Jake's biggest weakness: reflective surfaces.

Note to self: if ever running a covert ops mission with Cassie Blake, she is definitely not allowed to name the operation, because she is terrible at it.  But you know what she isn’t terrible at? Using her DARK MAGIC to do cool shit.  Like accessing Jake’s early childhood memories of the most traumatic night of his life so that she can finally find out what happened on The Night Of The Fire™.  Finally!  You guys, it’s all happening!

First of all, let’s just be thankful that sixteen years (16 YEARS) after the fire, the boat wreckage is still completely untouched and in tact, just waiting for some teen witch sleuths to come on board and reveal the secrets of what happened.  Because if there is one thing that towns love to do, it’s to leave the morbid and definitely unsafe reminder of a town tragedy up for everyone to see for the rest of eternity.  And thankfully, Chance Harbor doesn’t seem to have fancy, big-city roadblocks like ‘investigations’ or ‘protocol’, which surely would have disturbed the remains of the fire and definitely would have prevented Cassie from finding her dad’s cool DARK MAGIC necklace that saved him from being killed.  Oh, yeah – Cassie’s dad is probably still alive, which is perfect because I’m pretty sure that Gran has just walked off the face of the earth, and let’s face it – Cassie needs adult supervision.

So…the big night.  Let’s talk about it.  It went down much differently than we’ve been led to believe!  It’s what one might call a GAMECHANGER (a word that, in my opinion, is overused to an eye-rolling degree, but in this case legitimately applies).  This whole time we’ve been told that Cassie’s dad, he of the DARK MAGIC, was the embodiment of evil who killed every one’s parents.  It turns out that the actual evildoers were the witch hunters, and they were able to do what they did by getting a good portion of the circle onside with a plan to kill John Blackwell, whose DARK MAGIC was surely a threat to them all.  But the witch hunters turned out to be evil!  Maybe the title ‘WITCH HUNTERS’ should have tipped the WITCHES off?  They killed a whole bunch of people (were those all members of the circle? ‘Cause that was a lot of bodies) and tried and failed to kill Blackwell using their Super Special Dark Magic Killing Plan – guess it wasn’t as special as they thought.

Also, Ethan was there (looking HILARIOUSLY adult, despite the sneaky addition of a youthful baseball hat – ALMOST FOOLED ME, SHOW!!), even though he’s always maintained that he wasn’t.  Ruh-roh.  You guys, everything is topsy-turvy!  Up is down! Black is white! Unfortunately, SADam appears to still be a miserable old coot, so we didn’t find out that he’s secretly been repressing a fun, exuberant personality or anything.  Maybe during sweeps?  Can you imagine if you were Cassie, sextined to be with him forever?  That would be my DARK MAGIC plan #1: cancel sextiny with SADam, the teenage senior citizen.

Speaking of SADam, I find his scenes with Diana hilarious, because he’s either blatantly pining for Cassie right in Diana’s face, or they are so awkward that I can’t help but laugh.  I feel like someone should tell them that they can stop driving to places together, you know?  Also, Diana needs to moveon.org immediately.  With anyone.  Now.  Please.

Back in memory land, we didn’t see what Charles and Dawn were up to on the Boat of Mystery, but we know that they were there.  We also didn’t see Cassie’s mom or Melissa’s parents, unless I missed them.  Cassie did bump into a young girl who could see her though and who tried to get her out – who was this?  Someone else on board doing memory recognizance?  One of the parents with some kind of connection to Cassie?  I’m guessing it wasn’t her mom, or Cassie would have recognized her, right?  When Cassie told Jake about her dad not being dead, they went and dug up his grave (actually, he dug while she watched, but whatever), discovering something that would change Cassie forever:

Kidding, they discovered that some animal had been buried in his place – classic switcheroo!!  John Blackwell is clearly a genius.  Again, it’s a good thing that the officials of Chance Harbor are so on top of things.  I imagine that if you went into the police station, everyone would be comically running around while this music blared in the background:

But last night wasn’t all memories and fire and necklaces!  There were also things happening on the parent front.  Charles was back, thank dog.  We all missed him last week, and last night he looked extra dreamy.

He and Dawn are in an official fight, so she decided to use her feminine wiles (and LIES) to get Ethan to do her bidding and get the crystal from Charles.  He did, and in the process got a little payback for that time that Charles almost drowned him in his own bar:

You guys, between the fact that young (ha!) Ethan was on the boat That Night and the the fact that he now has a working crystal, I’m a little worried.  What if Ethan is the evil one and Charles is the good one which would make so much sense because he’s SO PRETTTTYYYYYYYYYY??????

On top of all THAT, Faye did some things too!  She basically played the Katie Holmes role in Go!, which is a very excellent movie that also features Timothy Olyphant, so it’s obviously perfect.  Faye was stuck with a creepy drug dealer guy who was holding her hostage, but in an edgy, sexy way (Faye develops Stockholm Syndrome so easily), while Lee went out to score him some Devil’s Spirit (aka Magic Weed).  Did I mention that the new guy was creepy?

Yes, a new element was added to the mythology of the show – magic weed.  I’m waiting to see more before I decide how I feel about this, but so far it seems like a big lesson in how DRUGS ARE BAD and will KILL YOU, even if it’s JUST WEED.  Which, is obviously stupid.  But we learned that Eva, Lee’s ex GF, died from a magic weed overdose or something?  And then the episode ended with a classic after school special moment of Callum giving Faye a free sample of the stuff, presumably to get her hooked.  So…I don’t know.  WE’LL SEE.

The promo for the next episode is below, and FYI – it doesn’t air until February 2nd, so make some plans to go out next Thursday.  After you watch the promo, hit the comments and talk to me.  What did you think of ‘Witness’?  Theories on the mystery boat girl?  On stuff in general?  Hearing from you guys is the best part of writing about the show, so don’t be shy!