Shadowhunters - 'This Guilty Blood' and 'A Door Into the Dark'

"I know that some of you are concerned by rumours that I might be British..."

Welcome back to Season 2 of well-dressed YA adaptation Shadowhunters. We pick up where we left off, with brooding, troubled Jace on a ship full of proto-Shadowhunters with his father, and his brooding, troubled friends worrying about him; and to a lesser extent about the army of proto-Shadowhunters being created with the aid of the Mortal Cup.

About thirty seconds of in-universe time after choosing to go with his father, Clary turns up and Jace is so out of there. Unfortunately, it turns out that this Clary is actually Valentine in disguise. Remember this trick; we're going to see it a few times.

Back at the Institute, before you can say 'unsanctioned rescue mission' the Clave has stepped in and sent oily Brit Victor Aldertree to take control of the Institute in the name of the forces of Shadowhunter conservatism. His first act is to crack down on unsanctioned rescue missions, put out a dead or alive warrant for Jace and boot Luke, Magnus and Simon out of the Institute. Luke puts Simon up, but the rest of the pack insist that he kip in the storage shed, while Magnus has his first fight with Alec because Alec is being a dick about... well, everything. While giving Clary a hard time because Jace is her sole and blinding priority seems to be a sign of being a bad un, Alex gets no such free pass, and that's good.

"These aren't the druids you're looking for."

Less good is that Clary continues to get that pass. Aldertree, and even Jocelyn, rag on her about not trusting Jace, even - especially - when she tells her mother that Jace is actually Jonathan, her long-thought-dead son, but no-one decent, not even snobby Lydia, has a bad word to say about her and her constant telling people what they can and can't do, and what's right and what's wrong. Actually... Alec does call her on basically being a preachy know-nothing, but that's mostly chalked up to him being a dick.

Incontrovertibly dickish is Valentine, who has his son beaten in an attempt to mend fifteen years of absence and neglect with half an hour of quality abuse. He also explains that he made Jace stronger by means of in vitro injections of demon blood, because that's quality parenting right there. To make his wider point - that the Clave has become a worthless, bureaucratic anachronism - he takes Jace out to roust an unsanctioned, people-eating vampire nest. Noticing his power, the leader of the nest surrenders, but Valentine goads him into executing her.

Well... that seems to be the intended takeaway. Actually what happens is that Valentine goads her into attacking so that Jace can kill her in self-defence and be all conflicted and stuff without actually executing a vampire in cold blood.

And Clary pops up in time to see her mother take a shot at both Valentine and Jace, so... conflict!

"Is the semi-nudity strictly necessary?"
"We're going to say yes."

Moving on to 'A Door Into the Dark', Jocelyn tells Clary the demon blood story and Clary is all poo-poo, soulful eyes, you don't know him. This pisses Alec off, because bitch you don't know him, but Clary takes the moral high road of throwing in the towel and going back to art school.

No, really. Suddenly she's all 'I wanna normal life!'

Alec apologises to Magnus for being a tool, and persuades him to help him track Jace using tasteful nudity, although not before Magnus helps Simon to look for Camille in order to get Raphael off the hook over the illicit vamp nest, which was one of Camille's creations. This entails a trip to Agra and a wonderful sequence in which Simon stumbles about and Magnus reclaims all his stuff that Camille walked off with after their last breakup. Magnus Bane PI is still my fantasy spin off.

"Come on, son; just one little bit of brutal, frontier justice."

While Alec is risking his life with dodgy tracking magic, Dot shows up at Clary's school. Remember Dot? Apparently died, now covered in scary veins? I liked Dot; I'm glad to see her back. I hope she'll be around for a while now. She briefly calls Clary out on never looking for her, then portals her to the ship of fools where Clary unaccountably starts spewing Valentine's propaganda. It turns out Dot has enchanted her, but refuses to do so again, instead helping Clary and Jace to escape the ship, leaving Dot and the white-haired werewolf to face Valentine's idea of fair play.

Seriously; they don't even try and fail to rescue either of them. I'm pretty sure that Clary's plan didn't involve Dot escaping at any point. Not even to the stage of trying to persuade her and 'oh no, I'm too far gone with the creepy, Valentine mind-control mojo.'

The show has a new look for the new season, most notable in the fact that the seraph blades have shining runes along the blades instead of looking like knock-off toy lightsabres. The other visuals remain strong, although I don't really see much of the 'darker edge' that has been talked up a lot. Valentine is more visibly evil, but I wonder if that's just the necessity of creating a gradient between total evil, the garden variety douchebaggery of the Clave, and the 'heroism' of the leads, who would look pretty whiny, useless and self-centred if the grown ups weren't all blinkered, bigoted and/or scenery-chewing evil. It's good fun, but I really, really hope we aren't supposed to cheer unreservedly for our 'heroes'.