[Warning: The below contains spoilers for Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches Season 2 Episode 6, “Michaelmas.”]
New Orleans got a break from those chaotic Mayfairs this week as Rowan (Alexandra Daddario), Lark (Ben Feldman), Moira (Alyssa Jirrels), and Cortland (Harry Hamlin) headed to Scotland in search of demon-on-the-go Lasher (Jack Huston). And it was there that they met a new batch of Mayfair men who welcomed them into their own brand of crazy.
Jonathan Hession / AMC
Arriving just in time for Michaelmas, which is apparently a religious feast celebrating the end of the harvest through unsettling costumes and masks made of human skin, our traveling troupe almost immediately winds up in a mass. Moira goes missing, there’s no room at the inn they’ve booked themselves, and everyone in town seems to specialize in side-eyeing the newcomers. That is, until a fine young lad named Hamish is tasked with delivering Rowan, Cortland, and Lark to what turns out to be the home of Cort’s brother, Ian (Ian Pirie), a.k.a. Hamish’s dad.
While that whole situation develops — there’s axe throwing, brotherly story-swapping between Cortland and Ian, a little spicy time for Lark and Rowan, who also finds time to convince soft-brained Hamish into telling her she can find Lasher via the tunnels beneath Ian’s house — Lasher himself is being prepped for his wedding to Emaleth (Hennesi Schmidt).
Leigh Page / AMC
It’s surprisingly lighthearted at times, yet key to expanding the Mayfair lore. Throughout the hour, we get a ton of new information on how Ian and Cortland were played against one another by their demented father Julien (totally tracks and inspires some of Hamlin’s funniest stuff), a look at how the Scottish Mayfairs are magically bonded so that if anyone tries to harm them, other family members feel the pain, and even hints as to why the impending nups are so important to some of these folks. If you have read the books, you know something super grisly is in the works.
But just as vital, perhaps even more so to the overall continuity of AMC’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe, is what Ciprien (the perpetually watchable Tongayi Chirisa) gets up to in during the episode. Called to the Talamasca motherhouse in Amsterdam, ostensibly for a hearing about his losing Lasher to (the now deceased) Albrecht (Dennis Boutsikaris), our intuitive agent runs into a crafty Interview With the Vampire Easter Egg when his Talamasca escort Polina (Mariana Novak) asks a security guard if he’s having a busy day.
“Ever since Daniel Molloy’s book, it’s been all hands on deck,” he replies. “And now this business…”
Jonathan Hession / AMC
So we now know that Mayfair is happening after the Season 2 finale of IWTV, which revealed that Eric Bogosian‘s Daniel Molloy had both been turned and published Interview With the Vampire, which now has the undead community in an uproar over Louis’s (Jacob Anderson) myriad revelations about their existence.
After that fun lil’ bit, Polina and Sip are greeted by Motherhouse mother hen Anamika (Franka Potente), who reveals to Sip that the case against him has been dropped and that he’s actually been brought to the Venice of the North because they need his singular gift of channeling information via touch to decipher a clue to Albrecht’s whereabouts.
“We always walk into these episodes not knowing anything in the season because we literally get the script and we’re [immediately] reading them to see what happens,” Chirisa told TV Insider at the start of the season. “So I didn’t know what was going to happen until maybe a week before we started filming. But yeah, I think just the journey of opening up the Talamasca world has been wonderful to see.”
Chirisa also admitted that he was thrilled with the show’s decision to dig deeper into the world of the Talamasca. Not only does it help set the stage for the in-production spinoff centering on the supernatural CIA, but it also allowed for his character to step into a more heroic era and deepened his roots in the Immortal Universe beyond Sip’s work with the Mayfairs.
“That was really nice for me because I remember being on set, I’m looking at certain things, I’m like, oh, we really do have this [from the books],” he recalls. “This is nice. Because it was like, all right, what do we have other than the name Talamasca?”
“And then there is that relationship with Albrecht, the way it came full circle of him being like the surrogate father that Sip never had and then to experience what he experienced, to know that this man wasn’t who he said he was. It forces Sip for the first time to have independent thoughts outside of Albrecht and the Talamasca, despite his feelings towards Rowan-slash-the Mayfair family; the mandate becomes very clear because he’s now treading a very thin line smack in the middle between the Talamasca and the Mayfairs. So his journey is definitely something that is now motivated by seeking truth and for the first time seeking truth in his own terms.”
And that becomes vividly clear when a fed-up Sip reads Anamika for filth over everything from calling him away from America for some bait-and-switch mission to the organization’s long-running lack of transparency to how they took him in as a child to turn him into a weapon rather than a respected member of the team. “I was never the carpenter, I was the hammer.”
“He’s no longer listening to just the objective of the Talamasca where they say, ‘We need to have Lasher in our possession, no questions asked.’ Because every time he probes, he’s not getting anything other than the mandate to just capture him and bring in,” continues Chirisa. “So because of that little piece of paper he saw in the fire, it starts to uncover certain aspects of Lasher that he didn’t know. And now when he’s brought to the motherhouse, I think this is leverage for him to say, ‘Hey, look, if you want me to keep going this way, you need to give me a little bit more because I’m making independent decisions right now. And I’m very happy to walk away if you don’t want to cooperate and comply.’ Because if I’m just a tool, I don’t want to be a tool. I want to be somebody that’s informed so I can make these decisions that will benefit not only just the Talamasca, but for the sake of the family… That’s when we start to see the independence of Sip’s thinking outside of the Talamasca, which was really, really interesting to explore.”
At the end of his first interaction with Anamika, Sip hits her with an ultimatum: If you want my help, make me the head of the New Orleans division. Whether or not she agrees to the promotion remains to be seen (the woman is as unflappable as her pristine blow-out), but this is definitely a major step for Sip — one that could either pay off big time or put him in the crosshairs of the worst enemies he could imagine.
Leigh Page / AMC
“He’s ready to risk it all,” confirms the actor, adding that his character’s hand has been forced by the Talamasca’s lack of transparency. “[He’s] like, ‘Look, I’m going to resist you and I’m going to try to figure this thing out on my own. And if it costs me my job-slash-life, so be it.’ Sip is not going to [buy] what they tell him as gospel truth, because obviously the math is not mathing.”
Hopefully, he is able to put two and two together soon and get himself over to Scotland, because the last two episodes of the season are INSANE and Rowan is probably going to need some assistance from as many otherworldly powered pals as possible.
Mayfair Witches, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC (Streaming Sundays on AMC+)
