Last night’s Nancy Drew felt a lot like the calm before the storm. If you could ever call an episode of Nancy Drew “calm”, that is.
The Fate of the Buried Treasure showed us that our heroes are running out of time. Our favorite mystery-solving crew only has 46 hours left before the Aglaeca comes for them and they suffer a painful death.
So obviously, tensions are running high, options are running low, and they are running out of time to solve this.
The Aglaeca’s identity revealed
Last week, the crew went back to AJ’s cottage after he died to try and find any clue about how to defeat the Aglaeca. Once there, they found and retrieved something AJ had been building, called a Dybbuk Box.
Supposedly, it would work to trap the vengeful sea spirit, and thus, rid them of their death curse problem.
But of course, things are never that easy on this show, right? Nick quickly finds out that the box AJ had was total junk because it had to be built with a specific type of Mahogany wood and blessed by a priest, who died in the 1700s. Awesome.
As usual, though, Ace comes to the rescue and finds the original Dybbuk box. The problem is, it’s in a museum just outside of Boston. So he comes up with a plan, and that is to have Carson Drew posing as the Hudsons lawyer and ask the museum if they can take the Dybuk box out on a loan.
Carson tells him that he can’t lie, and Ace is like, dude, I got this. And then convinces Ryan Hudson to join their little trip. We’ll talk more about this in a minute, but this entire plot was fantastic and I love Ace for meddling. He’s my precious unicorn.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Bess were on a mission to find the rest of the items needed for the Dybbuk box to work. According to legend, they would need personal items of the vengeful spirit in order to lure it in and trap it inside the box. But in order to do that, they needed to confirm the Aglaeca’s identity first so they could try and locate any of personal belongings.
According to the song, the Aglaeca was actually a French woman named Odette Lamarr. They manage to track her story down online and find a painting of her, where she’s wearing a beautiful red necklace. They figure that if the story that she was murdered for her riches was true, then Douglas Marvin would have kept the necklace.
So off to the Douglas Marvin cottage — that now is a tourist spot in Horseshoe Bay since Marvin was one of the founders of the town — Nancy and Bess go. They were told to look for a guy named Aristotle, who was a tour guy, and that he would be able to help them with more information about Marvin.
Then there’s a fantastic scene where Nancy corrects everything about Odette the guy is saying in front of a bunch of tourists, and announce to them that Odette was murdered in cold blood just so Marvin could get her fortune. The crowd loves it, but Aristotle is not happy that she’s disrupting his tour.
Inside the cottage, they see a painting of Agnes, Marvin’s second wife, and guess what? She’s wearing Odette’s necklace. So Nancy and Bess decide to go exploring around the cottage and find a cellar that happens to be haunted by Agnes herself.
But they get spooked and rush out of there as fast as they can. Joining the tourist group again, Nancy inquires Aristotle about what’s up with the cellar and finds out that Agnes spent her last years there, as she went mad. Her only personal belonging they still had was hymn book, which Nancy stealthily grabs before they leave.
They go back to The Claw, where Nick is tinkering with a pair of ghost catching goggles. Where they even find these things is completely beyond me. But the device helps Nancy to see Agnes in her madness in that cellar, and she’s really shaken by it.
But they need to find that necklace, so she goes back in and tries to talk to Agnes unsuccessfully. But she notices something Agnes had carved into a table, and figures it must be a message somehow.
With Ryan’s help — of all people, right — she finds out that the riddle are actually music notes. She manages to identify the song and the specific passage, and solves the riddle. Agnes had hidden the necklace and several romantic letters she’d found from Odette to an English woman in the church.
That’s when Nancy finds out that Agnes figured out the truth about Odette’s murder and that she was forced to marry Marvin. Odette was actually in love with another woman, and Marvin took everything from her. Agnes felt so bad about this and wanted the world to know about Odette’s story. She told everything to the priest at the time, but he was in on it with Marvin.
They spread a story that she was mad, and locked her away in that cellar to stop her. Her last action before they locked her up was to hide the letters and the necklace in the hope that someone would eventually find it, believe her, and tell their story to the world.
How heartbreaking is that?
So now they had everything they needed, because Ace came back with Dybbuk box after Ryan Hudson bought it from the museum. They prepared everything, went to the beach, lured the Aglaeca in, and it almost worked. Odette nearly touched the necklace, her ghostly figure turning to human for a moment. But she realized it was a trap and screamed in Nancy’s face when she tried to reassure her that they wanted to tell her story to the world.
However, they still managed to hurt the Aglaeca. So if they can hurt, does that mean they can kill her?
I guess they have one day left to find out.
Nancy and her two fathers
While all of this was going on, Ace managed to accomplish a near impossible feat. Get Ryan Hudson and Carson Drew to talk. During their little roadtrip to Boston, after spending sometime at each other’s throats, Nancy’s two dads finally open up and talk about the elephant in the room.
What was particularly compelling about this is that Ryan admitted that he wasn’t ready then to be a father at 18. But that he wanted to give it a try now. Carson tells him that while Nancy probably wasn’t ready to forgive him for lying about her true origin her entire life, she might be more open to talk to Ryan.
And he was right! Ryan helped her solve Agnes’ riddle, and they talked a little but about him being her father, and that he would love to get to know her now, if she was interested. And she is! I still think Ryan has a long way to go as a human being, but that moment was just so incredibly heartwarming.
I can’t wait to see where their relationship goes, but I really hope Nancy forgives Carson sooner rather than later.
Other highlights of Nancy Drew
- I loved every moment of George and Jesse together. George loves her sisters so, so much and she is terrified of what might happen to them if/when she dies.
- Nick already said I love you? Dude moves fast, huh? Was I the only one who thought this was awfully fast?
- Have I mentioned how much I love Ace? Because I really, really do, and he must be protected at all costs.
- I felt so bad for Bess being so afraid she’s going to die that she bailed on Lisbeth. I truly hope they can patch things up.
Nancy Drew airs on Wednesdays at 9/8C on The CW.
“Then there’s a fantastic scene where Nancy corrects everything about Odette the guy is saying in front of a bunch of tourists, and announce to them that Odette was murdered in cold blood just so Marvin could get her fortune. The crowd loves it, but Aristotle is not happy that she’s disrupting his tour.”
Loved that scene,