Hudson Williams as Henry Park in YAGA, Episode 2, “Dark Solstice.”
Photo credit: Bell Media.
Spoilers for “Dark Solstice,” Episode 2 of Crave’s YAGA.
Someone has nailed a burning rooster to Charlie Rapp’s hotel room door, and he interprets a message from Henry Park’s phone as a warning to stop looking. Now he’s dreaming about insects crawling out of his mouth. The missing-person case is getting stranger, although Sergeant Carson is still unconvinced that Henry is in any danger.
“Dark Solstice” takes Charlie (Noah Reid) and Carson (Clark Backo) from Sandeson’s diner to a university classroom and finally to a masked party at the Park house, where their search for Henry leads to another disappearance and a body on the beach.
A rooster, a text message and breakfast at Sandeson’s
Baba Yaga opens the episode by complaining that people come to a witch demanding spells and curses, then forget how difficult magic is. Charlie’s nightmare follows: insects pour out of his mouth as he struggles to wake up. When he finally does, it’s 3:32 a.m.
In the morning, Angel (Emilija Baranac) is helping clean up the aftermath of the rooster incident when Carson arrives. Charlie mentions the bite he discovered on his body, then tells Carson he received a message from Henry’s phone. He thinks someone else sent it to scare him away from the investigation. Carson offers the more straightforward possibility that Henry simply doesn’t want to be found.
Carson is also furious that Charlie didn’t tell her about the rooster. She has to drag out the admission that he and Henry are friends, although Charlie insists he already told her. Their uneasy partnership continues, with Carson asking for honesty and Charlie supplying it only after being cornered.
On the way to Sandeson’s, Charlie asks whether everyone in Whittock works for the Parks’ seafood-processing business. Carson explains how Henry’s wealthy father met his future wife, a local waitress, and Charlie calls the romance the stuff of “fish-fairy smut.” It’s one of his better descriptions of the town so far.
At the diner, Lily (Georgia Acken) takes their order, and Charlie’s request for vegan food earns an exasperated response. Lily assures him that she’s heard swearing before, then announces that she’s vegetarian and would like to go vegan, if her mother would allow it. Charlie orders a garden salad for breakfast, claiming he doesn’t follow the usual breakfast rules.
Geena Sandeson (Megan Follows), Lily’s mother, soon joins them. Carson warns Charlie about flirting with Lily and repeats a local story that Geena stabbed a drunken customer in the eye with metal tongs after he grabbed her daughter. Nobody offers proof, and Geena responds to Charlie’s awkward introduction by asking whether he knows her because of the tongs. Charlie pretends he meant her famous eggs.
Geena has plenty to say about Henry. She caters his elaborate parties, including a masked Dark Solstice event planned for that night, and has no intention of cancelling because he’s missing. He paid in advance. She also employs Pam Russell part-time and gave her a few days off after Pam punched Henry in the mouth hard enough to knock out a tooth.
According to Geena, Pam left the diner on the 21st while Henry and Logan stayed behind, drinking coffee, arguing and acting woozy. Logan eventually left, and Henry remained until around 10 p.m. He was so distracted that he forgot his phone. Geena chased after him and caught him getting into a fancy black car, but her claim that she recorded its plates is plainly sarcastic. Charlie also asks about her injured wrist, a question she avoids.
Carson’s breakfast arrives with a blood spot on the eggs, which Geena assures her is harmless. Charlie’s salad suddenly seems like the sensible choice.
The ferry trip and the Boner Beast
Officer Billy Granger (Sam Krochmal) has located witnesses who saw Henry board a ferry to the mainland on the 18th, three days before the diner incident. Henry paid cash for a return ticket and came back on the last ferry that evening. It was also the day he withdrew $15,000 from the family account.
Charlie floats the possibility of drugs, then suggests the money could have paid for a gift. He remembers that Henry’s father is fond of giving women expensive presents. Since Henry and Pam were still together, the idea raises questions about the other women Pam accused him of seeing.
That brings Charlie and Carson to the university, where a search for a professor nicknamed the Boner Beast leads them to Dr. Katherine Hargrove (Carrie-Anne Moss). Charlie met her at the bar in Episode 1, although Carson is about to discover just how enthusiastically he intends to renew the acquaintance.
Katherine is lecturing about predators that disguise themselves as harmless creatures or even their own victims. Her example is a crab spider that uses a dead ant’s head to approach other ants. She asks her students to imagine a human murderer adopting the same trick. Charlie and Carson arrive just as her lecture reaches its nastiest point.
The interview goes badly, at least by Carson’s standards. Charlie deliberately mixes up their coffee orders, compliments Katherine and asks whether she’s single. Katherine is happy to spar with him, including over their ages, but becomes less accommodating when he suggests she might have slept with Henry.
