Fucking Day: Witches of East End

In 2013 a Lifetime executive woke up in a cold sweat, realizing the tweens and teens who grew up in the Vampire Diaries years were now old enough to be squarely in the Lifetime demographic. You may know The Lifetime channel from their hit movies, such as What If This Hot Man Murdered You and What If This Hot Man Who Owns a Christmas Tree Farm Kissed You, and the immensely popular What If This Hot Man Murdered You And Buried Your Body On His Christmas Tree Farm with Candace Cameron-Bure and Dermot Mulroney.

Of the big channels that cater exclusively to women, Hallmark is the religious one, and Lifetime is the horny one, so when it came time to impress the freaky ladies of Generation Monster Sex, they were prepared to go all out.

They decided to adapt YA author Melissa de la Cruz's first adult novel into a series. It was called Witches Of East End, not to be confused with The Witches Of Eastwick, except that everyone was totally hoping you would confuse it with that.

Though they have similar titles, the shows are completely different. The Witches Of Eastwick is about three sexy witches and one creepy supernatural dude. The Witches Of East End is about four sexy witches and a bunch of creepy supernatural dudes. See, there's an extra hot lady, so it's an entirely different story. It's like how you can tell Back to the Future from Butt to the Future because Doc Brown has sex with his past self in Back. Wait, Butt.

The basic premise of the Witches Of East End is Marvel's Thor meets The Craft. The witches are from another dimension called Asgard, which is legally distinct from Thor's Asgard because the king is named Nikolaus for some reason. It's like the writers read 10% of Norse mythology and figured they had the gist of it before they got to Odin.

From left to right in the above picture, the main characters are Ingrid, Joanna, Wendy, and Freya. They were all banished to Earth by Wendy and Joanna's father, Nikolaus, the king of Asgard, who also cursed them. Sort of? Wendy's curse is that she can turn into a cat and has nine lives, which is a pretty sweet "curse.". I think we'd all like to know what atrocity she committed to get sentenced to having awesome cat powers.

You can tell who Nikolaus's favorite daughter was because Joanna's curse is "never-ending motherhood." Her daughters Freya and Ingrid will grow to adulthood but die relatively young. Then Joanna becomes mystically pregnant with them and has to raise them again. Oh, and they are reincarnated with no memories of their previous life. Her sister got, "sometimes you're a kitty cat," and Joanna got “childbirth like 17 times.”

Obviously, none of this matters. It’s a monster sex show; nothing else around it has to make sense because nobody cares. As long as a Frankenstein gets fucked, they keep viewers. Here are some favorite setups for monster erotica on this Lifetime show.

Setup #1: Freya Can't Stop Having Sex With Her Fiance's Brother, But It's Ok Because They Are Reincarnated Soulmates.

This one is my least favorite of my favorites, but it's essential to the genre. Every monster sex story has to have some kind of soul mate pairing that lasts forever (or until one of the actors gets a movie deal). Witches Of East End had Freya and Killian.

Killian is a warlock, and we learn in the episode "Poe Way Out" that he was, sigh, Edgar Allen Poe in one of his past lives because this show loves two things: monster dick and puns. There was no mention of why Killian married his thirteen-year-old cousin in that past life. I guess Poe-body's nerfect!

When Freya first sees Killian, her extreme horniness triggers her witch powers and turns her white flower red which is a pretty funny visual metaphor for boioioing. Or a pretty unambiguous message if you're a baboon.

Setup #2: Ingrid Has A Bunch Of Ghost Sex

Shortly after meeting her Aunt Wendy, Ingrid ends up resurrecting her from the dead, which she didn't need to do because, again, Wendy's curse is a superpower. According to the show canon, every spell has a price, and if you resurrect someone you love, someone else you love will die. Anyway, Ingrid's normal guy boyfriend, Adam, dies of an aneurism and she feels guilty, so she brings him back from the dead for some sorry-I-killed-you ghost sex.

The show calls this her "unique" way of mourning Adam. I call it a one way ticket to horny jail.

Setup #3: Ingrid Is In a Mystical Orgy Cult

It's got creepy Eyes Wide Shut masks and everything, so you know it's serious. This is the plot that makes the least sense, which is an accomplishment for a show with a time closet. Yes, there's a time closet. It's not important. Remember how Ingrid and Freya are constantly dying and being reborn? Well, in 1906 Ingrid got mixed up with this cult leader named Archibald Browning, pictured in this hilarious giant-headed painting from the show.

This version of Ingrid dies protecting Archibald from her family and is resurrected (with absolutely no consequences) by a villain to become a major villain herself in season one. A regular viewer might think, "Wait, if Ingrid is reincarnated, shouldn't 1906 Ingrid's soul be in modern day Ingrid's bod-- whoa, look at the buns on that minotaur!"

