Carnival Row episode 3 review: A much-needed flashback hour gives this story more depth

Carnival Row takes us back in time to show us Philo and Vignette’s relationship (and how it ended) in the series’ strongest and most complete episode yet.

As we’ve mentioned before, one of the biggest issues with Carnival Row is how frequently all over the place it is, tonally speaking, as it tries to cram about four different genres and twice as many plots into one story. Its third episode, “Kingdoms of the Moon,” solves that problem by focusing solely on one storyline, an hour-long flashback that details the star-crossed romance between Philo and Vignette.

The result is the series’ best episode yet, an installment that manages to make you genuinely care about what were, to this point, the series’ weakest characters, and believe in the relationship between them. Now, it’s still up in the air as to whether Philo and Vignette ought to have anything to do with one another in the show’s current timeline, but it’s easy to see what they were to each other in the past.

Even if Philo’s sudden decision to fake his own death in order to “protect” his love makes even less sense now than it did before we knew anything about how and/or why he did it. In theory, he makes a split second decision to end things with Vignette for good because I guess Tourmaline manages to convince him that their future together will be too hard? It’s all sort of random and out of the blue, but basically what happens is that Philo goes from caring enough about Vignette to tell her the deepest, darkest secrets of his heart to deciding that he has to break off all contact with her forever so that human men aren’t racist toward her in his town. Maybe?

Sidebar: Surprise, Philo is also half-fae. This explains his deep-set sympathy for the fae people, because they are also, sort of, his people. And, to be fair, the story he tells about growing up always knowing he was missing the wings shorn off him as a child is pretty moving. But Carnival Row doesn’t seem to be the sort of show that’s going to be nuanced enough to discuss the intricacies of “passing” and the way that living that kind of life affects a person, which is a shame as that would be a more novel spin on one of the show’s clunkier racism metaphors.

But, as Philo hasn’t had a tremendous amount of depth up until this point, I suspect we should take what we can get.

The couple’s human/faery meet-cute in a hidden fae library full of magical illuminated texts is pretty adorable, as is their shared love of reading in general. And Carnival Row hints at something rather thematically beautiful with the idea that stories can be a universal language, shared between even the most disparate groups. The idea that Philo and Vignette both liked different versions of what was basically the same story in two different packages is sweet and a much more subtle way of proving universal connection than Carnival Row manages with the idea of prejudice. (Let’s put it this way: Even some of the soldiers sent to protect the fae folk are openly rude and racist to them at the same time, behavior which gets real tiresome real fast. Yes, yes, we get it – they’re different.)

Philo and Vignette even manage to build something like a real connection with each other before they have the obviously required inter-species sex interlude, in a sequence that kind of seems to exist to remind us that Amazon is a pay service and can show people naked if it wants to. “Kingdom of the Moons” honestly does a pretty good job of building a believable relationship between them in an extremely limited amount of time.

Of course, the episode spends so much time making us believe in these two star-crossed lovers as a thing that it sort of forgets to do anything with their breakup besides make Philo look like a ghosting jerk. I mean, pretending to be dead like two minutes after you told someone you loved them is like a next level trash move. And maybe Philo is trash, a little bit. He clearly hadn’t considered what a real relationship beyond their wartime love nest would look like. Maybe the approaching enemy air balloon army spooked him. Could be he’s just epically bad at relationships. Or perhaps he really thought giving Vignette a clean break would be what was best for her. (Though, as she quite rightly points out, he obviously never considered the pain she’d have to live with every day afterward.)

Either way, at least we understand precisely why she’s so furious with him now. And it’ll be interesting to see where their story goes from here.

All episodes of Carnival Row are now streaming on Amazon.