There’s a bit in episode two of The Essex Serpent on Apple TV+ – I am one of the few people on Earth who will ever make it to episode two, so I can tell you this safe in the knowledge that you will never bother to watch as far – where Claire Danes’s Cora and Tom Hiddleston’s Will experience fata morgana, a mirage out at sea.
The central struggle at the heart of The Essex Serpent – or one of the 12 or 14 scattergun themes it has – is Cora’s naturalist, reason-based logic versus preacher Will’s more measured, conservative, faith-based beliefs, and how they weirdly flirt with each other by reading intensely through library books and tiptoeing around whether God is real. The mirage itches that scratch for them both: she has something she can research all the magic out of; he has something he can remember reading about romantically in one of his leather-bound books. They’ll bond over this, eventually, but I won’t watch that far. No one will.
