Shadowhunters - 'Parabatai Lost'

The morning after, Shadowhunter style.

We begin as we ended last week's episode, with Jace and Clary free, Gretel the werewolf dead, and no real idea what the fuck is happening with Dot.

At least one oversight comes back to bite our putative heroes on the arse, as Jace washes up on the shores of the East River right next to Gretel's body, and instead of doing anything smart like, say, urging the bystander who finds them to yes, please call the police, he instead tells her not to, acts like a scary person and runs away before Luke and the other werewolf cops show up to reclaim their own and draw unflattering conclusions. Being the best and brightest that the Institute has to offer, he then goes to a werewolf bar to use a phone to call Clary, where he is pegged for Gretel's kidnapper and chased until he collapses and gets taken to hospital.

"Don't make me hex a bitch."

Meanwhile, Alec is fading after a part of him got lost trying to track his Parabatai bond to Captain Insensitive. This being TV, a coma naturally means flashbacks, and Alec relives his training with Jace, who was always a cocky little jerk, although the fact that it was instilled at a young age actually makes him a little more sympathetic, since it is clearly a taught rather than an acquired behaviour. We see them train and become a great team, Alec reluctant to undergo the Parabatai bond because he is in love with Jace, and Jace utterly insensitive to any such nuance.

Jace escapes the werewolves again at the hospital and tries to get to Alec at Magnus's loft, but when Aldertree finds that Alec has been removed from the Institute in, as is now traditional, direct opposition to his orders, Izzy has no choice but to make a deal; to bring Jace in, in exchange for helping him get to Alec in time to save him. It turns out that arresting him is about the only thing that gets him out of being eaten by werewolves, despite Luke's attempts to rein in the pack, so there's that.

"There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this..."

This episode, Clary mostly dithers and worries about Jace while lying to Aldertree. For the alleged heroine, she's really a bit of a sideshow this season. Jocelyn is in more of this episode, now apparently keen to protect 'Jonathan', which makes a change from shooting at him, and getting chewed out by Magnus for dragging him into this whole colossal clusterfuck in the first place. Simon has way more going on as his mother, frantic with worry, tries to contact him and he makes contact only to learn that Raphael has smoothed things over so that he can get back to finding Camille and bringing her in to face the music.

There is definitely a degree to which Shadowhunters suffers from old teen syndrome. The characters are supposed to be in their mid-to-late teens, but the actors are all in their twenties, which means that whenever they act like teenagers, I feel like they ought to just grow up and stop being so selfish(1). In particular, it probably does make sense that they would just run when they had the chance, but I still hope that Gretel's death will weigh on them, as well as whatever the hell is happening to Dot, because straight up the Warlocks are the bitches of this particular demimonde and helping out a Fray seems to be the fast-track to getting terminally screwed over. As a result, I don't much care for mother or daughter at this juncture, and am more sympatico with the warlocks and the werewolves, and even Raphael's vampire faction than either the Clave or the protagonists.

(1) Because frankly, they are hella selfish. I know the older Clave members are supposed to be hidebound and hard-hearted, but they make a lot of sense to me(2), and where the young protagonists are right it is frankly by chance more than by intent.

(2) Although a fair few of them are also complete jerks in their own way.