It’s hard, coming home.Hard for different reasons, mind, depending on who’s homecoming and why. Coming home means asking yourself why you left. Coming home means accepting that the place you left doesn’t exist any more—or, at least, it doesn’t exist anywhere but inside your head, which leaves it a lot more durable than might be ideal. Sometimes, coming home means fighting monsters.Grace and Liam stand at the heart of this season, and this episode throws them together against their respective pasts. This is Grace’s first return to China since she left in a box back in ’37. And this is Liam’s first opportunity to confront Christina and the Network, his old allies in a time he’s since forgotten.In a season dedicated to tracing the roots of magic, and interrogating the Society’s history and impact on the world, it was a treat to force Team Three’s most magic-ambivalent characters into a crucible. Sal went through the ringer last season, but whatever long-term damage she suffered from possession is still surfacing, buried beneath her renewed dedication to the mission. Menchú has his scars, but he’s had more time to manage them. Grace and Liam, though—their wounds are raw. Grace manages her curse, but it weighs on her, and Liam’s compensated for his lost time and his feelings of violation with utter locked-down control. They’re both too controlled, in different ways, to confront their respective traumas, so of course they find themselves drawn to them.I loved writing this episode. It was a treat to revisit Shanghai—a modern Shanghai, my Shanghai, with the Pearl and the Bund together, rather than the 20s version I reconstructed last season. Liam and Grace rub against one another so well, too—in this ep we get a trace of how Team Three functioned before Sal’s arrival. (That is, dysfunctionally.)And I found a lot of joy in showing not only their independent relationships to their pasts, but their perspectives on one another’s experience. Since Liam and Grace have such different damage—and such different responses to that damage—in the overlap of their perspectives we get to approach the truth.The story starts with an argument about discomfort in customs lines, setting the stage for this conversation, but the moments that bring the contrast into sharpest relief for me are Grace’s and Liam’s first exposures to the world beneath the water.Liam meets dragons and mythical creatures as monsters, in part because they’re outside his context. He struggles to orient himself, but he doesn’t have the words for what he sees, and as a result he feels uncomfortable, out of place. Grace, later, enters the magic world like coming home. She knows these creatures from childhood stories and her own old work experience, and she gasps to see them revealed.We’ll build on that difference throughout the rest of the season—especially in Amal El-Mohtar’s guest episode, coming up next week. I really love the piece, and I hope you do too!
