The one with the werewolf that isn’t actually a werewolf...
Like many episodes in this series, Cursed is more important than it initially appears. Though you could get away with skipping it, the story introduces the concept of the Rada’Han, reminds us of Shota’s existence, and fills in a little background on Zed...
In a rare story development, the gang doesn’t stumble upon trouble or meet with a Resistance assignation, but rather receives a message with a request for help. Having long since accepted that helping individuals will be prioritized over any big-picture Rahl-defeating missions, Kahlan and Zed accompany Richard to the territory of King Gregor to hear his story...
According to him, the location of his kingdom puts his people in a vulnerable position: they are strategically valuable to the D’Harans and have kept the enemy at bay only thanks to the terrifying creature known as a calthrop, which can effortlessly tear apart entire garrisons as soon as the sun goes down. There’s a problem though: with the D’Harans on the retreat, the calthrop has turned its attention to Gregor’s own people... including his wife, who was recently killed while out on a midnight excursion.
And now the terrible secret: Gregor himself is the calthrop, having made a deal with Shota, who lives in the nearby mountain region and benefits from the calthrop’s reign of terror. Only now that Gregor has no further use for the creature, and further being wracked with guilt over the accidental murder of his wife, he naturally wants the curse lifted.
So the plan is simple: having a long history with Shota, Zed offers to go and simply ask that she end the spell she cast over Gregor, while Richard and Kahlan make sure that he doesn’t hurt anyone else in the meanwhile.
There are complications: Gregor’s daughter Princess Corah doesn’t know anything about what’s going on. She thinks the Seeker and his friends are here to slay the monster that killed her mother, and has no idea of her father’s complicity. Furthermore, despite having spent a good deal of money on a Rada'Han (that is, a magical collar that represses any magical abilities within a person – something Kahlan certainly pricks her ears up at) the device doesn’t work in preventing the transformation.
Oh, and Gregor has a brother running around who is clearly the culprit behind the current troubles plaguing the kingdom. I don’t want to be mean, but they cast an actor with a full-on “villain face,” so the fact no one catches on to the fact he’s up to no good strains a lot of credibility.
What follows is a fairly standard whodunnit horror story with a few fantasy wrinkles. Richard immediately fails in guarding King Gregor, and the beast escapes just as Kahlan and Corah have left the safety of the castle to help the latter’s handmaid and her children, currently stranded in the forest after their cart loses a wheel. The calthrop attacks, Kahlan goes into the Con Dar to protect her companions, and finally Richard arrives to kill the monster.
We get one of those Cooldown Hugs that shippers everywhere love (you know, when one half of the pairing soothes the other out of an unstoppable rage) while Corah gets a look at the dead calthrop, and realizes that it was her father the whole time.
Suffice to say that Zed’s attempts to talk Shota into showing a degree of mercy for Gregor failed, though at least he got to enjoy a nice outdoor picnic with his ex, and Danielle Cormack looks great in that dress.
Corah is crowned queen, but Kahlan is grappling with the resurgence of the bloodrage and her inability to control it. That’s where the Rada’Han comes in, as she accepts Corah’s offer of a favour and claims it for her own. According to her, there were “two monsters” on the loose in the kingdom that night, and this collar will prevent her from ever tapping into her darker self again. Richard does not approve.
But, problem! Now that the caltrop is gone, there’s nothing standing in the way of the D’Harans relaunching their invasion. Even as Corah’s inner circle comes up with ways to trick them into believing that the monster is still out there (dead livestock, magical windchimes) it becomes apparent that there’s... wait for it... another calthrop on the loose!
The plot thickens when Corah confides to Kahlan that she’s found her mother’s diary and that before her death she left the castle due to suspicions that her husband was having an affair with another woman. She doesn’t state who this woman could have been, or where she got the information in the first place... but I’m sure you remember this guy!
He's the spy in the castle of course, one that Richard catches on his way to tell the D’Harans that the calthrop poses no further threat – just as Shota tells Zed that it wasn’t Gregor that she cursed, it was his scepter – and as a result, the curse has passed on to Corah.
