Salem, Netflix

Recommended.

I resisted watching this because, Salem.in

Even as it started through the first few episodes, as it gets rolling slowly it does not appear promising. Just the same wearisome material rehashed and as viewer I threaten myself to give up the effort and just stop watching. Just another set piece for the junk heap. And it's so ugly. The Puritan conceits expressed all over again. Cotton Mather again. We hate him already.

Then something happens. In the series witches are real. And the townsfolk are sincere in their efforts to identify them and to rid their towns of them. And there are a lot of them. Both men and women.

The writers add tons of new twists to how witchcraft manifests, the witches' practices are far more extreme and exceedingly imaginatively written.

Right off we see women bearing teats in unusual places on their bodies. That's just one way to identify witches when accused. It's how they nurse their "familiar," cool word, that, great innovation. It's just the sort of word choice the people of the era would use. It's a creature, any creature, insect, spider, mouse, anything, that identifies with a witch to do her bidding. Any bidding. The familiar chooses the witch. So these creatures appear throughout the series, doing unGodly things for the witches and returning to nurse.

Any witchcraft that occurs requires blood from the witch, so we see them poking themselves to draw their own blood and all witchcraft is an exchange. It's a sacrifice. It's why witches are so awful, they've learned to trade the things that they love for power so they all eventually reach a point where they cannot love anything.

And that makes for tremendous dialogue between them. It's wonderful. It's horrible. Normal interaction is not possible.

The witches speak to each other horribly. None can trust any other. They form hives, not covens, while all trust between them is temporary and always broken.

And they all do perfectly horrible things such as you've not seen in movies or television. Episode by episode these very strange innovations accumulate and boom you're hooked and going one episode directly into the next, eager to see what the writers devised. You will not see many of these things anywhere else.

The native Americans have their own form of witchcraft that intermingles with the story.

And the scenes come on you unexpectedly. I find myself going, "What?" and rewinding to catch the critical transition. In one scene a woman is taking a bath. No mention of how or who brought up the water and heated it. All we see is a beautiful dark woman in a gorgeous copper tub. Our eyes are drawn to the room and its design, the accouterments, the architecture. It looks like she's committing suicide. She cuts her own wrist and bleeds into the bathwater. A new camera angle and the water is cleared. A man of lower social rank enters the room and reports to her something important to her. He did his duty to her. He was loyal. His report concludes, the woman stands up and tells the man he can stop averting his gaze from her. Hesitantly the man looks at her and that is the key to her witchcraft. The water drains from the tub through the man who begins to choke. He spits out more water from his mouth than his stomach could hold. The bath water pours out of his mouth. He chokes standing in the room as her bath water drains through his mouth onto the floor of the room.

Now, writing for a witchcraft story, who would even think of that? It's utterly new. There is no physical connection between the tub drain and man standing there. Yet the tub drains through his mouth. How incredibly impressively imaginative. That's nowhere to be found anywhere in witch related literature. And the series is loaded with such imaginative scenes. Every episode has such an amazing scene. There is simply no way for a viewer to predict what these witches will do.

It's fun!

Many characters speak with a British accent. And that's a bit annoying. I am so tired of hearing "hot" for heart, but that's my particular bug up my butt. And so what. In the story they're all fresh from England. The witches' story came directly from England.

Turns out Cotton Mather is one of the more sympathetic characters. They turn that around on us. The writers humanize Cotton. He is one of the heroes. However his dad is a real creep. But turns out his dad really did confront very real witchcraft in this story and he was not a principal in the mass hysteria that we learned from American history. We learn of his actual travails and his actual encounters with the Christian devil. So his activities are explained rationally. Still, we don't like him. And he's still an awful character and we don't care when he dies. Plus a witch uses his head to conjure his ghost from Hell to attain specific information for her within a specific timeframe. The limits they put on the witches' spells are convincing. Every character is so awful in their own way that I found myself not caring what happens to any of them. There is so much death and so much horrible activities that I don't care who lives and who dies. They're all awful. And that's a great relief from the tension that builds as we go. A little boy is introduced, fine, die already. The character comes predisposed to horror so I don't care if he lives or dies.

