On this week’s episode of Haven, “Fear and Loathing”, we once again had the intersection of two different Troubles. I love when the show does this, because in a town like Haven, issues wouldn’t appear neatly one at a time. The first issue arises when everyone who looks at a certain girl sees whatever thing scares him or her the most. Audrey and Nathan track down the girl, Jackie, and discover that her affliction started a few months before, when her dad died, but had gone away for a few weeks and just reappeared that day. Around the time Jackie’s affliction came back, Nathan’s disappeared – he could suddenly feel things. Jackie and Nathan realized that they both got cuts shortly before their Troubles went away, so they conclude that someone is taking their afflictions through contact with their blood. (Part of the conversation in which they figure this out … Audrey: “Something strange is going on.” Nathan: “Bold statement.” Heh.)
It turns out that the culprit is Ian, a sometime associate of Duke’s, who is trying to destroy the town by putting together an 18th century children’s puzzle that an indentured servant named Tristram Carver had invented. (Among other things, this suggests that Haven was Troubled right from the start.) Carver went insane and his caretakers scattered the pieces of his deadly puzzle, so Ian used Jackie’s affliction to distract people by terrifying them so he could collect the pieces. Then he used Nathan’s to force himself down the Haven museum’s chimney (without feeling pain) in order to steal the puzzle board.
Ian only destroys one building in town before Duke notices that Ian can’t feel pain and our heroes figure out the whole thing. By then, however, Ian is holding Jackie and her boyfriend hostage on Duke’s boat, and starts a shootout with Nathan and Audrey when they arrive. They both shoot him, and for a moment it seems that Ian will die and Nathan will be rid of his affliction for good. But Nathan gets Ian to take Jackie’s affliction instead, thus sacrificing his chance at normalcy to allow her to look people in the eye again. Nathan later theorizes that Ian wasn’t working alone, so we’ll have to wait and see whether this plotline comes back at a future date. The Teague brothers take the puzzle pieces and promise to wrap them separately so no one can use them, but Duke clearly doesn’t trust them, so this could all return in an interesting way.
We should probably note our characters’ worst fears, while we’re on the subject. Audrey isn’t affected by Jackie any more than she is by most Troubles, but Audrey 2.0 sees a terrifying clown that they both (of course) remember from childhood. Duke sees a man with that recurring symbolic tattoo trying to kill him. One of the Teague brothers sees a woman, and has the following conversation with his brother:
“Your worst fear, was it Lucy?”
“No, I wish it was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not.”
So … basically I have no idea what’s going on there, but it seems important! And finally, Nathan DOES see something scary but we never find out what it is, so I can only assume that the answer to that mystery will come up later as well.
Meanwhile, Audrey 2.0 is still around, investigating things. She and Duke find a connection between Original Audrey’s Howard and Nathan’s father, and this leads them to a house where they find the copy of the vampire book Audrey gave Howard way back in the pilot. Again, this undoubtedly means … something!
Nathan starts the episode off at his father’s funeral, poor guy, but he’s quickly distracted when he begins feeling things. Duke – his enemy! They hate each other! They swear! – is clearly completely, sincerely delighted for Nathan, and then hilariously offers to procure him some girls, but Nathan turns him down. Instead, he goes on to have an awkward conversation with Audrey about whether it bothered her when she was the only person he could feel. She swears it didn’t, which is good, because they’re soon back to that status quo. At the end of the episode, she holds his hand across the table at Duke’s restaurant for a while, as though to make it clear that he won’t have to go entirely without feeling, and when she leaves he sniffs a rose and stares after her. Aww. Someone’s got it bad.
Duke, of course, is still claiming that he’s not actually helping Audrey and Nathan. You keep telling yourself that, hon. At one point, he tries to cast himself as an upstanding citizen demanding police protection, which leads to the best Duke/Nathan exchange of the episode: “I pay my taxes.” “No you don’t.” “Some of them.” “No … you don’t.” Oh, boys. Even Duke is starting to take things seriously by this point, though. At the end of the episode, he says that when people are scared, they either run or fight, and he advises Nathan that “I’d start planning for both.” Of course. This is Haven.
Photo Courtesy of Syfy