WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Chapelwaite Season 1, Episode 1, "Blood Calls Blood," airing now on EPIX.
At the beginning of Chapelwaite's premiere, Maya Boone dies at sea, leaving behind her husband Charles and their three children: Honor, Loa and Tane. Maya's death serves as the catalyst for the Boone family’s move to Chapelwaite, the house Charles inherited from his cousin, Stephen Boone. A flashback to Maya's death bed shows that she asked Charles to move with the children to provide them with more structure. While Charles wants to honor Maya's wishes, the Boone family's varying reactions to the change show that grief is complicated and moving to a new place, especially a possibly haunted or infested home near a town filled with racism and animosity toward their family, might not be the best way to help them deal with their loss.
While Chapelwaite is supposed to be a new beginning for the Boones, they are surrounded by their ancestral dead. Upon their arrival, the children find the family portrait wall, which depicts all of their dead relatives, and notably, Charles' father Robert Boone's portrait is vandalized. Later, when clearing out the overgrowth in the yard, Tane finds the Boone family graveyard. He is horrified by the idea of having the graveyard in their backyard. Honor jokes, "I guess this is where you go after the portrait gallery," but the scene fills them all with unease.
Despite these reminders of the dead, Honor, the oldest, is still willing to embrace Chapelwaite and life in Maine. She is thrilled when she sees the manor, and she seems to be the most interested in the family history. When interviewing Rebecca Morgan for the governess position, Honor takes the lead and takes pride in her siblings and education. However, she also shows excitement for the possibilities that Rebecca's college education presents, both for her studies and for her own possible future. Overall, Honor shows that while she still loves and misses her mother, she wants to make Chapelwaite a home for her family.
After Maya's burial at sea, Tane has a hard time accepting that Maya is gone. When Charles goes to his children to tell him his plans for the family at Chapelwaite, Tane is distraught because he heard scratching and believes that his mother is trying to get back on the boat. When Rebecca suggests that they play the pendulum game to find spirits in honor of All Hallows Eve, Tane asks if they will be able to communicate with the spirits they find, clearly hoping to speak with his mother. Despite his grief, Tane has some enthusiasm for the move and for the new house like Honor.
Loa is the one most outwardly affected by her grief. She always wears her mother's shell necklace. After Maya's funeral, Loa refuses to speak for months. She is the most resistant to the changes brought by their move to Chapelwaite. Loa thinks that Maya would not have liked the home and also objects to the hiring of Rebecca Morgan as their governess, albeit silently in both cases. Loa is absorbed in her grief and struggles with the rest of her family's attempts to move forward.
Loa's silence breaks during a confrontation with Charles after the family is refused entry to the Sunday service in Preacher's Corners. Charles apologizes for snapping at Loa at the church, but he also demands obedience. Charles reveals that he believes Loa blames him for Maya’s death and for Loa’s disability from rickets, and he apologizes for both. He also talks about Maya, her strength and stubbornness, and how he misses her. Loa then embraces her father and reveals that her silence is partly from Charles’ own silence. She states, "There is something inside that you hide from us. It scares me."
Charles' secret, his father's attempted murder of him as a child, is a trauma that he understandably struggles to confront. Charles has not confided in his children the truth of his childhood or his fears about his own mental health, especially in light of his hallucinations of worms. Instead, he chooses to move forward without taking the chance to fully grieve for his wife or for the man he believed his father to be. This stubborn refusal to confront his grief forms the true crux of his conflict with Loa and makes him unable to help her with her own grief and loss. The reason why Loa breaks her silence is that Charles finally is talking about Maya more and acknowledging Loa's pain, even if he still keeps his secrets about his past. However, her pronouncement about Charles' secrets fuels Charles' fears about his familial history.
While Charles and Loa share some reconciliation by the episode’s end, it is clear that the conflict between them is just beginning. While there is no one way to grieve, the conflicts formed by their differing grieving methods are all the more dangerous because of the horror within Chapelwaite. As the series continues, they will have to deal with their grief as they face a hostile community and more supernatural trials from the Boone family's past and future.
To see how the upcoming supernatural horror continues to affect the Boone family's dynamics, watch new episodes of Chapelwaite Sundays at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on EPIX.
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