See Her Very Well Haven S5E01 See No Evil

Haven S5E01 See No Evil

At long, long last - no, really, this has been one of the longest fucking summers of our lives - we return to you with more new Haven. (S2 catch-up on Haven, along with Sleepy Hollow and the little-discussed but much-considered Helix, are all on the backburner until we figure out what new fall schedules do to our ability to get posts out while retaining what we pretend is our sanity.) A word to the wise in case you're new, or if you've just forgotten in the intervening months: this is not a shipper blog. We actually care very little, at this point, about the Nathan/Audrey romance, not least because Nathan goes through long periods of level-grinding where he flings himself like an idiot at a brick wall, metaphorical or literal, and then has sudden Moments Of Awesome. Which is totally plausible as a character! I know people like that! They're just unfortunately always the kind of person you want to smack upside the head with a cluebat until they get it.

Any rate! Previously, on Haven: which we get in a voice from Emily Rose that I associate rather more with Mara than with Audrey; it's the sharp/hard edges around it that make it so, or it's Audrey very much in the oh FUCK THIS I am so done with your shit mode. Which, admittedly, we had a fair (entirely warranted) bit of last season. We get a visual recap of not just last season, where the Troubles got worse and worse, but odds and ends from prior seasons. Duke with the Lady Justice golem; the electricity Trouble that introduced Dwight back in s2, and each of AudSarLuLex's personas while the brothers Teagues enlighten us about the nature of her being, insofar as they know and are willing to share it. Lexie in the bar(n), Sarah shooting Roy Crocker, Lucy in the haunted house with James Cogan (hi James! we miss you! is this a sign of things to come?), back to Sarah on the beach to remind us that Nathan loved her as Sarah as well. (This is still kind of creepy, honestly. I can get behind Their Love Transcends Time, but really, Nathan?) And before Sarah the Teagues aren't sure, but we are! At least in the ultimate-before sense, hi Mara and William. Which is the previouslies cue to send William into voiceover territory instead of the Teagues! And a more structured recap of last season, Mara and William originated the Troubles and had their own brand of creepy obsessive love, oh yay. (Actually, randomly, you know what would make us incredibly happy about this season? Maraudrey pulling a get the hell out of my face and my head card, and no, NEITHER kind of obsessive romantic love is wanted, she will now find her OWN way with none of this predestined/mindwipe horseshit. I would love that. Can we have that arc please?) But I get ahead of myself. Turns out the little black death truffles William brought from the other side can cause Troubles when crushed into evil black glowing handprints! Yay! Oh, and beyond the assorted people they Troubled, Duke had to be re-Troubled after killing his brother, because they were duly freaked out about the fact that there might be literal apocalyptic Troubles coming. Also because nobody's killing babies in Haven, poor everyone. Unfortunately re-Troubling Duke and Duke's evil blood of evil means Audrey gets to remember who she started out as, and in the process freak out everyone to the point of shoving William back through the door in the hopes of making that work. Hi, Jennifer. No, that doesn't work, that makes it worse, opening doors that should be closed is always a bad idea. As Hawkeye would like to remind us, doors work both ways. Though it remains unclear if it was the touch or the door or both that did it.

And we cut back in from Duke supposedly being as good as dead, Jennifer dying, Dave shot, Mara taking over the body formerly belonging to Audrey (mostly), and everyone else in the cave in various stages of WHAT THE FUCK. Panover of the bay, followed by a nice tranquil looking scene in the gazebo. Do not anger the gazebo, you guys. This can only end in tears. Gloria's trying to find her sense of humor already, right after losing her son and deciding that she's going to adopt her grandson and raise him, and oh honey. Vickie's expression is pretty much "I would give you a hug but then you'd break down and nobody would be happy about that." It's a very quiet start to the season, the eye of the storm, if you will, despite the crying baby. (This is a great depiction of why you don't pick up babies when you're upset. They know.) No, the baby won't kill anyone by crying, I think that's one part wanting to help them both and one part what Vickie says, which is generalized fear of the Troubles staying this long. I can't blame Gloria for leaping to the obvious conclusion about what makes Vickie make that face, though. And when Vickie loses control over the whole sitting on her hands not offering to help thing she's been doing, she gets exactly the response she expected, followed by a minor meltdown of OH GOD HOW DO I PARENT. Particularly for a woman who's pushing, what, 70, judging by that statement? Depending on when you consider it imperative to give a kid the sex talk, really, I've known people who got it in bits and pieces from the time they were four or five to people who never got it at all and whose parents relied on high school health classes. (Hint: DON'T DO THAT SECOND ONE.) But, yes, parenting is a huge responsibility, all the more so when you're of an age to be retired already. Reasons we love even the small, occasionally-seen residents of Haven: we have a real sense of growth here, with Vickie. She's recovered at least somewhat from her trauma back in s1, she's grown up, she doesn't use her Trouble, but she's taken to carrying around a sketchpad just in case, because she also knows how bad off Haven is these days. In this instance, because it's just a crying baby and her boss she's trying to calm down, she ends up drawing the gazebo and blowing all the flower petals up in the air as a distraction. I mean, this is what normal people have mobiles for, but nobody ever pretended Haven was normal. And it makes a fantastic contrast of peace and beauty and warmth for a few suspended seconds against what's coming.

As it does right on the heels of Vickie using her Trouble, just so we can see both women terrified that maybe it was Vickie. For a long stretch, where she's all no, because I don't draw the lighthouse. Honestly if Vickie were the kind of character more inclined to humor value as distraction, I'd have dropped a line about not drawing the lighthouse it's got enough Troubles without her adding to them. Because really. Instead Gloria lampshades how many times the fucking thing's been destroyed in this round of the Troubles, and then we see a massive, massive explosion of power. White light, but not the kind we'd typically associate with goodness and all that is right in the world. More white light, the kind of strict boundary-upholding magical light. It might have looked better if it hadn't collapsed the lighthouse and most of the end of the spit of land it's on crumbled. Just in case we were in any doubt about getting to the cave proper with the thinny and the magic labyrinth thing on the floor and, no, that's gone now, bye William. In theory, anyway. In practice, who knows! Just like Vickie and Gloria don't know if there were people in there but they hope not.