If they wanted this past version of Ingrid on the show, why didn't they just do a time travel thing with the, I don't know, time closet? The time closet has been in the house since season one. It would have come in handy multiple times, but they don't discuss it until season two. And you don't need a PhD. in Dork to know that when a show introduces time travel in season two, it's in trouble. The time closet was the oh shit button for Witches Of East End, and once they double palm smashed that bad boy, the show was doomed. Where do you go from time closet? Psh. I already undid your better idea with my time closet.

Setup #4: Wendy's Boyfriend Is Possessed By... Her Dad

Season two is all about the portal to Asgard. Ingrid opened it at the end of season one, and Freya's long-lost twin brother Frederick used it to return to the show due to a lack of hot warlocks. However, due to a lack of hot warlocks who are also evil, Frederick became a vessel for the real great curser, Nikolaus.

Frederick spends most of the season searching for the perfect body for Nickolaus, and hey, wouldn't you know it, the ideal vessel is the nice normal guy banging his Aunt Wendy. Every human man that enters this show is just begging to be murdered by a hotter monster.

King Nikolaus is totally cool with this. He's not at all concerned about living in the body of a man who used to bone his daughter. Of course, the witches vanquish the evil king but end up killing Wendy's hot boyfriend in the process. So, Wendy switches the last of her nine lives with her boyfriend's, bringing him back to life and sending her to Hell, which looks like the set of a 90's Evanescence music video.

Since the show was canceled with Wendy in Hell, apparently she's trapped there forever. Sorry, Wendy! Fans were pretty upset about this along with multiple other unresolved cliffhangers, so Melissa de la Cruz has publicly said she's hoping to get Wendy out of Hell in her new YA series set in the same universe starring the daughters of Thor, whose mortal name is Troy Overbrook which I find hilarious. People are named Thor in our universe! Why would he change his name to Troy? Does he think that sounds cooler than Thor? You sound like a fucking nerd, Troy Overbrook.

Setup #5: Holy Shit, Do The Writers Hate Ingrid? Ingrid Gets Brainwashed By A Sex Monster

Season two of Witches Of East End, the same season which gave us the time closet, and Hell, also gave us the Mandragora. Apparently, Witches Of East End wasn't satisfied with the pantheon of sexy monsters that had yet to be fucked on this show. No one fucked a mummy or even a werewolf, but they were ready to invent their own sexy monster, and boy did they do that. It's called the Mandragora. It's got man right in its name, so you know it's hot.

The Mandragora is always shown in shadow because the monster makeup budget on this show wasn't great. It's described as an animal or mystical creature, like if a unicorn were a hot boy. It has long blue tentacles that come out of its back which it uses to feed and to kill its victims. It doesn't eat people, though. It survives on the "sexual energy" of its chosen partner.

The Mandragora uses its powers to erase its partner's memory, so you could be having sex with a mandragora right now, and you wouldn't even know it. Keen-eyed crotch detectives might have noticed the Mandragora doesn't appear to have a penis but instead a sort of round sack in the penis area. We see Ingrid have sex with the mandragora A LOT in season 2, and there's definite pelvic thrusting involved, so I don't know what's going on down there? And I don't care to speculate. It's probably a cloaca. Or some kind of vibrating fish lure. Damn it, I'm speculating.

Whatever it was, audiences loved it. You know that thing where girls make a Youtube video with clips of a couple from a TV show over a love song? There's one for Ingrid and the Mandragora set to "Stripped" by Rammstein that has 56,000 views.

The Mandragora is killed, but Frederick tells everyone that King Nikolaus has cultivated an army of them to do his bidding in Asgard, which would imply the existence of an army of people whose job is to fuck mandragora's every day, so they don't die of starvation.

I'm glad that Witches Of East End didn't get a season three. Not only because I don't know where you go from the time closet reveal, but because there was a huge move in the fan base to redeem the Mandragora. Supportive comments under The Mandragora's page on the Witches Of East End wiki include:

"I am so on Team Mandragora i would have called him Manny, lol, but no they had to kill him Ingrid don't know what she's missing out on ;)"

"I think they should be together forever :) Maybe they could do a spell so that he looks human :) I love this show"

"Those tentacles…Hentai anyone? Hahaha!! He's hot though :3"

It turns out the ultimate bad boy is a murder monster from another dimension who eats sex. There isn't a maximum-security horny jail big enough to contain whoever invented this. Thank God Lifetime went back to making normal shows like, Hot Murderer Santa Thinks You've Been Naughty starring Jason Priestley and Ellen Burstyn as Mr. and the Former Mrs. Claus.

Follow Lydia on Twitter for more mandragora facts.