Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 16 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Dramas in the Witch House
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 5 | Aired on 11.19.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Caleb keeps having these dreams about Miranda's new heavenly existence, where she has parents and a little sister and all the pajamas she can wear. But what she's not really noticing is that everything is super creepy and her little sister Max is the creepiest of all, and her head goes completely around and she is bros with demons under the bed, and all kinds of bad things for little girls to be into.
The Gang takes apart that box Caleb was left by his Uncle Henry, who then died of fright. It's full of secrets and drawings and photographs and awesome flashbacks, but not much info. After another sleepwalking jaunt by Remy, and with dreamboat Dillon's help, they finally figure out that they need to break through the wall of the basement of the Vault coffee shop, which used to be a bank and now is a secret grave for dead weirdos.
Turns out that the original Caleb and Miranda were betrothed, and got married at sea right before the boat accident that claimed their 1918 version of the Five. Two other kids, Thomas and Esther, decided that by walling themselves up in the bank and starving to death they could make Caleb and Miranda reincarnate and break the Curse. It sounds nuts, but would explain why Caleb and Miranda look so much like Caleb and Miranda.
After several false leads -- some provided by The Grunwald, who seems interested in keeping them out of the house where Miranda actually is, and in fact urges Collins to dig up Miranda's bones to steal more of her hair at one point to keep this from happening -- they arrive at the house where Miranda and Caleb were going to live when they got married, and where our Miranda is now hanging out thinking it's heaven.
That was the saddest part to me. They work their way through a thousand scary things and when they finally get to the bedroom it's not all cozy and sweet at all: It's moldy and rotten and falling down, and she has no idea. She is fully in the trap, and it's kind of embarrassing but mostly sad for reasons I can't really verbalize.
Anyway, after all this travel through the creepy house -- including several run-ins with Max, who is the little Redcoat girl from earlier episodes and who starts jumping out at them randomly in her Redcoat outfit, singing nursery rhymes and talking in a demon voice -- they finally get Miranda to confront the demon impersonating her mother. That part is heartbreaking when she realizes she's been super dumb. Then Caleb remembers from his dream how the closet has a door in the back that goes out into the second-floor space over the yard, and everybody gets out except Caleb, who dies.
Even though he spent a lot of the episode making romance plans with Hanna Marin and even thinking about a visit to Rosewood to see her -- a huge step back toward romance and life -- once he's dead Caleb is cool with just settling down and being ghosts with Miranda. But she firmly sends him back to the real world, after a complicated but very sweet kiss goodbye that makes them both look like champs and very nice people.
At the hospital, everybody is very happy to see Caleb alive -- even Luke! -- but just when you think everything is going to be okay and they're going to figure everything out in January when he wakes up, Dillon heads off for coffee and a secret meeting with Max Redcoat, who is a fucking demon and therefore is no good to be friends with.
Dillon was too dreamy to be nice! Olivia should have kept him out of it but instead he helped her figure it all out and now they are back together! So he reveals to us that they (meaning him and his demonic buds, at the behest of various townspeople and maybe monsters or undead preachers) have been playing this whole season as a trap to get the Five into that house together, and that "He" is very pissed that their hard work was for nothing. Max seems worried, but then goes to some witch dimension and plays with ravens, so I guess her job stress is relative.
Next Year: Caleb wakes up, Miranda fucks around with The Grunwald's head, the Twins try to figure out Uncle Dracula's place in their lives, and we meet possibly the originators of the Curse, who seem like a cross between Watcher's Council assholes and the confused deacons of those Hawthorne stories where you end up accidentally a Satanist.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Caleb found another misplaced uncle, who went nuts in the middle of the night and then gave him a key to an underground county office that eventually produced a magical box. Miranda was very upset that Uncle Collins was keeping pieces of her dead body around, even though clearly it is a tradition having to do with the Curse, which is clearly not of his doing. When Caleb bitched at him about it, that old dracula bitched right back. Luke kissed horrible Tess, and Miranda ran off with something seeming to be her mom.
GHOST MORNING
Miranda: "Mom, why are we in that same bedroom as every other scene? Has this show been in Heaven the whole time? And if so, where is The Grunwald?"
Mom: "Yes. Pajamas all the time, for everybody."
Random Dad: "I am here also. Heaven means chocolate-chip pancakes for you."
Miranda: "Did you know that because of lovely bones-ing me?"
Mom: "Yes and here is a closet full of clothes!"
Miranda: "In life I wished I had more outfit options, due to being a poor orphan. Then I died, and there was just the one outfit. But now I am double-dead."
Parents: "Yep, that's why pajamas. If you die one more time you get a Prom dress. That you will never wear to Prom, due to your several deaths."
Like everything else in Ravenswood, the clothes immediately start whooshing around on their own, because they are haunted.
Miranda: "Wait, are these clothes haunted?"
Clothes: "Yes! By a little girl named Max."
Miranda: "Is this little blonde girl my sister?"
Parents: "No, we just found her in the yard. She seems pretty cool."
She is not! The second Miranda goes back to shopping in her Ghost Closet, the little girl Max's head turns completely around! That is not cool, Max! Put your head back the other way! It was okay when you were just playing with a blonde doll that was a smaller version of you with candlestick curls and a spooky expression -- that's totally normal and wouldn't faze us at this point -- but you turn your goddamn head back this very moment.
MIDNIGHT SOCIETY
But then, Caleb wakes up! I guess he was just dreaming about Miranda in Heaven. But with this show, usually Caleb's dreams are not really dreams but more like straight up what is going on with Miranda. So I guess what is going on with Miranda is: A mean, scary trick.