents, pulled it off. Michael Hurst in particular does a lot with very little: playing pragmatic to the point of ruthless, but with a teary-eyed quality that demonstrates how hard it is for him to betray the Seeker and his Confessor. I mean, there’s a reason he retconned their story to such an extent, and I’m sure it had as much to do with assuaging his own grief, Atonement-style, than in providing the masses with a stalwart hero, The Dark Knight-style.
But one massive problem with the flashbacks was the complete lack of context to everyone’s wider placement and purpose in the world. Yes, the focus was rightfully on their emotional struggles and how they pertained to Richard, Kahlan and Zed, but there really needed to be a clearer understanding of what everyone was actually trying to achieve on a big-picture scale. Who were they all fighting against? What were they trying to achieve? What on earth was this “quest” everyone kept referencing in regards to Kieran? Perhaps it was meant to be vague; maybe they just didn’t have enough time to flesh things out, but it left the three past characters feeling groundless.
There are some rather baffling bits of random world-building strewn throughout this episode: Zed comments that the Sword of Truth feeds on rage (huh? Since WHEN??), Amfortus reveals there’s a special connection between Seeker and Confessor, something that has yet to be properly explained (does every Seeker get a personal Confessor? Who came up with that?) and Richard says that when Kiernan possessed him, he felt a magical power, a comment I’m pretty sure never gets elaborated on in any of the upcoming episodes.
It ends with the three spotting a “tracer cloud” in the sky, a rather wonky CGI spell that Rahl is using to track the Box of Orden, and Zed gallops off to hide it elsewhere, leaving Richard and Kahlan to ponder their potential destinies...
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