AudienceofOne

Bleak. Contrived. Oddly boring. The entire back half of this season culminating in this episode. They've continued to piss me off, pretty well since they killed off Shado entirely to propel this annoying plotline forward.

I completely agree and, when it wasn't being boring, it was being about Isabella's ridiculous motivation. She had an affair with his father and now thinks she deserves the company? WTF?

The necklace annoyed me a great deal and in retrospect even more. Why did Duke wait so long to tell her he knew Lucy, that he was the boy in the photo and she gave him the necklace? Why did she give him the necklace in the first place? Why has this never been mentioned again?

Mostly I was bored while watching but in retrospect I'm annoyed. If you have to have your main characters steal a woman's baby to make her "evil" then a) she's no longer the evil one and b) you're falling into the Prince Arthur paradigm. "Bad guys" aren't bad just because they oppose the hero, And the hero isn't good just because he's the hero. "Bad guys" and "good guys" should actually do bad things and good things. Wrenching a baby from its mother's arms is the former. Being angry about that and wanting your baby back is the latter. So bravo, writers. We're now watching a show about a heroic mother trying to find her kidnapped child and get it back from the Machiavellian bastards who stole it from her.

So I guess I was the only one who was unbelievably bored from beginning to end? Renard and Adalind and royals and a baby and phone conversations all in one episode. Endless tedium from beginning to end. Claire Coffey bought it, which was the only good thing to say, really.