Apparently this thinny's magic tends to those who would otherwise be trapped and/or dead, on account of hello Dwight! Sitting up on some rocks and doing an automatic check of his vest to make sure nobody's tried shooting him in the meantime. Good Dwight. This is why we like you. Off in the not very far distance Duke is shouting for Jennifer, no, Duke, that's not going to work. So at least those two got thrown by Magic Thinny Dispersal to approximately the same place! Duke is still bleeding and also leaving his blood on the rocks, which the camera would like us to know is Very Important. You'll excuse us while we go bang our heads into a wall. Crocker blood, especially after what was said the end of last season with it containing all the Troubles that a Crocker ever ended, and a camera that focused on it? Can't be good news for anyone least of all Duke, in the long term. Dwight thinks that Duke's eyebleed is bad news and requires a doctor, not chasing after the rest of the group and evasive answers. Mind you, in this case I give Duke some credit for evasive maneuvers purely because he just got traumatized to shit and Dwight does tend to know everything, at least in Duke's way of thinking. I do support the theory of going to see a Troubles-knowledgeable doctor! Of course Dwight knows who they are. (This is not helping Duke's impression of him as omniscient, as we will see to poor Dwight's detriment later this ep.) (K: He's not omniscient, he just has Contacts +12.) (A: And the ones who know the biggest picture are the ones shutting up too much. HRMPH.) And off Duke goes calling for Jennifer and hoping for probably, realistically, anyone.

The Teagues, of course, also got thrown out of the cave together. Into the middle of some woods, with Dave still shot and operating on sheer stubborn and Vince's arm, with no idea how they got there. Vince would like to believe, or at least would like Dave to believe while he's still half in shock, that nothing truly bad happened as a result of opening the door. William's gone! Dave's still here! With these two things established they can do anything, right? Hoo boy not right. So not right. But I'm pretty sure Vince's attitude here is more on the side of anything he can say to keep Dave moving to a hospital, and freak out and be pissed off at his brother for lack of disclosure (not that he has ANY ground to stand on) later. Sensible enough, as far as it goes!

Another forest panover later, and Nathan and "Audrey" have been thrown together! In which I'm sure is supposed to be symbolic and mostly I'm going back to hoping that Maraudrey says fuck you to all her supposed-to-bes and forges her own path. Preferably a not-evil one, but, y'know, considering she's only had the choice of seeing another way out recently, I mostly just want her to have the freedom to make the damn choices. At any rate, her choice (such as it is) right now is to trick Nathan into thinking she's still Audrey for just long enough to get him hugged and handcuffed to a railing so she can steal his gun. The music helps! There's a cute little lost love found riff and then the dun-dun-dun-dunnnn when Mara reveals herself with a standard villain giggle. Honestly she is so lazy as a villain sometimes, it's not, I don't think, like she couldn't talk Nathan around to doing truly heinous things in the vague hopes of him recovering Audrey. She's just too focused on the fact that she's free to act for the first time. In how long, you ask? Well, first we get a little bit of villain monologuing about what she's going to do and how much fun it's going to be and yes, she has everyone's memories in there, with a particularly lascivious look at Sarah. I have to say I am really fucking impressed by how far Emily Rose has come in the last, what, five years? To make it this believable as a personality switch. I mean, it's a little bit over the top in delivery, but it's no more so than any number of cackling male villains I could name you, and a lot of the mannerisms are reminding me of William, which suggests a level of study to Colin Ferguson's performance last season that makes this even more believable. So: five hundred years that she's been stuck back there, either as a passenger behind all the other personalities (that's a rounded number, for the record, it's either 486 or 513 by the 27-year cycle) or reliving it while she's stuck in the barn. Who knows! Not us, and either way is definitely punishment for Mara's wrongdoing. And she's claiming Audrey as the worst, which I think is a function of most recent, and current connections to that person strongest, but still, it's indicative of something. Nathan persists YET AGAIN in throwing himself at the brick wall of "you have her memories therefore she's still in there therefore there is HOPE GIVE HER BACK." Yeah, um, that's not actually how it works, Nathan, for one. For two, go read a goddamn psych book about how memories create neural pathways and come at this from a different angle. Not the one that gets you concussed for the umpteenth goddamn time. I SAID NOT THAT ONE. Oi.

Roll credits! Which have not changed, aren't you glad we checked for any obvious change between Audrey and Mara. No, apparently not! Nathan is still unconscious on the ground, regaining consciousness to Duke's constant calling Jennifer's name. One would think he'd be hoarse by now, but apparently not! I love that Nathan doesn't stop to think or ask if Duke can get him out of the cuffs, he just tells him to, and then doesn't even blink when Duke pulls out a set of lockpicks. First Season Nathan would have had all the commentary on that. Fifth Season Nathan accepts that it's a part of Duke to the point of taking it for granted. Duke catches him up on what happened with Dwight and the Tweedles and Nathan catches Duke up on what Mara did to him. Interestingly, but not entirely surprisingly, nobody does quite seem to remember that Mara took over Audrey at the last, back in the cave. Which is what happens when you're not expecting that, and subsequently get blasted out into the middle of fuck-knows-where and scattered from your friends. Allies. Whatever we're calling everyone's assorted complicated relationships. Nathan then pokes him about the bleeding eyes in the cave thing. Back to the lighthouse to see if they can try and make sense of anything!