Katherine confirms that Henry attended her class and interviewed her for his podcast. She disputes the implications of Pam’s nickname, correcting “Boner Beast” to “Bone Beast,” and says she nearly failed Pam the previous semester. As Charlie pushes the affair theory, he also makes a spectacularly ill-judged remark about a woman being a less creepy predator than a man. Carson has to tell him to stop.
Katherine points them back toward Pam and Logan, whom she says were constantly with Henry. She also warns Charlie about making accusations that could damage someone’s livelihood. He apologizes, though he still asks what she was doing on the 21st and whether she drives a car. Katherine says she was having dinner with her mother, who could confirm it, and that she rides a bicycle. Nobody has checked the alibi yet.
Before leaving, Charlie finds time to offer her his card and an invitation for Ethiopian food. Carson has endured more than enough.
Charlie's coffee trick, and a movie reference he doesn't get
Once they’re outside, Carson challenges Charlie about his conduct. He explains that his habit of giving people the wrong coffee is a private-investigator tactic. The person who refuses the drink, the person who demands a replacement and the person who drinks it to spare his feelings supposedly reveal something about their personalities. Carson thinks the tactic is stupid.
She then asks what his experiment tells him about Mrs. Robinson, a reference to The Graduate and to Katherine’s possible attraction to a younger man. Charlie has no idea who Mrs. Robinson is. When Carson explains she’s from a movie, he assumes the movie must be called Mrs. Robinson. Charlie has been lecturing Carson about her job, and now she’s the one explaining a film reference to him.
Carson’s patience wears thinner when Charlie starts calling her “boss,” which she finds patronizing. He insists he’s trying to acknowledge her authority, while also predicting that Katherine will soon become obsessed with him. Then Billy calls: Henry’s phone has pinged close to the Park house.
A costume party, an apparent high and another missing man
With the Dark Solstice party underway, Charlie insists Carson can’t walk in wearing a police uniform. He offers his undershirt, and after a little arguing, she changes in front of him while he promises not to look. He looks anyway, and she catches him. Their exchanges have been getting more flirtatious even as she grows increasingly exasperated by his behaviour.
Inside, the masked guests are drinking, dancing and having sex. A woman dressed as an angel is pressed against a wall during one particularly conspicuous encounter. Angel is there too and offers Charlie a taste from what appears to be a lollipop. Carson warns that it could contain drugs, but the episode doesn’t identify the substance.
Charlie soon begins acting as though he’s intoxicated. He leans toward Carson, marvels at her perfume and seems genuinely confused when she points out she isn’t wearing any. That’s particularly funny after their argument about his undershirt smelling bad. He may be enjoying the smell of his own shirt.
A woman’s cries of Henry’s name draw Charlie into another room, where he interrupts a couple having sex. He runs after the man, but Carson encounters Logan (Hudson Williams) and tries to stop him. Logan tells her to stay out of it, shoves her into a wall and escapes. She ends up with a bloody nose.
Meanwhile, Charlie is wandering outside in a daze. Snow seems to fall around him, and he holds a feather as a woman with long dark hair and a white dress appears before him. She has Katherine’s voice, tells him she can smell him, and removes an eyelash from his face so he can make a wish. The encounter is presented through Charlie’s altered perceptions, leaving open whether Katherine is physically there at all.
Carson finds Charlie and tells him the man he followed was Logan, although Charlie insists he saw Henry. He also sees what looks like a burning bird flying above them. We’ve already had a flaming chicken on a bed, a rooster nailed to a door and now another fiery bird. At this point, I’m reluctant to trust anything Charlie sees.
A body on the beach
A scream sends Charlie and Carson looking down toward the beach, where a body has been discovered. From the final images, it appears to be Logan, the man Carson was chasing moments earlier. With Logan and Henry looking identical, the discovery complicates a case that was already getting difficult to follow.
Baba Yaga gets the last word, complaining that people keep telling stories about the wicked old witch without ever staying long enough to get to know her. She says she’s funny, and on the evidence of these two episodes, she certainly has a sense of humour.
Charlie still hasn’t found Henry. He has instead picked up a mysterious bite, experienced disturbing visions and stumbled into a party that ends with an apparent death. Carson has been injured, and Katherine’s increasingly strange appearances have given them another reason to keep asking questions, even if there’s no proof yet that she’s involved in Henry’s disappearance.
The flirtation between Charlie and Carson is definitely picking up, though he keeps finding new ways to annoy her. The perfume moment is especially funny because she’s wearing his shirt, so is he attracted to his own smell?
I also caught Lily’s “I’ve heard fuck before” from the Edmonton stage production of Yaga I saw the previous week.
The party leaves me with a few questions, particularly about Angel: she seems to give Charlie something, but when she later asks whether he’s okay, I wonder if she was actually responsible for his condition. The woman in white reminded me of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, except it’s Katherine, or at least Charlie thinks it is.
Lastly, I couldn’t tell whether Logan deliberately shoved Carson into the wall either, and that seems worth keeping in mind after the ending on the beach.
