In this episode, the series’ love stories take center stage. Characters struggle to choose between what their hearts want and what their minds tell them to do. There are no physical battles, large or small. (For the episode’s requisite glimpse of gore, we see a bit of surgery.) The warriors Rogers and Simcoe don’t appear at all, and Brewster pops in for only a second. There are no feats of espionage. Instead, the intercut storylines are all about women and men seeking love, even as they betray themselves or others. Meanwhile, in Setauket, the love quadrangle of Anna Strong (Heather Lind), her absent husband Selah, Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell), and Maj. Edmund Hewlett (Burn Gorman) edges toward a wedding. Eighteenth-century law and etiquette would not actually allow this story to play out as it does, but Turn has established the characters well enough that it works within this reality. We know that Anna loves Abe, admires Hewlett, and will do whatever she must to keep them from hurting each other. We know Abe will do anything he can think of to get everything he wants now. And we know Hewlett will do the decent thing, even if he doesn’t get what he wants at all. By the end of the episode, this quadrangle collapses. One or two of the characters are leaving Setauket, apparently for good. Peggy Shippen also establishes a ticking clock for the upcoming episodes: She tells André that she and Arnold will be married on March 1, 1779. (In real life, the Arnolds married on April 8, and the general’s secret correspondence with André didn’t begin until the next month.) Shippen clearly wants André to finish traducing Arnold and rescue her from that engagement. Unlike Anna Strong, she does not actually have feelings for both the men pursuing her. André is just as clearly in a funk over not having Shippen for himself. Yet his first response is not to go after his Peggy, but to ask for a stronger drink. Later, he asks actress Philomena Cheer (Amy Gumenick), whom he hired to seduce Gen. Charles Lee in season 1, to dress her hair like Shippen’s. This does not bode well for Peggy’s hopes. In Turn, women betray men for other men they love and to forestall killings, but men betray women to carry on the war.
