Mayfair Witches Showrunners Explain Rowan Coming Into Her Power in Season Finale (Exclusive)

The first season of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches concluded on Sunday night with the season finale, “What Rough Beast”, delivering major changes for not only the Mayfair family, but for Rowan (Alexandra Daddario). Last week’s episode, “Tessa”, saw Rowan take back Lasher (Jack Huston) in the wake of Tessa’s (Madison Wolfe) murder, an act that brings her closer than ever to fulfilling a centuries old prophecy. The finale sees what happens when Rowan embraces her power and now, series creators Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford explain what it means for Rowan to embrace her power and how it sets up Season 2.

Warning: spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches beyond this point.

In the episode, Rowan fully embraces Lasher and her powers, chasing the man who killed Tessa into the woods and then commanding Lasher to kill him for her. But Rowan is herself injured and ultimately ends up being drawn into a vision of Suzanne’s cottage where she learns about the prophecy, that she is the thirteenth witch, and the answers to her powers — including that she can heal herself and others.

As this is happening, her pregnancy also progresses rapidly as it is part of the prophecy that the thirteenth witch is the doorway and that at the witching hour, Lasher will be reborn via Rowan’s child. The episode ends with Rowan giving birth to the child and choosing to accept the power it offers rather than allowing Cortland to take the baby and power for himself — as well as rebuffing Ciprien (Tongayi Chirisa) when he tries to take the child for the Talamasca.

“It’s a lot that is thrown her way. I would say we were really trying to honor the end of that first book, which has this wild, wild turn,” Esta Spalding told ComicBook.com. “So, the first part of the episode is this absolute high for her of like, “I want to destroy, I’m admitting I’m a witch. I want to destroy, I want vengeance. That leads me to this place where I realized through all this whole wealth of ancestral knowledge and that I can heal and that connects me ultimately with Lasher. But connecting with Lasher, is this making a deal with a demon?” And that’s where it tips as into the second half where things are happening to her suddenly and she’s reacting to them. And it felt in the spirit of Anne’s book, right to have that happen. It is how it goes for Rowan there.”

She continued, “Michelle and I, when we broke the pilot, this idea that she says at the beginning, ‘if I had power, I would use it well.’ We really wanted her at the end of the season to choose power. Not just have that baby foisted on her, but there’s a chance Cortland could walk off with it and she chooses it. She chooses the power where that goes with it. So, we really go into the next season wondering what will she do with power? Will she live up to what she said she’ll do?”

For Michelle Ashford, it was important to examine the idea of what it looks like when women have power.

“That’s here we got really excited about that idea and we were talking about how it’s very much out in the zeitgeist, this notion of what does it look like when women have power?” Ashford said. “We were talking about that movie Tar, which is a really interesting examination of exactly that that, which is ‘wow, so that’s a woman with that kind of power, but look what happens.’ And it so is power in and of itself just naturally corrupting and we’ll see.”

Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches is now streaming on AMC+.