This is Haven. Of course they can't. The lighthouse is still entirely gone, and while Nathan and Duke can extrapolate what happened based on interdimensional door slammed shut, knocked them all very far away, probably sunk the lighthouse too, Stan comes up with the plausible yet not at all believable excuse of an earthquake that was mostly absorbed by the lighthouse so it didn't really hit Haven. Uh-huh. No one believes that's how earthquakes work, but then again I don't think anyone believes half of those gas leaks either, the point isn't to fool people, the point is to give them an excuse that allows them to get on with their lives. Preferably involving the implication that this is a finite event, or at least a preventable one. Duke will now bully Stan into going and asking about Jennifer, searching around for her. (As we understand it the actress wasn't able to participate in this season, so, woe. But we will appreciate it if they don't entirely fridge her so she can come back later!) Every bit of music and staging, and the progression of Duke's search, though, and obviously the fact that we don't cut to scenes of Jennifer in any sense, suggest that he's not going to find her. It's both the lack of cuts and the lack of spaces to put in those cuts, really. At any rate. Here comes a functionary of some kind! Hello functionary! We've never met you before, chances are you're going to die horribly. I'm sorry. Especially since you come bearing references to the past lighthouse destruction! Yay! Both the time in Sketchy (1x07) and the meteors (3x13) get a line reference, and then he moans about never getting the town to rebuild again, so I'm going to go ahead and assume he's either a tourism board dude or a history preservation dude. He continues to bitch even through Duke's very I-don't-want-to-hear-it interruption, concluding with a "if anyone died in there" type statement that is just begging fate to stick Jennifer's body in the ruins. It looks like Duke thinks so too, because he gets even more cranky at that one. Nathan's first thought is for Mara, though. Which, arguably, is a sensible thing to do considering the kind of power William had and Mara might have, to mess things up, kill a lot of people, etc. And in this exchange it's Duke who's taking love over reason here, because he's going to go keep looking for Jennifer. The difference between Duke doing it and Nathan is, at this point, if Duke chooses love over brutal practicality and goes looking for Jennifer, they're out one person's worth of manpower. If Nathan chooses love over brutal practicality and keeps treating Mara as someone who just needs to be cured so he can get Audrey back, he's going to pass up a lot of opportunities to restrain her, and he's one of the few people who knows how dangerous she is. Burden of responsibility on him, it sucks, but Nathan, please live up to it. I know you won't!

So, okay, Duke is going to stomp off ranting about how of course Jennifer collapsed, she was casting Dimension Door with insufficient components and most likely from hit points (opening a portal with a vampire novel and a positive attitude, for those of you who don't play D&D type games) and when he finds her they are going to go somewhere very very far away. Oh sweetie. I would too, except you're a Crocker, and, well, this isn't going to go well at all. As an example! The functionary walks past calling orders about search and rescue, Duke looks around most likely assuming, as do we, that search and rescue is there for human survivors. Or a human survivor. No, he wants them there looking for debris. Disgusted, Duke turns away, and that's when the functionary doubles over with his eyes sewn shut. Oooops. Now, the interesting thing about this here, too, is that if it were any character of the week rather than Duke, we would instantly peg the disgusted upset person we don't know as the cause of the Trouble. But since there isn't one, we completely skip and I'm going to spoil the rest of the episode for you, but we completely skip over Duke as the source of this Trouble. Because it's not like he hasn't gotten exasperated, pissed off, and upset before! And he's never done this. Sure, he got reTroubled last season and things went a little haywire, but that was last season. Even when we know the facts, we fall into the thought pattern of no, that wasn't really Duke, there's a Troubled person on the loose. If only for a second. Because they're pushing us very, very hard to forget that.

Well, at least the functionary's still alive for now. We hope. Dwight is upset, this isn't a Trouble they've seen before (which says something about how old it is, now that we know where it comes from), and Nathan says that Mara threatened to give more people Troubles. While he takes his new gun and phone, because Dwight is an excellent supplier of material goods both as a cleaner and, lately, as the chief of police. This is news to Dwight! So is the box of black goo being connected, and so is the fact that William and Mara were in Haven before. (Before what? Before the Troubles, we can guess, at this point.) Dwight starts talking about the APB on Mara, and getting out the Guard. Yes! Good. As long as they're well trained and better disciplined than some of the Guard we've seen, having plainclothes people used to keeping an eye on their surroundings in the situational awareness sense would be useful. Nathan objects! Nathan objects on the grounds that if they hurt Mara they hurt Audrey, and he doesn't want that to happen. Nathan has obviously not come around to the idea of Maraudrey yet, nor has he come to even accept as possible what Dwight's talking about, that maybe Audrey really is gone, and Mara is what they have to deal with. It's also interesting that Dwight is the one saying this because while he was the voice of reason when they thought Audrey was dead, he also didn't stop looking for her, as shown by the fact that he was still collecting reports about possible Audreys, as shown by him sending Vince and Dave to identify a body. With this, Mara is a potential threat, and Dwight will be exactly as practical as he has to be, while Nathan is still dominated by emotion. Oh Nathan. Level-grind faster, would you? They touch on whether or not Jennifer's even alive, eventually concluding that they, too, have insufficient data to explain that or Duke's mysterious recovery, and what happens in the cave stays in the cave. I love you, Dwight. I love you too, Adam. We catch up with Duke being more frustrated that a fireman talked to Audrey (Dwight is ever so thrilled that Mara can pretend to be Audrey with Audrey's memories) and some speculation is tossed around as to why Mara wants Jennifer anyway. Well, yes. If she said That Door, apart from the potential of calling it That Door the way we call it That [expletive deleted] Barn, chances are there's more of them. Especially since she doesn't seem to have the emotional/durational investment to call it That Door with that amount of specificity and no antecedent. Anyway. So, okay, they agree to search for the other doors by various methods, I love how Duke just requests manpower and Dwight just gives it. Oh boys. Duke's going to map out everyone's landing points and see if he can do this scientifically, because that's sometimes a thing in Haven! Nathan's going to go lean on the Teagues, because they are helpful at the oddest of times!

