Siren episode 6 review: The rift between Ryn and Donna grows
Ben works his magic
Even though the government has allowed for companies to fish the ocean dry the media is not letting up on anyone deciding to take advantage of the situation and their target is Ben’s family since they have the biggest fishery in town. Ben sees this as an opportunity to try and and bend his father in a direction that helps the oceans, by saying that his father can take a strong political stand to get good press for his company – that even though the government is taking a “we don’t care” stance on over fishing, his company won’t do that. He sells it to his dad by saying they can sell premium fish to high end markets with quality over quantity winning out so they can still make good money, but not over-fish. After crunching the numbers his father agrees and brings in the boats.
Family love or romantic love?
While we have been fully aboard the idea of Ben, Maddie and Ryn becoming involved in a polyamorous relationship for a while now we’ve been wondering if Ryn truly understands everything she is doing. We have to remember here that she’s not a human and she has barely had any contact with other humans outside of Maddie and Ben who are a romantic couple. Watching them interact is where she is learning how to interact with them, so is this really a romantic feeling that Ryn is having or is this how she thinks families interact with each other? Last week we saw Ryn kiss Maddie and tonight we saw her mimic Maddie as Ryn kissed Ben on the mouth and say I love you as he was headed out the door.
Decker’s hunt for Donna
Decker is a really interesting character and one that we haven’t quite figured out where he fits in on the whole good vs bad spectrum. He has sympathy for the sirens, but he’s still a man of science so if he can find a way to not hurt the sirens too much and continue his research he will do that. He’s not exactly a villain, but he’s not a hero either and that’s what make him one of the most interesting characters on the show.
He’s obsessed with Donna and even though she played him like a fiddle and then murdered almost everyone at the lab, he can’t get her siren song out of her head. His hunt for Donna has led him to Bristol Cove and has been sniffing around the marina lab that Ben and Maddie work out of. Once he sees the signs that the sirens have been there (a smashed up wall will give them away every time) he knows he close.
At a charity ball, Decker shows up and finds a way to be introduced to Ben. Decker is trying to tap in to Ben’s soft spot (his mother’s paralysis) by talking about a “marine creature” he was experimenting with saying that their stem cells helped paralyzed rats regain their ability to move again, something that Ben’s mother has desperately wanted since her accident. Dangling this carrot in front of his mom infuriates Ben (as it would anyone) and he tells Decker off, but it doesn’t stop him from pushing Ben to get to the Siren. Originally, we thought Ben wasn’t going to reveal anything, but when he tells Decker that he “knows what she did to him” with the siren song Ben knows he’s got Decker’s attention.
This scene was a bit strange for us and here’s why: We know that Ben is trying to fill the oceans back up with fish and that he’s not one to sell out any of the sirens to make that happen but it was still unnerving to hear him offer to give up Donna if Decker called off the hunt for more sirens. We just have to be like Ryn and trust that Ben has a bigger plan here that is not going to end up with Donna being sacrificed. The plan works insofar as Decker reveals that a boat just off the coast is going to start harvesting the sirens tonight! Why Decker gave up this information without really being given any sort of sign of goodwill from Ben about giving him Donna is beyond us, but we are willing to go with it.
Sisterly rift
Donna is still anti-human and nothing Ryn says is helping to bridge that gap. In fact, the more Ryn tries to tell Donna that Ben and Maddie will help them get food, the more resistant Donna is – and can we blame her? They haven’t exactly had the same experience. While Donna was in a prison having painful testing done on her, Ryn was getting kisses and hugs from the humans. This is an issue that they may never see eye to eye on… even if the humans help get her food we suspect Donna isn’t going to come around.
Once Ryn gets a better understanding of exactly what happened to Donna (both the physical and emotional pain of what she went through) they find out where Decker is and lure him to the woods to kill him. When Ben and Maddie show up and stop Ryn from killing Decker, Ryn sees that there is a difference between bad humans and good humans, (also that killing in general is frowned upon in the human world), but Donna still can’t look past what happened to her. It continues to widen the rift between them as Donna heads back to the ocean.
Related – Check out what’s coming up on Siren episode 7!
CarterMatt Verdict
One of our biggest questions coming out of tonight’s episode is this: Are we going to see other sirens before the season is out? We know that there is a fishing trolley out in the ocean that is moving forward to snags some new mermaids, so it’s possible that we may meet some new sirens before the season ends. There weren’t as many big shockers in this episode, but what tonight’s installment really did was set up the final few episodes for a pretty intense ride.
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