Besides the prolonged introduction to Magnus, nothing new happens here: Simon still hates Jace, Clary still can’t explain her feelings and uses the word “lost” a lot, and the girls still choose really impractical clothes to fight in.Īnd, on top of that, the dialogue has gotten even worse. After a brief pause in the action while Simon has a bit of a (probably justified) post-traumatic meltdown, Clary and co get their briefing, gear up, and head out to track Magnus down in the hope of finding the elusive Mortal Cup. Based on a bad dream and a tip-off from Simon, Clary figures out that a warlock named Magnus Bane could be the one who stole her memories. What makes this worse though is that the episode itself is a bit of a non-entity – we achieve nothing, we see no major character development and at the end of the hour we’re back exactly where we started. We’re not exactly treading new ground here but still there are no subtleties to anything and everything gets an immediate explanation. There’s a difference between world building and completely underestimating your audience’s ability to follow the plot, and with their latest offering Shadowhunters has fallen heavily into the latter. We’re four episodes in to Shadowhunters now, and despite two weeks of a more solid effort that promised so much more, ‘Raising Hell’ has just taken us straight back to the clunky, info-dumping world of the pilot, only without the excitement of a new show to tide us over.
‘Raising Hell’ is completely the wrong title for this episode – raising a mild interest in the things we already know would be more accurate.