What is a recap? A miserable little pile of spoilers!
Last time, Dracula had agreed to send his forces (and castle) to Braila, while other scouting night creatures had begun trying to invade the Belmont Hold in which Trevor Bemont, Sypha Belnades, and Alucard were attempting to find a way to lock down the castle in a single location. The action is finally ramping up as we near the conclusion of this season!
Today we’ll dive into the sixth episode of Castlevania season two, “The River.”
1. Defense of the Belmont Hold
As the night creatures invade the Belmont Hold, Trevor is forced to face them alone. Alucard is busy keeping the image of Dracula’s castle in the distance mirror by focusing on his memory of it, while Sypha is concentrating on finishing assembling the locking spell to pull the castle to a set location and keep it there. However, barring some comedic problems with boarding up exits or securing appropriate armaments at a moment’s notice, he does rather well for himself. With the more literature and magic-inclined members of the trio occupied, he ends up disposing of the creatures one after another with both the magically augmented Morning Star flail and his overall ability with combat (and, by his reckoning, a “stick”).
Trevor Belmont may be a drunken fool a lot of the time, but he is still a Belmont, with the monster-hunting expertise his family is famous for to go with the surname.
2. Hell in Braila
At long last, Dracula’s forces have attacked Braila. There is violence, chaos in the streets in the form of destruction and panic from the castle’s sudden appearance. However, it is not only Dracula’s forces who they need to worry about. The actual attack on Braila itself was largely irrelevant: it was the river itself that was important, and so the focus remains far more heavily on a very different battle going on…
3. A Bridge over Holy Waters
The Bishop’s placement in Carmilla’s plan is made clear at the river of Braila. Using his powers of prayer, he blesses the entire river itself, turning it into a flow of holy water. The stream would have been difficult to pass directly for vampires in any case, due to being running water, but as holy water it is deliberately toxic to their kind. Considering Carmilla’s plots, such a body of water could be a means to keep the vampiric forces from retaking the castle once she attempts to usurp Dracula’s hold on it, or can be used as a weapon against the vampires in the first place.
In the process of blessing the river, the Bishop’s body, already a night creature and thus undead and vulnerable to holy energies, burns away, turning to naught but ash to be spread down the banks beyond. It is unlikely that we will be seeing his corpse again, given nobody seemed to care about him at all beyond being a tool or a momentary obstacle.
With all of the pieces in play as far as she can tell, she finally starts her overt coup. By pulling up the drawbridge to the castle too early, her forces cause many vampires to fall into the river below, resulting in instantaneous death by disintegration.
4. A Castle Divided Amongst Itself
Though many vampires fall to the sanctified streams below, those stuck either outside of the castle or inside are quickly assaulted by those Austrian troops, including apparently a large number of the remaining generals.
Isaac warns Dracula of the betrayal, with the colors on the armor cluing in his vampire friend that Carmilla had betrayed them at last. The castle lord is enraged, and declares that no one would take his castle from him.
Meanwhile, Carmilla herself is with Hector, noting that with the events going on, there is no way for him to ever go back to Dracula as anything but a traitor, leaving him stuck with her.
5. A Collision of Plans
Hilariously without being even aware of each other’s presence or, to a degree, even existence, the plans of the heroes and Carmilla’s scheme collide. While Sypha is capable with magic, she is still working against the techno-mystical engineering of the castle itself, causing several of her attempts to fail halfway through the process. The scholar’s gradual teleportation of the castle toward the Belmont Hold results in it appearing and disappearing at random in a wide variety of places across Braila, causing the holy water of the river to erupt upward and kill many vampires on either side, including very nearly Carmilla herself. Once the castle is finally gone from Braila altogether, rendering Carmilla’s plans moot, she can only respond in dumbfounded confusion, left in the riverside town with Hector and her troops, but unable to follow after her once-fellow generals.
Once the castle is brought, it is Sypha’s turn to be embarrassed and realize that she did not think things through. After all, she just transmitted an enormous, stone castle filled with undead to be on top of, in her words, “this underground space that’s probably only held up by wood and… dirt.”
Luckily, it isn’t going to collapse in on itself despite the damage done during the fighting, but still we are finally coming up on a collision of antagonistic forces, with the battle viewers have been waiting for soon to arrive.
