Episode 5 - Julien's Victrola

Mayfair Witches S02 E05 AMC Networks

From IMDb: Rowan demands Julien's help in finding Lasher; Moira probes Cortland's mind for important memories.

Since it will be two weeks until Episode 6, I thought I'd get right to it.  Well, those things and no matter what anyone thinks of the show, I'm still going to talk about the model (let's call it that) of the Mayfair house in Julien's afterlife.  If you've seen my images and/or video of my 3D model of the Mayfair house of the novels, which is always very much a work-in-progress, you probably won't be surprised.

When I was a kid, a popular book was The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright.  It's since been made into a TV movie, but it was about a girl whose frustration at having to be her sister's caretaker lands her on the doorstep of her aunt.  Long story short, her aunt had returned to the house, which had belonged to the girl's great-grandparents, to clean it out and prepare it for sale.  In the attic was a meticulously detailed dollhouse, an exact replica of the house that had belonged to the great-grandparents.  

The great-grandparents had been murdered thirty years earlier and the aunt, who had never married, blamed herself because she believed her boyfriend had committed the murders.  The dollhouse suddenly "comes to life", its lights turning on and the dolls, who were dolls of the great-grandparents, the aunt and the girl's father (who had been very young at the time), would end up in the places and positions they'd been at the time of the murders.

Except the great-grandmother.

She was found to have been doing something at the bookcase in the dollhouse that she hadn't quite been doing right before she was murdered.  She had been pulling books off the shelves.  Why?  Because she was trying to tell them something.

The Mayfair House Miniature-AMC, TV Insider,
and it's my favorite.

In a weird way, Rowan looking into the model of the house with Julien sort of reminded me of this.  Like the girl in The Dollhouse Murders, Rowan was able to look into the little house and see the occupants inside, one of whom was her "other half", I guess you could call it.  Julien seems to see the little house as if the occupants really are dolls.  His dolls, to manipulate however he pleases.  The way in or out for Rowan or any other living Mayfair is Julien's Victrola.

Keeping time is the always ominous hourglass.  The urgency is that only half of Rowan is in the room with the living and the Victrola.  The other is stuck in this strange afterlife with Julien, who seems more and more pleased with himself as the minutes tick away.  Despite Rowan's bravery, she knows she cannot just reach in and push things around to alert the living and the other part of her still among them that she needs help if she's going to survive.  She has to get the half of her in the living world--oddly enough, the one in what appears to be a dollhouse in Julien's afterlife world--to pull her back in through the little door before Julien pulls that living half of her out through the big door.

The splitting of a soul is something that actually isn't an alien concept in Anne Rice's novels.  I'm thrilled because I haven't yet indulged in this series yet, but I also loved The Mummy or Ramses the Damned and its sequel, The Passion of Cleopatra (cowritten with Christopher Rice).  This could also be somewhat seen as a nod towards an ability at least one of the Mayfair Witches possessed bilocation.  Not much has been mentioned about Mary Beth Mayfair (so far), but quickly, Mary Beth was the daughter of Katherine Mayfair (who built the First Street house) and the granddaughter of Marguerite Mayfair.  Marguerite is the Mayfair Witch shown to Rowan by Julien, and was Julien's mother in the novels, as well.  And I have to say, I LOVED the animated portrait of Marguerite!

Guess why.

Anyway.

Bilocation, short and sweet, is the ability of a living person to project themselves into a location separate from where their physical body is located.  In other words, they can appear to be in two places at the exact same time.  And they appear to and interact with the people in the location they've bilocated to that is separate from where their physical body is located.

Here is a departure of sorts from the novels.  While Julien Mayfair did indeed travel to Scotland in Lasher, it was not with his son, Cortland, but with Mary Beth.  It was a significant trip in Lasher, as well.  Cortland did have brothers, yes.  And sisters.  But I'm interested to see what direction the show goes in when Rowan and the other Mayfairs travel to Scotland in pursuit of Lasher.

It looks like we're getting to a point where we're about to learn more about the Mayfair family tree--of the show, that is.  You might have noticed what appears to be a coat of arms in Julien's afterlife mancave.  Rowan certainly did.  Coats of arms and family crests are a complicated thing, but to start, coats of arms were granted to individuals.  The right to use them was inherited by specific family members, usually male lineal descendants of the individual granted the coat of arms.

Because we are specifically talking about Scotland, for those of you with Scottish ancestors or if you're just curious, you might take a look at a search for coats of arms in Scotland.  And before you diss Wikipedia, one of the best things about it is its references and external sources.  It's actually an excellent primer if you're looking for how to provide primary sources online.  Those primary sources are what makes Wikipedia a standout, no matter how generalized the articles might seem at times.  Which is why your college-snot hostess here is a fan.

Should you want to learn more about the family tree of the Mayfair Witches of the novels, the Parlor has several pages that discuss it ('scuse the mess, I'm redecorating again).  It is very difficult to display a Mayfair family tree that shows all the lines in one pedigree chart, but I did manage to find another way to do it.  Family Tree Maker.  When I first started the website in 2008, I didn't have access to that kind of software and ended up having to draw separate charts for Rowan, Mona, and Michael Curry.  They were based upon the family tree drawn by Dr. Katherine Ramsland in The Witches' Companion, which was the official guide to the three Lives of the Mayfair Witches novels and written in cooperation with Anne Rice. 

Having to draw three separate little trees just did not really explain this tangled snarl of a family tree even remotely well.  With software like Family Tree Maker, I could build one tree, and then show charts for them, all from the same tree.  Recently, I finally managed to create a poster-type image of these branches, and folks, they are ENORMOUS in file size.

To help explain the relationship of key characters to these four characters, Family Tree Maker has another goodie I made full use of.  The ability to actually see how two people in a tree are related.  This, class, was FUN.  

Because not only was the list of different ways characters were related to one another long, it generated some pretty unusual but thankfully minor bug splats that were not the fault of any software (for once).  When you look on Rowan Mayfair's page, you'll see the howler sent up by Family Tree Maker when it came to Cortland Mayfair.  Each legacy Mayfair Witch has a profile avatar I made for each a couple of years ago.  The ones I made to indicate the lines of Michael Curry and Merrick Mayfair are at the top of each of their individual pages.

Episode 5 Recap amc+ on YouTube

If you do decide to have a look, again, each one's chart is from the same tree.  I do have a tutorial page with some basic terms and average relatedness in percentages.  And because this question is one of the most asked, I included a page on what it means when we say someone is x amount of times removed in relation from another person (a cousin).

If nothing else, please do let me know what you think of my footsies animations.  I'm very proud of them.