Carnival Row Season 2 Episode 7 Review: Why “Kindred” Repeats Itself

Carnival Row season 2 episode 7 recap and review

By the time Carnival Row season 2 reached its seventh hour, the show had a rhythm, and that was the problem. “Kindred,” directed by Andy Goddard from a script by Sam Ernst, was released on March 10, 2023, three weeks into a weekly release schedule that ended with the finale on March 17. The Prime Video fantasy, created by René Echevarria and Travis Beacham, had already been announced as ending with this season, so every episode had to do double duty: advance the plot and prepare the exit.

The review at the time said it was starting to lose faith. The performances were not the complaint; the supporting cast in particular had been solid. The complaint was structural. Almost every recent episode followed the same pattern: cops and the Black Raven fight, the Sparas murders someone, and a romance gets teased. Episode 7 follows it again.

Where episode 7 sits in the season

A little context helps. Season 2 picks up a war that Carnival Row had been building toward for years. According to Wikipedia’s summary, Philo fights in an underground ring for a man named Boz Ghaidos, and Vignette joins the Black Raven, an alliance that later pulls the couple apart. In the halls of power, Sophie Longerbane and Jonah Breakspear are secretly arming both the Pact and the New Dawn to protect their positions and reclaim Tirnanoc. Imogen and Agreus are seized by the Pact and forced to Ragusa, where they work in factories. And Tourmaline’s visions, inherited from Aoife Tsigani, lead her to the Sparas, a monster everyone thought was extinct.

That is a lot of plotting for ten episodes, and it explains why the middle of the season feels crowded. Several threads run in parallel, and “Kindred” checks in on nearly all of them without moving any one of them far. Where earlier hours had a clear event at the center, this one has a series of small reversals that return the characters to where they started.

What happens in “Kindred”

The episode opens with what looks like a promising Agreus and Imogen hour. In Ragusa, the family begins with music and beer and gets down to the business of executing a plan to leave. The plan fails, which the review notes is a running habit of the series. Plans in Carnival Row almost never work the way the characters expect: Philo’s announcement to Parliament about being the Chancellor’s other son is interrupted by Black Raven fairies, and the previous week ended with the realization that England did not need a government.

Philo, meanwhile, spends the hour regretting his decision to support the humans, though the review points out that he never really made a choice to begin with. He goes on a bender and is bailed out by Darius more than once. His punishment from the police after the previous episode was an assignment to solve the murders in the Row, which is what he had been doing all along. His detective story of the week has him seeking out Runyan Millworthy, now powerful at Parliament, to ask for safe passage to Tirnanoc, the Fae homeland, for all the Fae and not only his friends. Philo himself refuses to go.

Vignette spends her time trying to smuggle Tourmaline out of the Row. A mid-episode scene has the characters asking how they got here, and the review answered that they had not really gone anywhere: hate crimes in the city were getting worse, and the chancellor had been assassinated.

Where the writing stalls

The review had three specific complaints. First, Philo’s motivations had gone missing. He has lost his place on the force and his girlfriend, which were the two things that defined his thin depth as a character, and he still insists on staying in the middle, brokering peace for no reward. The attempt to get the Fae out to Tirnanoc raised an uncomfortable white-savior shading until Millworthy’s knowing reaction made it seem that he understood Philo as a thankless hero.

Second, Vignette’s arc had gone sour. She was helping Tourmaline escape as a last-minute attempt at redemption, and the review observed that many of the atrocities of recent episodes followed from her failures as leader of the Black Raven. Her chemistry with Tourmaline was a hard sell, and the review preferred Darius with Tourmaline.

Third, the ending. By the close of the hour, a viewer who had watched the previous two episodes would recognize what happens next. The review described it as the last two episodes on repeat.

What the episode gets right

There is praise in the review, and it is specific. Darius is called the show’s most realistically drawn character, apart from Millworthy, because he sees Carnival Row for what it is: a place run by a government that is mostly garbage and filled with people who are mostly the same. That shows growth, something the review argued Philo does not have this season.

The second half of the hour moves its focus onto the people of the Row, and the review says that is where the series is strongest, in class and political intrigue and in the hatred that humans have for the Fae, made worse by the death of the chancellor. A scene in which Vignette talks to a lifelong resident of the Row, who sees a charm in being a first-wave immigrant in a new world, was singled out. It may be a shanty, but it is theirs. Darius later echoes the same feeling about the city, which gives the show a thesis it could have followed more.

Season 2 episode 7 at a glance

Source: Wikipedia’s article on Carnival Row.

Carnival Row season 2 episode 7: the verdict

The review landed on worry, not condemnation. The show works when it deals with its townsfolk and its politics, and it wastes time on a love story that circles. That is a fair summary of a season with an unusually unbalanced engine. The romance subplot between Philo and Vignette had been the draw for many viewers, and in episode 7 it was the weakest part.

Does the series recover? The finale on March 17, 2023 delivers a full ending. According to Wikipedia, the Sparas turns out to be a Burgish officer, Philo stops it at Parliament, he declines the chancellorship in favor of a Fae chancellor, and Imogen and Agreus marry. The series ends with the Fae and the Burgish living more peacefully together. Critics were harder on the season than on the show’s first run; Wikipedia gives season 2 a 44 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 16 reviews.

For a viewer who has just finished episode 6, the advice is simple. Keep going. Episode 7 is the low point of the repetition, and the review itself ended with a worry, not a verdict of failure. The last episodes at least know where they are heading.

One practical note for anyone planning a rewatch. Because Amazon announced the ending before season 2 aired, the finale was always going to close the story, and it ties off most of its threads. That makes episode 7 easier to forgive on a binge, where the pattern the review spotted week by week is less irritating than it was on a weekly schedule. Watched in a sitting with episodes 6 and 8, “Kindred” is a connective hour, not a failure, and the supporting cast carries it.

Sources

• Carnival Row, Wikipedia — episode credits, plot summary and reception
• TVLine: Carnival Row to end with Season 2 — the November 2022 announcement