Catching up on writring a little bit about TV and video games I watched (or played) this past year... To kick it off, I thought I'd write a little bit about Motherland: Fort Salem.  For October I meant to watch themed movies and shows (you know, horror and witchy stuff), but I only managed to binge this series 🙃. I finished it just before Halloween so I was within my self-imposed time frame 😹

I originally came across this on Hulu (I think) back in 2020, but it didn't catch my attention back then. Having a little more time, I thought I'd dive into the show (and yes, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen this yet).  The premise of the show is that witches are real, and their persecution in Salem was a real thing, but that came to an end with an agreement known as the Salem Accord, whereby witches would have a compulsory draft into the continental army (which later became the US army). While this agreement spared witches from persecution, it conscripted them and future generations as a military force. This agreement was binding in both legal and supernatural ways.

So...witches go into the military, other nations have witches too, there appears to be a global witch council of some sort (made up of top generals) so the peace is kept at a global level by the time the show starts. However, not everything is honkey dorey.  There is a group of dissident witches, The Spree, who coordinate terrorist attacks around the world in an attempt to end the conscription of witches. That's where Season 1 begins. Without spoiling too much of the series, the series continues with a good old-fashioned witch hunt (the Van Hellsing/Castlevania kind, not the political kind) when the Camarilla (and ancient order of witch hunters) enters the scene again, there's a kind of magical fungus (fungi were popular in the 2020s it seems...), and in the end there's no reason the persecute witches because.... (you're just going to have to watch to find out).

Overall, this was a 7/10.  The storytelling behind it was very WB/CW for my liking, but not too CW that it posed an obstacle to the binging.  The world that the series built out seemed interesting, and I would have liked to see more, but the plot device used to explain how witches exist (maybe this didn't need explaining), and how everything got resolved seemed too convenient.  Still, worth a watch IMO.

Trailer (season 1)