Everything happens pretty fast at that point: proving that she’s dangerous even without the bloodrage, Kahlan immediately confesses the king’s brother and gets the intel they need (he unlocked Gregor from the Rada'Han, he lured the former queen in to the forest, etc). The D’Harans manage to break through the kingdom’s defences and attack the gang in the throne room, which ends with them getting overpowered rather quickly and taken captive. Richard goes for bravado and tells the commanding officer that Darken Rahl expects him to be delivered alive... at which point the bad guys demonstrate they mean business and cut off Richard’s hands.
But don’t worry, it’s a fake-out! Turns out that Shota and Zed are watching all this in one of her divining pools (and to be fair, they did set this up at the beginning of the episode) and the two pull off a full-on Joshua Commands the Sun by combining their magic to cause an eclipse.
This is the opportunity that Corah needs: she unlocks herself from the Rada'Han and unleashes the calthrop on the D’Harans. It’s a solution to the problem that works: despite some iffy issues in the episode (I’ll get to them) they at least establish all the moving parts to this nicely: that the calthrop comes out in the dark, that the curse has been passed on to Corah, and that the creature is more than capable of taking out an entire army of D’Harans.
In the aftermath of battle, Kahlan unsurprisingly chooses not to take the Rada'Han for herself (that would be too easy now, wouldn’t it) and on a more thoughtful note, Corah decides to tell her people the truth about who and what she is. Though it would be easy enough to simply put on the Rada'Han every night and prevent anyone from finding out about the calthrop, she realizes that keeping things hidden is what led her parents to their untimely deaths.
It's a good thing when the younger generations can learn and grow from the mistakes of their parents.
Miscellaneous Observations:
There were so many shortcuts and plot holes in this episode, it’s difficult to know where to start. How did the messenger find Richard and Kahlan when they’re clearly just living rough in the forest? The contrivance with the broken-down cart in the forest was just silly: if an old man could manage to run all the way back to the castle to warn Corah, then why didn’t the women and children just go with him? And why did Kahlan and Corah waste time trying to fix the cart when they could have just unhitched the horses and galloped away?
How convenient that Corah’s mother was so discreet that she didn’t bother to write any pertinent details in her diary about her husband’s supposed affair – including who gave her this information in the first place. And where did Corah end up after the first night of her transformation? Surely she would have woken up out in the wilderness somewhere and realized what had happened to her.
Structurally this is not a good episode, not helped by the fact that its climax (the invasion of the D’Harans and Richard getting his hands cut off) is just a massive fake-out. Plus, we already know that Zed can use magic to regrow hands, so as gruesome as it was, it was only ever going to be a temporary injury.
The Rada'Han is going to be important going forward. Sure it’s a bit too convenient and is essentially an X-Men inhibitor collar, but it definitely has a part to play in the finale (though oddly, neither Kahlan or Richard took the opportunity to float the possibility that it would let them be together).
The atmosphere throughout was nice: there were misty forests and dark corridors, as befits a horror story, but also a gold filter used in the Shota scenes, who herself came across as a dark Galadriel in Lothlorien. That picnic she prepared looked tasty.
The television budget certainly made itself known this episode: not only did we get a wide shot of the D’Haran army that was recycled from the first episode, but the invasion itself took place in the tiny throne room between a handful of people (though credit where it’s due, they did make the onslaught look pretty intense).
I really enjoyed the actress who played Corah, and the character herself. Granted, she wasn’t the best in some of her deliveries, but she depicted a type of femininity that doesn’t often get lauded in modern fantasy-fiction, which was nicely set-off by the fact that she changes into the deranged, blood-thirsty monster at the end. I doubt we’ll see her again, but the show continues to be good with its one-off female characters, and it sounds like she’ll make a good queen.
And it ends with Zed telling them that there’s another Book of Counted Shadows out there somewhere. Er, okay! I’ve totally forgotten why this thing is important, and they seem to have been doing fine without it, but whatever. They’re off to find the MacGuffin!
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