The witches are scientific. That allows for some wonderful modern special effects. The characters become more modern to us as the story develops such that they appear to be modern people displaced anachronistically and fairly stuck in their time. They use an orrery that was hardly common back then to track the path of a comet which was not even scientifically understood in that time. It's an adorable little model with a very cute little comet with a comical comet tail inserted into it. It clicks ahead like a clock as the witches' plans advance aligned with the cosmos. A scientific Puritan is impressed when he sees it and with the witches' scientific knowledge that they've kept secret for centuries. The scientist equates the witches with actual historic scientists persecuted by the church.

The story develops that the witches want their own separate New World.

It's a nice touch in a series loaded with such touches.

A blind woodsman appears fairly early. He's a very strange character with a shaved head and short mohawk and eyes turned blue with cataracts. He's blind. We discover he actually sees better than any other character by his alternate modes of vision that surpass his eyeball vision. He's very creepy in the woods, his woods, sneaking around and witness to all that goes on there. When witches need something seen with extraordinary sight then they seek out this character. At one point the man stands face to face with a witch seeking his preternatural sight. He reaches his fingers into his eye sockets and removes both cataract eyeballs leaving two blank darkened eye sockets without any apparent pain, and places his eyeballs into the witch's hands then moves closely to kiss her, their mouths connected, her holding his eyeballs, she now has his supernatural vision, receiving images important to her inquiry. The visions stop. He pulls away. He asks the witch, "Did you see what you needed?"

A witch knows that a citizen helper is captured and being interrogated. The writers set up two scenes, the guy being interrogated brutally and another of women standing at a table with horrible object, an animal skull specifically. The witch really needs the prisoner far away to shut up. She forces the animal skull's mandible open. In the other scene the prisoner's mouth juts open painfully. His interrogator is amazed and shocked that his prisoner is stroking out on him, his mouth wide open. The witch puts something inside the animal skull's open mouth. The prisoner sticks out his tongue far as it will go. The witch slams the animal skull's mouth shut. The man bits off his own tongue and with his arms tied above him, he bleeds from his mouth all over his torso and onto the floor. His interrogator shocked that his prisoner can no longer speak. That is the type of witchcraft these women do throughout the series. Shocking us wonderfully one episode to the next. It's fantastic.

The writers introduce ideas that do not appear in historic record. There is no mention of a gully. In the story there is a gully in the woods where bodies are dumped. Not buried. Human bodies left to rot in one specific gully in the woods. They make the woods out to be exceedingly creepy. It's a wonderfully false description. And it takes extremely perverse minds of writers to conceive it. I'm impressed. The plague comes, bodies are collected and dumped in the gully. Here's a macabre twist. The witches disassociated with the town and on the run from Salem justice sleep in the gully among the corpses using dead bodies as pillows. Because no one will go there. No one will find them. And that's fine with the witches who make no distinction between upscale human comforts and open pubic graves of rotting corpses.

The women suffer horribly throughout the whole thing. They subject themselves to horrors for their witchcraft. They're constantly bleeding themselves for their craft and without even wincing.

Right off we see see the historic chair dunking mechanism that modern readers find so terrible and strange. It's too hard to watch. I skip ahead. But that's the least of the horrors these characters endure.

The plague is actually a witch's spell used to manipulate the course of power. She kills half the town so that the course of power moves her direction.

I'm still watching. I'm genuinely hooked. I'll have to rewatch the whole thing because I'm doing other things around here and missing quite a lot of it. When I do watch it again it'll be like an entirely new series. This is turning out to be one of my favorite Netflix series. The writers have done a wonderful job at perverting the historic Salem witch trials to a splendid new series filled to the brim with surprises. If you like weird shows that beat the pants off the zombie idea that's taken hold then you'll like this series.

It sounds like I'm selling this show. I'm explaining why I like it so much.