Vince is also sad about losing Audrey, but he seems to be a little further in on the stages of grieving, or at least he's hit one that isn't Denial. Nathan is still paddling, talking about Dwight like he's an antagonist in this at the very least, someone to be worked around rather than with. This does not bode well. Vince doesn't think this bodes well either, especially the part where Nathan hasn't told Dwight everything about what Mara and William are. Not because Dwight was coordinating a million different things, which he was, but because he doesn't want Dwight going after Maraudrey if there's a chance his lady love is in there still. Nathan. Vince's hope that maybe Mara's not so dangerous now with William gone really is just that, a hope, he has his looking through information and theorizing face on, not his I am fully confident in what I'm saying face, which only gets worse when Nathan tells him there might be another door. Yay! Wait, no, that other thing. Definitely that other thing. Also, who wants to bet there are three doors? Well, in this case four doors, since the lighthouse is one. Other good numbers are five and seven. So then they turn the conversation to Dave and what he might know about the doors, and I mentioned this not long ago but it bears repeating, we don't actually know that Dave is native to this place, do we. Nor does Dave, or at least he hasn't confirmed it. ("Why do you think you're from there?" "I've been there.") Certainly Nathan refers to him as going back and forth, which we only know of one time, but you never know. Vince doesn't know either! Vince is very put out by this. He is also very put out by his brother being shot due to his own damn foolishness, but that isn't going to go away anytime soon. We close with a flashback/vision shot from Dave, reliving the trauma of the door being opened, which isn't a terribly big surprise nor yet anything we didn't already know except, Audrey's looking up in that vision. Mara. Maraudrey. Whoever she is. But the door was in the floor. So why is she looking up, and why is the camera pulling back like she's being watched from something rising above her? And eventually everyone else gets that look, too! Inquiring and hungry minds! Dave can you float? Did you float? What the fuck.

Over at the hospital we push forward over a nurse's shoulder to Dwight (nurse's? doctor's? probably doctor's but I don't know the scrubs color code here), which naturally means we then follow her over to talk to him. God he's tall. She wants to know if anyone knows what kind of Trouble this is, i.e. how to protect themselves against it, and she's scared. As well she might be! The Guard is scared too, which is considerably more ominous, and Vince isn't being terribly leaderly at the moment on account of his brother was shot and is now in a coma-like state. Dwight's tone begs for sympathy, and the nurse-doctor does look some sheepish. Asks him to talk to him, which he agrees as Nathan comes up and gets some horrifying information about the stitches around that poor bastard's eyes. Nathan's still going to go after Mara, despite them disagreeing on who's the bigger threat here. Nathan, stop lying to Dwight, you are totally hiding shit from him. Nathan, Dwight can see through your bullshit, he just doesn't know what he's looking at. NATHAN. Fucking hell. Meanwhile Duke is having no luck on his ownsome, we do see a couple nice shots of him plotting things on a map out on a boat called, apparently, the Little Deere, but he doesn't seem to be any closer to Jennifer and the only interesting shot we get here is the pullback from above, similar to the one we got in Dave's flashback. It could just be an artistic choice. Bet the one in the cave isn't entirely, though.

Maraudrey, in the meantime, already knows where all the thinnies are! One of them is at Black House Coffee, and everyone who knows their King is facedesking right now. Black House is one of the few books not set in Maine; it's set in Wisconsin, I'll be over here snickering. The primary tie in this case is that the serial killer unsub of the novel is an agent of the Crimson King set to find Breakers to destabilize the Beams holding up the Dark Tower, i.e., the center of reality. I'm just going to leave that there in conjunction with Mara, William, and the thinnies, while I go out and buy a new desk from breaking this one into smithereens. Mara isn't even bothering with more than a thin veneer of niceties with the poor waiter who we already suspect is going to end up dead, just to demonstrate her utter lack of giveadamn. The thing is, this cackling maniacal villain schtick would not be nearly so believable if we didn't have an entire season of William to back it up, so while it's the kind of over-the-top villainy that might not normally send us, with a full season's weight behind it, it really works. We've got an I <3 Haven's First Responders bumper sticker and a Founder's Day poster in the stockroom, which makes a nice pair of callbacks to last season (4x02), with the Troubled firefighter. No, waiter dude, this is not about the marijuana last year, and Mara barely dignifies that with pulling it out of memory banks long enough to give him a Look about it. Also, really, "let's see those muscles?" I don't know if she's having him move the table in case the thinny bites her or just because she's being a shit, it's hard to tell, but there is a thinny! Back behind the general bulletin board vicinity, and yes, it bites her. Once, twice, and unlike the usual rules she won't be going for a third time. Probably just as well for Maraudrey, since it might fling her off somewhere else at that point. And she probably would've gotten away with all of this, even with the dumb waiter kid getting more and more suspicious and failing to obey the first rule of dealing with suspicious-acting people even when they're someone you should trust: get away, THEN call for help/backup. Doubly so when they're visibly armed. Except she has to go and demand the car keys, which is a bridge too far, and leads to him threatening to call Nathan and getting shot in the head as a result. I do appreciate that Emily Rose has changed her body language again to that of a person who's not trained in modern police methods of using firearms - if anything at all, she moves like a gunslinger out of the old West, or, y'know, out of Dark Tower. One shot, precise aim, no need to support with the other hand. Maybe more like a fencer, standing sideways? She's weapons-trained on something, with that stance, just not modern firearms and she's not using Audrey's muscle memory to use it in a way we'd consider proper technique. So now she has a car and a demonstrated lack of caring about the lives of people who Audrey Parker had no significant connection to and/or no ability to help Mara with information now that she needs it.

Let's have a couple of quick updates on how people are doing with their various searches when we come back from the break. We start off with Duke parking somewhere that looks suspiciously familiar, like a house we saw last season when we were chasing Jennifer's alleged birth parents; alas, it's just background so it's likely that it's just stock housing, a convenient place to park the jeep. He's got his map out again, no major visible progress there, and a phone call! It's Carl! Who's Carl? Hell if we know, but he's got a report of a fishing boat with a bunch of debris from the lighthouse, no bodies yet. Duke is annoyed that he got out of metaphorical bed for this and tells him to call him back when he actually has something. Hey, no bodies is progress, right? Over to Dwight, who is on the phone with apparently an engineer trying to engineer a plausible story. Like you do when you're the resident cleaner! Unfortunately that's when he gets a new mess to clean up in the form of a flipping SUV. Flipping several times. That's really not good. Dwight runs to the mess to check on the driver who, we don't get a status on him but if he's not dead I'll be impressed. Oh, and his mouth and eyes are sewn shut this time. Well, yeah, that would probably cause someone to wreck their car. Yeah, we've been ignoring the ep title because really now, if you don't know the See/Hear/Speak No Evil monkey I don't know what to tell you. (K: Honestly, they're only slightly behind the cymbal monkey for creepy statues/toys you should run a mile from.)

