Back in olden times, things sort of degenerate from there; in right-now times, Lafayette dreams about the story and then wakes up to find Mavis in his house being ghostly, and then she climbs in through his mouth and abruptly he is Mavis. One of the best things about the shapeshifting theme this season is watching powerful actors do powerful acting, and I must admit that I was hoping we'd get to see Tomfayette somehow because Ellis is so amazing, but this is ten times better. Mavis takes Lafayette's body for a little walk, presumably to the Bellefleurs' to steal Devil Mike.

I mean, on the one hand it's an interesting way to deal with the Devil Doll/Devil Baby cliffhangers and storyline, and a fairly classic ghost story in its own right that feels right for the icky race and history stuff of the area, and then on the other hand you have to think about how there are now two mediums inhabited by two spirits with two valid grudges, and how Bertolo told Jesus and Lala that he was being prepared to fight the Big Bad of this season, and how the season is absolutely going to have to end on Samhain, and it's so thrilling and I'm still missing some pieces of how it's going to go down.

But I still don't quite have a handle on how the two ghosts play off each other. They're both selfish, in different ways, and they both have stuff going on that's incredibly personal, and I don't know how you blow up Mavis's issues to full-on politics the way you can Antonia's -- beyond the strict racial thing going on right now with Mavis's tragedy -- but I think the answer lies somewhere in there. Because the other parallel that's jumping out right now is that ghosts are one kind of undead and vampires are the other, this sort of Cartesian break where one is a mind that needs a body and the other is a mind that is only a body, and either way the witches are in the middle.

Or if you look at ghosts as being echoes, repeated drives that go over and over -- vengeance, grief, etc. -- until the mystery gets solved, then the season will end with Zelda Rubenstein and I don't think that's entirely how it will go, because ghosts are only part of the equation: Samhain is when the walls between the worlds get thin. Halloween, All Hallow's, Dia de Los Muertos, all of it's because of the Autumnal Equinox, which for the West comes straight from Faerie lore. Ghosts, faeries, ancestors, mediums and witches. And for a vampire show, that word equinox is important because of how day and night are the same length, so that's a thing too.