Star-Crossed episode 8 review: An Old Accustom’d Feast

Star-Crossed might just be the most CW of all The CW's teen dramas. Here's Caroline's review of this week's episode...

This review contains spoilers.

1.8 An Old Accustom’d Feast

When watching Star-Crossed, it’s much easier if you accept that, despite the aliens, the thinly veiled allegories and the rapidly escalating drama, this is the most CW-esque show on the CW right now. This week, for example, the huge step forward for integration that is allowing humans into the sector for Atrian holiday Dinasyku is hijacked by Emery being nervous about meeting her new boyfriend’s mother, and it’s unclear which the show wants us to care more about.

It certainly wants us to care about Emery and Roman’s new romance, which has apparently been going on for a while without Emery getting around to dumping her actual boyfriend, Grayson. I wonder, if we can see so clearly that her actions, along with the video footage of Atrians dumping Grayson, apparently drugged, will push him over to joining his parents’ cause in the Red Hawks, then why can’t she? For all the weird ideas Star-Crossed sends out there, I know we’re definitely supposed to be rooting for the titular couple but, with Emery written the way she is, I’m siding with Grayson on this one.

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Dinasyku is a good way to get everyone together; everyone talking about the presence of their seven integrators’ classmates visiting the sector. We learn a little more about Drake in this episode, for example, with his family apparently gone (believed to be in Eljida) and a genuine reluctance to continue doing the Trag’s bidding and, with Roman’s help, he deals with both in this episode. It’s not entirely clear what the Trags want to achieve by springing Drake’s mother from jail, but it gets him off of spy duty and, with the black box confirming that she and another were piloting the ship that crashed on earth, things are heating up.

For that’s not all Emery saw in her flashback – Castor was the one who brought the ship down and, with that information and the knowledge that he has a cupboard full of explosives at home, we can only guess what side he’s on. Is he the big bad we’ve been looking for, or is Vega still the main target when things kick off? There might even be a sneaky wolf in sheep’s clothing hiding in plain sight, since we know that Atrians can hide their markings and live among the humans, and there’s still time for some more big reveals before we wrap up. Then there’s Sophia’s son, who must have a big part to play.

My guess is that whatever Eljida actually is, and we’re still no closer to finding out, will be the thing that sparks the revolution we’ve all been waiting for. Hope is a powerful thing and, with the hope that there’s somewhere better where their supposedly dead family and friends currently reside is keeping a lot of the Atrians placated. Without this to hold on to, why would they stay locked away? Since this is Star-Crossed, we’re not going to see any large-scale annihilation but, with the Red Hawks and the Trags too busy fighting each other to realise what might be the real threat – the discovery of Cypher.

Eva and her team of scientists might be trying to cure terminal disease with secret alien technology, but the way she’s using Julia suggests she might have something else up her sleeve. Would she really resort to blackmailing a teenage girl and piling up Atrian bodies just to advance science? It’s plausible but, even though no one but Julia is looking in her direction right now, it’s only a matter of time before she targets someone else our main characters care about. When this happens, and Grayson inevitably joins the other side, Emery and Roman are going to have much bigger problems than keeping their makeout sessions a secret.

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, To Seek A Foe, here.

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