Over at the Black House Coffee someone's discovered Mara's sloppyass work. Nathan's on the scene, Duke is freaking out as he gets to the scene except that Nathan stops him and tells him it's not Jennifer. Duke is... relieved, but less so than I'd expect of him, almost. Though that's probably because Jennifer's still missing, and it's even odds whether or not he's checked all the possible locations. Black House Coffee is one! To no one's surprise, given Mara's poking at the thinny. Nathan brings the threads together and Duke concludes, given that Mara's still stomping around looking for things, that she doesn't have Jennifer yet. Reasonable conclusion! And also a hopeful one, by that expression. Oh Duke honey. Our meta knowledge tells us he's going to be grieving a while, and that kind of hurts. All the more so since if he's expressing other Troubles at random he can't even cry, now. Nathan's phone rings while we're all contemplating how much this is going to suck for him. Vince has Cabot's journal! Away we go.

To yell at Vince for not using white cotton gloves on a five hundred year old journal. WHITE. COTTON. GLOVES. Or at least stop shaking it. Were you all born in a barn? Well, maybe Dave was, but. Don't answer that. Apparently Dave hid the book behind King Tut, which is possibly where he hid his porn stash when they were teenagers (enjoy that mental image), or whatever, either way it's not a very well hidden from Vince place. At any rate, either Vince speaks ancient Mi'kmaq or Cabot did and translated it, he gets distracted going off on a linguistic tangent which, okay, endears him to us a little, and eventually gets to the point that the Mi'kmaq spoke of ancient places where the veil etc etc thins. I will now take a victory lap around the couch I've been hiding behind because haven't we been talking about thinnies since last season's recaplyses? I believe we have! They then conclude that Mara's looking for Jennifer to open up the door like she did back in the cave and, not that anyone right now is talking about it, but like she did with the barn, without the aid of the book. So, what, Jennifer can open doors to pocket dimensions by herself, and needs the amplification of the book to open thinnies to other entire worlds? If that's the phrase and that's all the accurate wording there. It's at least a theory to be going on with. There are five thinnies in Haven! Or at least in Haven that anyone's found so far. Five is good, it's not as bludgeony as three but, oh, okay, now there are three, so, yes, let's all have a round of booze. And applause if you like, but booze is better. So, okay, Nathan, Duke, and Dwight each will take one of the remaining thinnies, and Vince can stay back and look worried and fuss over his brother. (If we're very lucky, and worm information out of him on camera. We won't be, but I live in hope.) Duke is still pissed about Mara going after Jennifer but, interestingly, Nathan doesn't say a word about this to Vince despite having already made mutterings about not trusting Dwight with information about Mara in case someone gets trigger happy. That's. Interesting. If I were Nathan I wouldn't trust Duke's anger with Maraudrey, but there's any number of reasons why Nathan would be more sympathetic so, sure, we'll go with that.

Cut to Nathan driving out onto the beach where one of those thin spots is... in the water? Which, okay, yes, visible and approachable when the tide is right, but did you know there's an entire group of Troubled people in Haven who can, in fact have to, go in the water? I believe they're called the FUCKING GODDAMN GLENDOWERS AUGH. What the HELL. This may not be a deliberate connection but given this show I'm not calling it either way, and either way the Glendowers are still nagging at us from all the way back in seasons one and two, being tied in with Haven back to the Crocker Box. Grrr. So, tide, Nathan not being a Glendower has to wait until it's far out enough to get to the thinny. Nathan, go hide your goddamn truck and wait for Mara with some stealth. No? No. Dwight, on the other hand, is in the woods with a taser! Dwight, you are the crunchiest of underbrush crunchers, you're an ex-Ranger, we actually do expect better of you. Oh, wait, there he goes. No, there he doesn't go stealthily Dwight. Roll better stealth rolls. Because Mara doesn't even have to turn around, she just draws and fires three times in the air and Dwight is knocked back to the ground. Admittedly largely for dramatic effect, as is the interesting slomo usage with accompanying whoomp-whoomp-whoomp almost helicopter noise. Bullets don't hit with that much force, but all in all, it works. And Mara goes off on a cackling tangent that at least gives us our answer: Yes, this Trouble worked on just about any gunpowder projectile. Not sure why gunpowder so specifically, but we'll go with it. Yeah, a vest might stop bullets, but it's not going to do dick for a cannonball to the chest, you're pretty much gone with that. Also by the sound of what she's saying that Trouble might have been inflicted as a sort of bodyguard Trouble, or rather as she calls it, cannon fodder. Certainly with some Hendricksons around she or William wouldn't have had to worry about getting shot. Ouch. Double ouch because this is when she grabs his taser and uses it on him, giggling. Triple ouch. Dwight disabled, she goes and tries to poke the thinny and, nothing. You can just about see her realize wait a fucking minute here and, no, two thinnies shut (and one exploded, let's not forget) is not likely a coincidence. Or an accident, as she says. Though why she thinks Dwight knows is beyond me, I think she's just expressing anger, here. Dwight says that if she sews him up he won't be able to tell her anything, which is a less than empty threat to her considering she's not the one doing it or having given it. As he finds out! And then he is mocked for being the stand-up guy who is a step behind everyone else. And then he's tased again. Poor Dwight. He really is not catching any breaks this episode, although I wonder if this will result in a break of some kind. Because if I were him, I'd start getting fed up with people not telling me shit I needed to know, especially after years of taking care of the town and putting my own life at risk.

