Shadowhunters Review: Jace Is a Herondale in “You Are Not Your Own”

Shadowhunters review: Jace learns he is a Herondale

The episode opens with a stalemate. The Inquisitor, Imogen Herondale (Mimi Kuzyk), is running out of patience with Valentine (Alan Van Sprang), who will not say where the Mortal Cup is. The man in her cell is not really Valentine. It is Magnus, played by Harry Shum Jr., while the real Valentine sits inside the warlock’s body. Azazel has promised to reverse the spell once he gets the cup, though he never planned to put the Nephilim back in his own body.

Alec (Matthew Daddario) comes to the loft after calling Magnus, who was evasive and refused to help him track down the greater demon. Azazel attacks Alec there, angry that Valentine failed to get rid of him, and Alec kills the demon with his bow, to the surprise of the man he thinks is Magnus. Frustrated, Valentine calls Dot to teach him some basic casting, claiming that an encounter with the demon made him forget how to do things. Then he moves ahead with his plan by luring Jace (Dominic Sherwood) to the loft and putting him in shackles.

At the Institute, Imogen is about to kill Magnus with Alec’s help when Valentine appears with Jace in chains. He identifies himself to the Inquisitor and offers a trade: if she wants to save her grandson, she must release Magnus so that the two men can switch back. He then tells her that Jace is the son of Stephen Herondale and his wife Celine, who was supposedly mauled to death by werewolves while pregnant. In fact, Valentine took the baby because the Clave had taken so much from him. As proof, he shows her the Herondale ring he took from Celine.

The Mortal Cup is the reason for all of it. In Cassandra Clare’s books, the cup is the object used to create Shadowhunters, so Valentine wants it and the Clave cannot afford to lose it. The episode keeps that stake in view while it spends most of its time on faces and families.

Anyone searching for shadowhunters jace and Herondale will find the answer in this scene. Imogen has to decide whether to believe a man she has every reason to distrust, and she has to do so with her grandson in shackles. The ring tips the balance. She releases Magnus, with Alec, Clary (Katherine McNamara) and Sebastian (Will Tudor) as backup.

The body swap and the portal

Valentine raises a ward and opens a portal before the switch can happen. Clary has been struggling to create new runes since her encounter with Azazel in the previous episode, and Sebastian helps her by pushing her to feel the emotions she has been suppressing. The result is a rune that destroys the ward. The team bursts in as Magnus and Valentine return to their own bodies, and Clary tackles her father through the portal and back into his cell at the Institute.

It is a satisfying sequence and an economical one. The cost for Magnus, shown in the episode’s closing scenes, is much higher than the action implies.

Jace meets his grandmother

After the fight, Imogen visits Jace and gives him the Herondale ring. She tells him that he comes from a long line of powerful Shadowhunters. Until now she has treated him with contempt because she thought he was Valentine’s son. Their final scene together shows a grandmother and a grandson who suddenly have room to connect. Imogen says that Jace’s defiant streak is exactly like his father’s, and that he will now find out what it means to be a Herondale.

In the books, Jace does not learn who his parents are until City of Glass, so this is an earlier reveal than book readers expect. The change opens a new chapter for the character, and it does so a good deal sooner than the source material.

Jace’s family history

The change also matters for the show’s tone. Season 2 had been building toward a version of Jace who no longer had Valentine as a shadow over him, and this reveal removes that shadow in a single scene. What replaces it is both lighter and heavier: lighter because the character is no longer defined by a villain, and heavier because a family history invites expectations. The show leaves it to the following episodes to say how Jace carries that weight.

The Herondale name carries weight for fans of Cassandra Clare’s other books. Jace descends from Will Herondale, a lead character in The Infernal Devices, where Will and his friend Jem Carstairs, his parabatai, share the story with Tessa Gray. Some viewers online argued that the reveal came too soon. Another way to look at it is that the show is exploring an alternative timeline, one that opens up possibilities the books never used.

Verdict: the Clace, Malec and Sebastian threads

For context, the episode belongs to the second half of season 2, which Freeform aired on Monday nights at 8 p.m. in the summer of 2017 after a break that followed the first ten episodes in March. The season ran twenty episodes in all. Part of the pleasure of this installment is how many of its threads, from Clary’s rune trouble to the Inquisitor’s hostility, pay off inside a single hour.

The episode covers more than Jace. Simon (Alberto Rosende) finds out that Jace is not Clary’s brother and eventually confronts her. Clary says she kept it quiet because she did not want to worry him, which of course worried him anyway. They make up with a kiss, and the daylighter also gets some warm scenes with Isabelle (Emeraude Toubia).

The Clace spark has not gone away, as the sparring session under the Inquisitor’s eye made clear. There is also something between Clary and Sebastian. Will Tudor plays him so well that viewers who know the books find themselves rooting for him to take a different path from his book counterpart. The scene in which Sebastian pushes Clary to feel everything, her mother’s death, a father who could never love her, the loss of the person she thought was her brother, is the most intense of the hour, and Tudor puts some real feeling into it.

The strongest scenes belong to Malec. Alan Van Sprang plays Magnus trapped in Valentine’s body with conviction, and Harry Shum Jr. does the reverse, channeling Valentine. The last moment between Alec and the warlock, after Magnus has been tortured by the Inquisitor, is the heart of the episode. It needed more screen time and a longer conversation, and the relationship does not look healthy by the end. Magnus is reminded of how brutal the Clave can be to Downworlders. The Nephilim, as the episode shows, can be prejudiced and cruel.

The best way to read the Shadowhunters Jace storyline is as a change of status. Until now, the Shadowhunter world has treated him as a possible threat because of the man it assumed was his father. After this episode, he has a family on the Clave’s side of the line, a ring and a name. That shift is useful to the writers, and it gives Dominic Sherwood new material: a character who has spent his life as an outsider, suddenly given a legacy.

Viewers new to the series can follow the hour without much homework. The plot is explained in dialogue, the relationships are clear from the first scenes and the reveal is staged so that the audience learns it at the same moment Jace does. That clarity is a quiet strength in a show with a complicated mythology.

The verdict is that this is a strong, busy episode with a good central reveal and a lot of emotional weight in its secondary threads. Its weakest point is the amount it asks of the audience: so many subplots at once means that some, including Malec, get short shrift. Still, anyone following the Shadowhunters Jace storyline should watch it, and the preview for episode 13, “Those of Demon Blood,” which aired on June 19, 2017, promised more trouble in the shadow world.

Sources

• Shadowhunters, Wikipedia — season 2 episode list, cast and air dates