By John Keegan
Talk about bad timing. Sally’s possession by her own Reaper persona takes place at the worst possible time, as Josh is about to turn during the full moon and Aidan needs a fix of human blood. For Sally’s part, she has fallen into that beloved trope of an internal fantasy world, as the Reaper personality seeks to keep her Sally personality happy and distracted.
“Spartacus” is usually that kind of series that delivers unexpected reversals of fortune, to the point where it becomes almost impossible to imagine that much of an episode would be devoted to a plot device that is so overused as to be laughable. So it’s surprising that the writers would go with something like a “Trojan Horse” scenario, even if they did try to frame it in a way that illuminates Glaber’s character.
"The Hunter's Heart" is a fairly good representation of "Merlin's" typical approach to blending an episodic story with the needs of an over-arching story, with the larger story taking a slightly heavier priority in this season than in any previous one. Most of the time, I've felt that the episodic storytelling detracts from the show's attempts to tell a serialized story, and that the connection between the two story layers was disappointingly thin. But at least in this case, the merger of the two stories feels relatively organic.