Nathan has all the exasperation you would expect out of someone on a stakeout with that much emotional investment to it. Stakeouts aren't fun at the best of times, and this is anything but. And then we get a look at Audrey's old lip gloss in the passenger-side door of the car, and a flashback, because that is how memories work, to s1 when Nathan could feel again, even briefly. Flower petals against his lips with sensory overload, and the beginning of his serious infatuation with AudSarLu, the one person whose touch he can feel even when Troubled. (Reminder: this is not actually a good basis for a relationship, you guys. The things Nathan and Audrey have been through together, THAT is a decent basis for a relationship. It makes us wonder how much of this desperation is Nathan wanting to be touched again; we know that lack of touch is in and of itself a severely traumatic experience.) I will now pause to SCREAM TO THE HEAVENS about roses and their ties to the Dark Tower universe: the tower itself stands amidst a sea of red roses, and there's a single red rose in a vacant lot that's the Tower in another form, that they have to protect. White Tower/Dark Tower, maybe? Maybe a lighthouse tower that's fallen three times now? (Three shall be the number of your fate.) It's likely that they're more thieving imagery than drawing direct parallels and allegories for the moment, but they are damn well thieving imagery left right and center.

The phone ringing throws Nathan out of his memories and into getting updates from Dwight, namely that Mara came, tasered him, tried to get the thinny open, named it a thinny and blamed them for closing the damn things in the first place. Plus, oh, she doesn't appear to know where Jennifer is. So maybe Jennifer's the one closing the thinnies! An excellent surmise based on what data they do have, namely that Jennifer's the only one who's shown any sign of being able to open and close doors to other worlds prior to this (the lighthouse, the barn to get Audrey back last season), but I'm still side-eying Dave. A lot. Dwight is not going to coordinate with Duke just 'cause you say so, Nathan, he believes that Mara's not behind the sewing Trouble and therefore he'll deal with protecting the rest of the town while Nathan hares off after the Maraudrey related issues. Which is actually a pretty normal split of responsibilities for them, and Nathan. Fucking tell Dwight things. NATHAN. At least he does care, evidenced by the resigned be-careful. The irony here, of course, is the Duke's responsible for the sewing Trouble. As the cut over to Nathan calling Duke and the elided update tells us! Duke is dancing with pride all THAT'S MY GIRL, Jennifer's staying off the radar and not contacting anyone because Mara has access to all Audrey's resources. If we'd had even a single cut to indicate Jennifer really was there and working as Duke believes, I would buy this explanation! As it is we just feel increasingly sorry for him. I think the closest we get to normal-Duke this ep is him cackling about never letting Dwight hear the end of it, when Nathan gives him the be-careful speech, tacked on with Mara taking Dwight down. Oh honeys. Nathan will now return to his boringass stakeout. He didn't even bring fast food, that's how upset he is.

Over at the hospital Dwight walks in to find Gloria slumped backwards in a chair mouth open. Which at least tells us that she hasn't had her faceholes sewn up, but the music is ominous and tense and building to something. Thankfully, given that it's Gloria, it's building to her jerking awake for comedy value rather than something that killed her jumping out at Dwight. Aww, Gloria. Thank god, we do love you. She is not in the least embarrassed about being caught sleeping, openmouthed, possibly snoring, probably drooling, by the police chief. She will instead snark about babies and old people needing sleep, old people more than babies. Did I mention we love Gloria? Sadly Dwight has no time for banter, it's straight to business and the police archives say that this sewing Trouble has happened before. But in '29. Which is a full cycle before Sarah, so that Trouble's been gone a long time. Gloria screams for the Intern! Well, shouts. Calls. Vicki, still adorable as the intern, rebukes her for potentially waking the baby and passes off the requisite folder and between last season and this we get the feeling this happens a lot. She's probably sitting offscreen doing her paperwork with a stack of files relevant to recent cases next to her just waiting for Gloria to go "Intern!" Anyway. Despite the number of cases there seems to have been only one death, died of suffocation, or at least only one death where records either were kept or survived. Apparently Lucassi saved all the records and was going to write a screenplay, and that was when we pegged Lucassi for the Stephen-King-alike and started cackling madly. More than usual. At any rate, now we have the obvious question of why is the Trouble back now, after three cycles? Well, two cycles and during the last very abnormal cycle. Dwight is off to find out! Please don't get sewn, Dwight.

Nathan's stakeout has turned to Nathan standing on the beach with binoculars not paying the slightest fucking bit of attention to anyone maybe coming up behind him. Like Maraudrey. With a gun, this time in something closer to a standard Weaver stance except too close. I do appreciate that he's having a moment of awesome right here where he tries to disarm her, he does know that she's dangerous and because Nathan is Nathan and has excessive martyr tendencies he's trying to bring her in alone. And to be fair, if she has all Mara's powers back, we know that William healed right up from a bullet wound when the hospital was inconveniencing him last season. What would be more helpful would be, I don't know, a pit trap or something, Nathan, something that's not muscle against muscle. Because maybe he could've taken Audrey in sparring, but Mara isn't normal-human and Nathan is both overtired and emotionally exhausted, so the question of how much of her hypothetical super-powered skillset she has to make use of to subdue him is kind of moot. I do appreciate the attempt! I just wish it looked less like running into a brick wall named Mara. Who thinks she can make him feel a bullet through his head, and I wouldn't bet against her on that score. P.S. binoculars around your neck make a GREAT impromptu garrote, Nathan, now is the time to start considering vulnerabilities like an assassin more than a cop. Think like Duke. Okay, I'll accept thinking like a cop when he gets to his feet and starts putting pieces together, I do wish he wouldn't show his hand about how much he's figuring out in front of Mara, but he's also got a longstanding habit of bouncing his thought process off an Audrey-shaped person. Sigh. So, no, she's not having a good day either, Nathan knows about all the thinnies and that they're closed and withholds the belief that Jennifer's closing them by taunting her a second time. As he does. Because she's got a gun, Nathan, which is a taunt that holds very little water with him at this point, not least because Maraudrey could be flinging Troubles around. Would be if she could, if she's as much like William as she's acting and as William believed. She needs the black death truffles (black goo, I like death truffles better) in order to Trouble people, and she thinks William's hidden them, not that they're lost at the bottom of the ocean with the lighthouse, the thinny, and the labyrinth of weird. That may be wishful thinking, but then she goes on to explain how they're the aether, the functional equivalent of ultimate life force or chi/ki, holds the universe together or pulls it apart. Which sounds, since we're pulling all the Dark Tower parallels, references, and allegories out and tapdancing on them, closest to the Black Bend/Thirteen of Maerlyn's Rainbow, a powerful set of spheres that represent the Beams of reality holding up the Dark Tower, and the Black Bend itself representing the Tower and filled with all the evil of the void. Okay, we're calling that one more allusion than straight parallel. At any rate. Maraudrey would like William back so he can get her the goddamn aether, unless Nathan would like to help her? No, he's not that far gone yet and she hasn't been hitting the right buttons for him to fold like a bad poker hand. But she'll kill him last! Yeah, that's not inspiring partnership or a willingness to help. It is inspiring Nathan to fling himself at this brick wall some more, probably out of assuming there's nothing left to lose, take a step forward and assert that Audrey won't let Mara kill him. Otherwise he'd already be dead! That's… not a totally erroneous assumption, but she does need to find some allies somewhere, and the people who know the most are absolutely the place I'd start, were I in Mara's shoes. And that said, she also does look like she's fighting off memories from Audrey, so it's possible Nathan's not wrong. It's just that him not being wrong might get him killed before he gets vindicated, and not necessarily from a direct shot. I mean, the narrative will probably protect him mostly, but that's not actually good for his internal character growth, I don't think.

