There is a moment in one of the early episodes of Motherland: Fort Salem that beautifully, and frustratingly, hints at the show’s great potential: Two young women, conscripted into an army of American witches learning combat magic at the titular facility, sneak away from the drudgery of basic training and into a moonlit wood. One of them, Scylla (Amalia Holm), is a bit savvier than the newest recruit, Raelle (Taylor Hickson), and she’s secreted away patches that, when applied to the skin, allow a witch to float upward in the air and propel herself in flight. The two women rise against a sky awash in a gorgeous lunar blue, buoyed by the drug and, most potently, by their attraction to each other. As their eyes fill with a rich, cloudlike whiteness and widen in an almost delirious pleasure, they glide toward each other in a sumptuous kiss. The moment is grandly romantic yet tinged with menace: Scylla harbors a secret, one that will devastate her lover.
The moment’s beautiful imagery introduces the physical, lived reality of being a super-powered person—more than a little terrifying but equally exhilarating, every gesture filled with boundless potential that must still be wrangled into careful control. Yet it’s frustrating because it holds a complexity that the show too often forfeits as it attempts the blood-flecked froth of other baroque teen dramas like Riverdale. Just when the series seems poised to say something profound and uncomfortable about power and exploitation, it becomes disappointingly rote. Motherland: Fort Salem has a compelling premise: In its alternative history, the U.S. government makes a pact with the most powerful of the Salem witches to suspend the infamous witch trials—provided that the witches use their remarkable gifts to advance America’s military agenda. The only way for witches to survive is to kill and die for a country that, for all intents and purposes, would’ve been content to see them hang.
By the time the series begins, the entire global military complex is powered by witchkind. There are “good” witches like our central trio, which is made up of Raelle Collar, the country girl with a chip on her shoulder after her beloved mother, an army medic, dies a spectacularly terrible death on a mission gone wrong; Abigail Bellweather (Ashley Nicole Williams), the proud daughter of a legendary military family, whose outsized arrogance barely veils her abiding sense of inadequacy; and Talley Craven (Jessica Sutton), the big-eyed, pure-hearted idealist who just wants to use her powers for the greater good. They answer their nation’s call on their 18th birthdays, swearing oaths to protect the innocent. “Bad” witches, like the terror group The Spree, raise the horrors of hell against the human world by murdering thousands of civilians in gruesome spectacles: In the first six episodes, members of The Spree enchant large groups of people so that they commit mass suicide, or freeze them alive in public swimming pools. These scenes are staged with an immaculately stylized cruelty that sickens and dazzles, like a glint of moonlight off a sharpened scythe.
Still, the show’s treatment of The Spree belies its two most significant weaknesses: It feints toward portraying the terrorist cell as something akin to X-Men’s Brotherhood of Mutants, using violence to defy and avenge decades of subjugation—and if they must kill thousands of civilians, all the better to make their point. But this portrayal remains surface-level, in a few tossed-off lines about a Spree-affiliated character’s rage at her conscientious objector parents being executed for desertion, or Raelle’s bitter observation that, for all the pomp and circumstance and “thank you for your service,” most of these witches are simply here to be cannon fodder. After all, the warrior matriarch of the Bellweather family, a woman renowned as one of the greatest generals in witchkind, was an enslaved woman, a point that the show glosses over. There’s an intricate, thorny bramble of a question here, of whether witches should violently rebel against a system that has, for generations, threatened them with torture or death for not defending it—yet the writing stays clear of all that, content to graze its finger on one of those thorns, and marvel at the thin trickle of blood drawn.