Shadowhunters - 'Morning Star'

"Leave me; I would brood."

We jump off last week's touching closing moment, with Jace violently rejecting the notion of Jocelyn's redeeming maternal love - Valentine raised him (in disguise), Valentine is evil (in disguise), therefore he must be evil; or something. Seriously, he seems to have suddenly decided that he's not actually the hottest thing since Pop Tarts, but is in fact intrinsically and inescapably evil; like Pop Tarts. That's why he couldn't stab his father through the heart like a good person would have done.

Alec argues with his parents about his oh-so public Warlock* snog and then goes looking for Lydia, finding her all comatosey but muttering 'Hodge'. Did Hodge attack her? Was Hodge also attacked? Fortunately, the Institute has all kinds of surveillance cameras so they can see that he was the traitor, and that he took a ring from the attack zombie. If any of those background Shadowhunters ever watched those cameras this series would have been much shorter. As it is, Hodge goes straight to Valentine and hands over the Cup, and Valentine wastes no time creating his new army, having apparently put an ad on Craigslist: "Wanted; desperate and powerless to become new army of demon-hunting badasses. Must provide own black coat, minimum 3/4 length."

Jace goes after Hodge and Alec asks Luke to set the pack on his trail as well, all of them desperately overestimating the length of time it will take two men with pressing business and an awareness that the almost literal hounds of Hell are on their heels to meet up and hand over a goblet. The upshot of this is that everyone finds Hodge after he's handed over the Cup and after Valentine has kicked him to the curb for being a dodgy bastard with no loyalty. Jace cuts his hand off and, after Alec and Luke stop him killing Hodge, instead abducts him and forces him to lead him to where Valentine was, before he took his freighter full of Shadowhunter Nouveau on a cruise.

"Klaatu verada nictu!"

Meanwhile, Clary, Simon and Isabelle try to get an interview with Camille, but Raphael is understandably kind of pissed that these whiny teenagers keep showing up at his crib and demanding stuff from him. He lets them look through Camille's stuff, warning that she's got safe houses all over town. Clary and Simon head to the vaults while Isabelle spectacularly fails to delay Raphael, despite which they manage to wake up Camille, have a sass off, make a deal and be half way out before Raph superspeeds in.

They somehow take advantage of the daylight to escape with Camille and Simon, leaving the unification of the Downworld in tatters (for which I totally expect them to blame Raphael next season.) They recover the Book of the White in exchange for a writ confirming that Simon was turned into a vampire of his own free will, and are immediately overcome by a bout of complete suck and captured by Valentine's Shadowhunters without a whisper of effective resistance, allowing Valentine to coerce Jace into joining him to strike down the Emperor, end this pointless rebellion and rule the galaxy as father and son. Clary begs him not to go, assuring him he is a good person, somehow confusing an imperative survival decision with a moral choice.

Magnus wakes Jocelyn and Valentine addresses his Hitler Youth Imperial Stormtroopers Shadowhunters 2.0 from the deck of the freighter with Jace at his side.

End of Season 1.

After a pretty good run and the barnstorming melodrama of 'Malec', Shadowhunters descends into a desperate mess of convenience and bad decision-making for the final episode, 'Morning Star'. Jace's descent into desperation and 'is he evil?' is nothing short of meteoric, while Simon has turned into a sharp suited weasel and much of the plot moves forward by having everyone - and especially Magnus and the Lightwood siblings - unaccountably suck for the sake of timing. It feels as if they really wanted to go full season, and receiving a half-season order desperately tried to shoehorn most of the major plot twists into one episode instead of twelve. It's a shame, because other than being horribly rushed and, as ever, dominated by the unspoken assumption that Clary is always right and all other considerations should be set aside, the beats of the episode are okay; there's just too damned many of them.

The lacklustre finale aside, I will be back for Season 2, which is set to be a full-length series, so hopefully we won't get this kind of rush job again.

* I disapprove of the use of warlock as a generic term for male magic users, or in this case magic users in general. It's from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning 'oath breaker', and while I understand that the neo-Pagan community is keen to own former terms of oppression, reclaiming warlock is kind of like the Norwegian-Americans of Minnesota deciding to reclaim 'quisling'.