Over at one of those ubiquitous white houses, so, okay, not a significant house then, we start with a shot of those creepy fucking monkeys. The current owner thinks they're ugly as hell, and I would agree and raise him from ugly to fucking unnerving, and for Dwight even more so when he points out the stitching is identical to the stitching that people now have on their eyes and mouth. Ew. Dwight prods Henry some more about his family history of Troubles, and the way he says "My family doesn't have anything to do with that" calls to mind the division between Troubled and non-Troubled in season two (and three, to an extent). Dwight points out that previously four men were found sewn up like this and they all worked for the Barrow family, so, um. Yeah. Henry doesn't know but his mother does! And she hoped he'd never have to find out. We've heard that before.  ... we haven't heard this before, Chief Erickson, what the fuck? Who screwed that one up, the writer or the character? Or the actress, for that matter. Argh. We'll see if it repeats and it's a retcon or just a screw-up, but anyway, back to the relevant information. Constance was the last person to have the Trouble, Colette's great grandmother. She "fell down a flight of stairs" and the curse seemed to die with her, along with the actual story of what happened with Constance Barrow's death. Apparently there was a man involved. A man named Crocker, perhaps?

I think so! Given that the exact next scene is Dwight walking up on Duke, who has some expanded theories on where Jennifer might be and what she might be up to. Dwight stops him at 'Mara caused the sewing Trouble,' explaining that it's an older Trouble from the Barrow family until Constance Barrow was murdered. Again, Dwight says his grandfather was the prime suspect but given when we met Roy in 1956 he was a young man, it's probably Duke's great grandfather. Either way, A Crocker Did It, and this is older than Mara's return. They get as far as running down the two victims before Duke puts it together, because these are smart men who use their smarts. Even when it hurts. And it does hurt, poor Duke. He didn't want harm to come to those guys. William had said in the cave that they were all in Duke, and now he understands what that means. And! And he's sharing it with Dwight! Oh boys. Come here let me hug you. Gingerly. I don't want you to kill me pls Duke. So, okay, between this, the bloody handprint he left (Bad Blood 4x03, the Troubled blood monster), the ghosts of dead people guy (Sins of the Fathers 2x12), Jordan's Trouble that Wade got (Countdown 4x06), and who knows what all else in the bloodline? It is going to suck out loud to be Duke very, very quickly. Dwight will highlight this for us after we get back from the ad break, at which point Duke is now even more desperate to find Mara. More so than Jennifer, possibly. He even says out loud that Mara started the Troubles (with William, let's not forget that jackass!) so maybe she can end them too. This is news to Dwight. It being news to Dwight is news to Duke! Basically no one has been telling Dwight anything, as Mara said. Come on, you know he's thinking about what she said. I'd be thinking about what she said. And what she was trying to accomplish when she said it. And, okay, Vince has an excuse, being distracted with his hospitalized brother, but Nathan has no goddamn excuse, and everyone knows it. Even being distracted by Maraudrey, Dwight knowing more about Mara can only help him help Nathan track her down, and Nathan is not sharing. Bad Nathan.

Speaking of people who tell nobody anything useful, oh look, it's the Teagues. Vince would like to wake his brother up and ask him some very important questions. (Like, are you a very important person? Do you have a tower?) Alas, no, that's not going to be possible, because Dave's been hitting the morphine button. As you do when you've got multiple bullet wounds and walked a mile or more to get to a road from which you could be picked up and taken to the hospital; frankly it's a miracle he's still alive. So we have another look at Dave's hallucinations/memory of what happened in the cave, still that death-from-above angle which I still don't think is purely artistic choice. We start, though, with flashes of the labyrinth floor, back and forth until we get the super-close-up of going into Dave's head and we see a woman standing in the center of the circle. I can't, actually, with the blurring, tell if that's Audrey or Jennifer. I think Audrey, or maybe Mara, though she appears to be holding something that might be book-shaped. There's a lot of don't do this, no, desperate faces and taser up (good Nathan) and everyone flailing at it. Dwight being dragged backwards by an unseen person or force, Nathan with his hands out and empty, and even Audrey backing away. And it's all from Dave's POV so it looks like he's the thing they're afraid of, which is interesting. Suggests either he did something physically or he has a mental link now with whatever they saw, at the very last, in that cave. Kitty wants to hit me for the suggestion (K: No no. Just maim a little.) that William is now possessing Dave, I insist that I'm helping, everyone has to share the goddamn misery. Or Dave's got some other kind of mental link now to Maraudrey and that's what they were backing away from. Or we have a third option which is that there's an unknown force wandering around! JUST WHAT WE WANTED. Because what this clusterfuck needs is more new players.

