Television is a tough medium from a storytelling perspective. If a show aims for long plot arc, it inevitably becomes a balancing act between teasing the story out over the course of sometimes an entire season and still making individual episodes compelling in their own right. Usually this means that segments of the larger plot emerge during stand-alone genre episodes, then the occasional plot-heavy explosion happens all at once after things have had time to accumulate. Unlike in movies or novels, major character elements and story pieces don't have the luxury of living and dying by a handful of poignant lines. That's why, despite being at its best during action sequences, Legend of the Seeker ends up being boring and unimaginative for the sake of loose ends. This week, we viewers had to pay for an interesting addition to the principle cast by sitting through a medieval courtroom drama.

Because I think Tabrett Bethell is talented (maybe too talented for this show) and Cara is one of Seeker's more interesting characters, I'm willing to excuse "Broken" for being kind of a snoozer because we needed to get Cara's backstory out of the way. Sure, from a pure narrative standpoint it would have been far more satisfying to get her background in bits and pieces over the course of several episodes, but Seeker really isn't one of those shows.

I guess now is as good a time as any to reiterate the point I made when I was reviewing Season 1 of Legend of the Seeker over the summer. This series is a guilty pleasure, plain and simple. It isn't a deeper, more clever show masquerading as a genre romp and there's nothing at all postmodern about it. Legend of the Seeker is TV junk food that never pretends to be anything else. As such, I don't hold it to the same standards as every other show I review. It just doesn't bother me that much when Craig Horner proves he's an actor with a very limited range (like this episode's interminable lecturing) or when irrational fights break out and our protagonists end up killing half a dozen guys in their quest for righteousness without even a trace of irony.

What I do expect from Seeker is a weekly dose of magic and sword fights. "Broken" was light on both and for anyone who watched the first season all of Cara's sympathy-building exposition was unnecessary. If you want to understand how Cara went from being an innocent little girl to leading a coven of elite S&M witches, go back and watch the Season 1 episode "Denna". The only thing "Broken" added to the current state of the series was a confirmation of the unsettling moral relativism that has lingered in the background of the show since the beginning. I'm sure the show will never really address this issue, but it tickles me regardless that our heroes are effectively mass murderers who justify their means by citing vague, ostensibly desirable ends.

Best Moment: How about that opening? I'm all for surreal sequences of little girls with weird eyes and pet ravens being all foreboding. It sure was pretty, too.

Notes: The thief with the rune on his hand had better die next week. Aside from giving Zedd something to do, his primary function seems to be audience annoyance.

Episode Rating: 3/5- I'll chalk this one up to a chore episode. Cara needed some fleshing out, we couldn't get to the Stone of Tears so soon and all of the protagonists needed to get on the same page. Now that we've pulled that tooth, let's hope for very sword-y, magic-y episode next week.