Seven Havens: The Faceless, The One Left Behind, Night of the Afflicted

There’s no way I’m going to be able to keep up with reviewing these episodes in a timely manner, so these posts will simply arrive when they’re ready. Hopefully I’ll be able to watch episodes seven-to-nine in the coming week, and we’ll go from there.

The ominous figures we saw in the final scene of the previous episode are known as the Faceless, and are busy stealing grain from Ellora when Jae’s team interrupts them. Interestingly, all of them seem to be benders, and when one of the firebenders knocks out Uki, she says: “the Brigade just sees you as muscle, sister.”

Her use of the word “sister” is interesting – is it just a turn of phrase, is she using it to address a fellow firebender, or does she mean it quite literally? Is Uki her sister? I only ask because there’s a big emphasis on Uki’s family throughout this episode, and by the end of it, she’s been kidnapped.

Seven Havens: On the Horizon, Into the Storm, The Order

It feels like just yesterday we were watching Korra and Asami walk off into the sunset (or spirit world) together, and now it’s twelve years later. In fact, In-Universe it was over two hundred years ago, and there’s a new Avatar in town – two in fact!

These episodes are being released in sets of three, which is kind of a bummer since it means we’re already halfway through the season after just two weeks, but thankfully it’s recently been announced that Seven Havens will be running for four seasons and not just two. That puts it on par with The Legend of Korra, and gives it more scope for a larger, more in-depth story.

The name of this season (or “book”) is “Survival,” which calls to mind the difference between living and merely surviving. They’re two very different things, and it would appear that life in this reimagined world is a lot more tenuous than it was back in Korra’s day. Civilization has been destroyed and then rebuilt across seven fortified havens after something called “the cataclysm.”

It’s not quite post-apocalyptic, since society is still largely functioning, but it would seem food is scarce and bending abilities are on the wane, with less benders born every year. More concerning, the Avatar is considered an enemy of the people. Though details are still (deliberately) vague at this point, Korra is said to have “let [humanity] down” and elaborate skits are performed that blame her for the aftereffects of the cataclysm – which among other things, involve terrifyingly violent storms.

I’m sure we’ll get more details later, but for now a lot of questions are raised. Do people think she caused the cataclysm? Or just wasn’t able to stop it? Did they vanquish her as was depicted in the play? Or did she perish some other way? And why has there been such a gap between her and the emergence of the next Avatar?

Woman of the Month: Miss Eglantine Price

Eglantine Price from Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Every year I try to feature a spooky-themed lady for October’s Woman of the Month entry, and there’s a surplus of witches out there to choose from. The problem is, I’ve used most of them already: Katrina Van Tassel, Mary Sibley, Wednesday Addams (she’s kind of a witch) and Halliwell sisters from both versions of Charmed.

I was about to settle on one or both of the Owens sisters (especially with the recent release of Practical Magic 2) when I remembered – of course! – Eglantine Price.

Miss Price embodies most of my life goals. She’s a single middle-aged woman living alone in a giant manse, studying the art of witchcraft. She rides around on a motorcycle that releases large clouds of yellow smoke, and has a black cat called Cosmic Creepers. She’s very much the main character of her own story, driving the action of the film from start to finish, and wants to be a witch for largely noble reasons: to assist in the war effort and defend her home from the Nazis (this whole thing being set in 1940). For this, she wants no recognition or reward, and Angela Lansbury is game for a lot of singing and dancing and comedic pratfalls.

She’s also allowed to enjoy a late-in-life romance (which is rare, and therefore important, even though I didn’t really care about it) and commands immense magical power. Watching this religiously as a child, I never realized how special she was.

Of course, because this is a Disney film, she eventually has to give up magic in order to become a wife and mother. Boo. Back in 2021 I posted an essay on The Problem with Witches which roughly hypothesized that despite the allure of witches in our fiction, there is an anxious preoccupation with the idea of women wielding hard power. It was not a particularly in-depth look at the subject, but suffice to say that once storytellers got past the concept of witches as agents of the devil, the likes of Jennifer in I Married a Witch! and Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle are inevitably required to give up their magical abilities once they fall in love.

Much later on, after the dodgy implications of this were recognized, witches were either shifted into the superhero genre (the assorted women of Charmed) or were given no greater ambition through which to funnel their gifts than running a bath shop (Sally in Practical Magic). It is power, but it is severely limited power.

Eglantine Price falls smackdab in the middle of this evolution. By the end of the story the Nazis have destroyed her magical workshop, and in hindsight, it’s obvious her oft-mentioned poor memory is a device to prevent her from recreating any of her spells. But she’s resigned to it all, claiming that she secretly knew she had no business being a witch due to her reaction to the existence of poisoned dragons’ liver.

And even though it’s a Maybe Ever After with Mr Brown (who leaves to join the Home Guard) and she’s probably going to be more of a Cool Aunt than a surrogate mother to the three orphans, the fact remains that she’s no longer a witch and is presumably settling down into drab domesticity. It’s not as depressing as the sight of Jennifer knitting in a chair or Gillian donning a flowery sundress, but it’s still pretty depressing, especially when you recall the scene in which she unwraps her broomstick. There is palpable excitement and reverence when she holds it to her cheek and utters: “my first broom!” This is clearly a woman who relishes being a witch.

So, let’s remember her in the film’s climax, in which she demonstrates her incredible power by bringing to life a makeshift army of soldiers from across Britain’s history, commanding them from a broomstick flying the Union Jack with a cutlass in her hand. Because IT IS AWESOME.