Will Review: Your Houses (Season 1 Episode 8)

Heartache plagues everyone on Will Season 1 Episode 8, “Your Houses.”

Alice and Will suffer the common heartache of a classic breakup. Alice finds something else to occupy her time rather than Will’s “meaningless” writing. She is taking up Southwell’s cause with fervid enthusiasm, which is mostly fueled by spite.

Love makes you do crazy things, and so does heartbreak.

Although Will has hardly a leg to stand on with Alice after the way he broke it off, I like his candor with her. I hope she heeds his warning because Southwell is seeming more and more predatory as the season progresses.

Will: I wonder how martyrs are made daily yet present company excepted.

Will is under a lot of stress, and fighting to win Alice back is just one of the many things on his plate. He has Topcliffe’s demand for a play, and he has a debt owed to Presto.

He comes up with a two birds, one stone solution.

Emilia and Presto each give him ideas to write a play featuring Topcliffe, but disguised as a myth.

Presto: What’s a myth?
Will: A story set in the past to illuminate something in the present.

Marlowe’s heartbreak is of the mourning and hopeless variety.

Having lost his love, and been unable to contact the devil, personally, Marlowe’s writer’s block abates, but he finds himself more despairing than ever.

The writing scene is the most captivating of the episode. It toggles back and forth between Marlowe writing and Marlowe as the character talking to the Devil.

The Devil makeup and costume are perfectly dark and sinister. Jamie Campbell Bower, as Marlowe, as the character of his play has the cockiness of Marlowe, adroitly representing Marlowe’s voice as an author.

This is an Inception-like task that Bower executes smoothly.

This is his first scene on the episode that gives more weight to his scenes that follow. Even though he is able to write again, it doesn’t mean his heart healed from the loss of his lover.

He shows his current fling, Tommy, how much he doesn’t feel by picking a fight with a brutish fellow in the pub. This is set to a version of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower.”

His despair is felt deeply with this display. And again, Bower makes Marlowe a more compelling character than Will.

He spirals down even further as he begs Will to tell him how to find Southwell. Since the Devil isn’t taking his calls, Marlowe considers the alternative: God.

“Your Houses” refreshingly gives an interesting secondary character a meaty storyline. Autolycus is Richard’s best bud who unfortunately gets sidelined as Richard’s wingman most of the time.

Autolycus breaks free of this when he is charged with distracting Richard’s date’s protective friend. Autolycus and Peg find they are birds of a feather when they discover their mutual love of birds.

They go on a goth and romantic (?) date to watch birds eat maggots out of beheaded skulls on display. Hey, no judgement here. Let your freak flags fly, you two lovebirds.

Later, he shows up at the theater with what looks like a hickey on his neck.

Nope. It’s the plague.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Peg is dying, and now so is Autolycus. Will and Richard rush him to her bedside in the house which is about to be boarded up by men in those creepy medieval plague masks.

It’s disappointing that these interesting characters that we finally get to know are going to die from the plague.

The plague, you guys.

At least Richard learns that he does care about something other than sex, money, and fame… if that’s any consolation.

Will Season 1 Episode 7 was lacking in excitement, and “Your Houses” greatly makes up for it with some A+ Shakespearean drama.

Stray Observations:

• Neemes’ execution is horrific
• I also enjoy Marcus and Owen getting more screen time
• “It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery”
• “Quick Musical Doodles” by Two Feet is a well used modern song beginning the barfight scene
• “The void within me is black, and it is bottomless, and it is eternal.” Yes, Marlowe, give me all the melodramatic emo lines
• I love that Marlowe calls Presto “the oracle”

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Will airs Mondays at 9/8c on TNT.

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