It’s harvest season in the Big Easy!
This week, we get the scoop on a witch ritual called the harvest. All of the Originals are learning about it simultaneously from different sources – Elijah from Davina in her church attic hideout, Rebekah and Hayley from Sophie as they traipse through the Bayou looking for dead witches and from Marcel at Big Auggie’s Bayou Bar.
The Harvest: A ritual the witches perform every three centuries to restore their ancestral bond with magic. “We appease our ancestors, they keep our ancestral blood flowing,” says Sophie. Four young witches must be sacrificed and the group includes not just Davina, but Sophie Deveraux’s niece, Monique. The girls believe they will be put into a gentle sort of sleep and remain in limbo until the reaping, when they’ll awake reborn. In reality: the ringleader witch slits their throats. No wonder Sophie is skeptical and worries they won’t come back!
Mid-ritual, though, Sophie and the vampires step in. (Turns out, around the same time as the harvest was getting under way, Sophie and Marcel had a bit of a secret relationship.) They rush into the cemetery but are able to save only Davina. Marcel takes her away and hides her – a little witch with quadruple the power, because she inherited the other girls’ when they died.
Now, the reaping is just around the corner. If the witches can’t complete the harvest process (ie: kill Davina) then everything is over. All the witches in the French Quarter will lose their power, which is okay with Davina because all she wants is to be normal, so she’s prepared to sit and wait out the process. The witches who lied to her and betrayed her will be punished and she’ll be free.
That’s why the witches are so desperate to get their hands on Davina. Not just because she herself is powerful, but because they could lose everything they have – and if the vampires can keep her hidden and safe long enough, then the witches won’t be a problem anymore at all. The family members of the other girls also want to kill Davina so they’ll all be resurrected – and in that case, the vampires could be the ones who lose their power.
The church connection: Unsure who to ask for help when she was trying to stop the harvest, Sophie turned to Father Kieran – Cami’s uncle. Her brother (and his nephew) Sean hears Kieran arguing with the witches and comes in. Sabine uses this as an opportunity and puts a hex on him. He appears to slowly lose his mind, distracting Kieran and then eventually killing all his peers and committing suicide, which we learned about last episode from Cami, although she couldn’t explain why it all happened. Meanwhile, the witches didn’t have him looking over their shoulder while they proceeded with the harvest
Family: Sophie was the only one who questioned the harvest and whether it would work. Since she intervened and her niece was killed, she will now fight to the death to get Davina and slit her throat so she can get Monique back. It’s a promise she made to her sister. “That makes her more dangerous than anyone,” says Elijah, explaining to Rebekah, Klaus and Hayley that they thought they were coming into a war over power, but it was really all about family. It always comes to down to family. “She’s lucky. Nobody ever fought for me, but someone fought for her,” says Davina.