Meanwhile on the beach, Maraudrey will proceed to demonstrate completely fucking awful gun safety and protocol, her arm wavers as she points it in the general direction of Nathan. Actually a couple times I think it goes down to about crotch-level, which just gives me all of the Losers flashbacks. (Now imagine the Losers in Haven. You're welcome. Dwight needed more explosions, really.) Nope! This thinny is also sealed. Nathan will now proceed to mock her about it being Jennifer's doing, I guess on the grounds that if all but the last of the thinnies, the one Duke's at, are sealed, then there's a good chance all of them are. Maraudrey thinks this is ridiculous and will even tell Nathan why, presumably because she thinks there's not much he or anyone can do about it. This scene really was set up to reveal Jennifer's body at low tide, by the way, and I guess I'm glad they haven't done that yet but I'm not too sanguine about her chances next episode. Maraudrey insists that Jennifer doesn't have the power to close all the thinnies like this, just acts as a conduit between worlds. So… what made it possible for her to close the lighthouse thinny? Or did she not do that entirely? Or was it the book? INQUIRING MINDS. Also insufficient data. Nathan will now display his conviction that Mara's trapped here, both in that body and in this world, and there's no getting William back, and the other thinny will be closed. Because if all of that is true then he can, in theory, work with what he had with Audrey in an attempt to bring her memories back to prominence! That's a very cute idea, Nathan, now stop reading/watching the Winter Soldier arc assuming it even exists in your world, this isn't the same deal, quit it. (Apparently the media we consume is on a running theme of memory-identity-martyr complexes LOOK THERE IS NO TYPE HERE, OKAY, SHUT UP.) On the… semi upside? Insisting and insisting and insisting that Audrey's in there and he's going to get her out and their love will conquer all (oh look that's come up again) and doesn't compare against Mara and William's love… that finally gets him shot. I don't know if that's because he brought up William and Mara still does care deeply about the psychotic fucker, or because being reminded that Nathan loves another woman (who used to?) occupying this body is painful. We know Mara can experience something like love, so it's not beyond the realm of belief that being so viscerally and loudly not wanted as herself while being looked at like she's the sun hurts now. Whether or not that gets Nathan anywhere other than shot in the arm is another question entirely. And it is in the arm, it looks like she pulls the shot which should've been center-mass. Which is interesting. And then even though we know Nathan could get up and get himself shot again, he stays down, placing himself under her power in a very visible display and one of the few sensible things he's done all episode. Honestly, yes, if you accept his premise that nothing but getting Audrey back matters, including his own life and the lives of the entire rest of Haven, I can buy every action he takes. It's just that that ignores that RIGHT NOW, Audrey ain't home, and Mara's running around shooting and tasering people for shits and giggles. Which makes this both selfish and DANGEROUS and I can't stand behind it; see the end of Cap2 for a direct contrast. The best we can say for Nathan here is that he's trying to keep Mara away from everyone else for a long period of time. And it works right up until he's expecting to die, goes out with "I'll always love you, Parker," and she… can't shoot him. It's really hard to tell, without actually being in her head, whether that's a genuine internal argument with Audrey-in-her-head or just Mara thinking of something. I assume, because the writers are evil bastards, that Audrey really is still in there trying to pull the strings, but this leads to a whole truckload of ethical questions, like, okay, sure. That was a pretty horrific punishment for pretty horrific crimes, does that mean that Mara's personality and choices don't matter now, that we should just cram Audrey back on there? What about all the other people AudSarLu has been over the years, some of whom we don't even know? What say do they get in this, since Mara's got all their memories too? How does that even work, the various personalities crashing into each other? Is that just, is that fair, is that right, and are we going to claim that essentially causing death of/trapped personality of the original is a-ok because she was evil? If so, what does that make us, or anyone else in Haven?

While you enjoy chewing over those meaty ethical questions, because I'm not asking them rhetorically and I don't think there's actually a good answer here - we do have a needs of the many situation and on the other hand I don't think wiping someone's personality is ever, ever justified or right, let's talk some other patterns we didn't have a good place to drop in. Back in Dark Tower, we've got the Drawing of the Three (and not Tree as I've been mistyping it in chat all day; if Yggdrasil itself shows up in person rather than on the box along with that whole mythology we've got a whole OTHER problem on our hands) (K: I'm just going to leave Yggdrasil-as-Rose here.),  which I think we can safely say corresponds pretty well to last season. The Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows, and the Pusher were the three tarot-esque names given to them in DT; I think we can safely call Dave the Prisoner and William the Pusher. Jennifer, presumably, is the Lady of Shadows who exists only due to the shadow of the barn? Maybe? The other option, of course, is that Maraudrey is the Lady of Shadows. Still and nonetheless, it makes for some interesting parallels, and those of you who want to poke at them further can go read King, or plunge into wiki-surfing.

Next week on Haven! Dwight is being the voice of reason, Maraudrey is tasering Vickie and ripping up a sketch in front of another thinny, that can't be good. Also some random nurse with her mouth sewn up, Nathan with HIS mouth sewn up and Duke looking horrified and helpless. Tubes full of what might be black death truffles. Dwight telling someone to stay out of his way, there's really way too many options for who he's talking to. Horror-movie type pans down a hospital. Maybe Maraudrey is going after Dave as a potential other conduit? Or something. The this-season-on is only slightly more illuminating: Gloria wants answers, Mara says she and William still have work to do, there's an explosion in something that looks an awful lot like the old bar(n) where Lexie DeWitt spent awhile talking to William. Lots of Maraudrey and Nathan being a hostage, or looking like a hostage, or getting hit, or threatened, or anything else you care to name. Duke insisting that Audrey's gone, Duke saying they'll throw everything they've got at her who's evidently supposed to be Maraudrey but I wouldn't bet on that being wholly accurate. Maraudrey in bed dropping her bra on the floor. Who the hell knows who she's actually talking to, who she is at the time, if she knows who she is at the time, if that's really a sex scene… in short, oh look, it's well-done trailer editing that doesn't tell us anything substantial beyond the themes. Enjoy the screaming about insufficient data; we know the Haven writers will.