Legend of the Seeker is an odd show for me, as both a critic and a fan. I can see so much potential in it and while I never really expect it to live up to that potential, I still find myself feeling disappointed when it doesn't take at least a few opportunities for some real emotional depth. Whenever a book gets adapted for the screen there's a respectable impetus to be faithful to the source material, but there are always reasons to deviate from the original. I think the Sword of Truth series does well as a standard exercise in high fantasy, but like most of the genre it lacks the pathos required to make a compelling modern TV drama. I so often find myself wishing that the show would be darker or more emotionally complicated, especially in episodes like "Touched" in which there are so many chances to push that button.

If you've watched Season 1 of Seeker then you've already been exhaustively educated on the topic of magical Confession and its implications for love, marriage and procreation. Like so much of Season 2, this episode is as much a primer for newcomers as a continuation of the larger plot. Kahlan asks a bunch of wisps, aka the little glowing plot devices discarded early in the first season, to find any other living Confessors and they only turn up one result. It's a naive girl locked up in a tower Rapunzel-style who doesn't know about her powers. After a botched attempt to sell her to a rehash of the magic-stealing sorcerer from a long, long time ago, our protagonists have to deal with her and her numerous magical abuses.

In that regard I'm actually glad she showed up. She was an awful, annoying character with no future on the show, but she confessed Flynn and all regular viewers should know that Confession is practically a death sentence on this show. Getting rid of the stereotypical thief character was worth a little whining by a pudgy teenager.

Except that there was remarkably little death in this episode. Little Miss Confessor gets some wrong ideas in her head about love and all that business, so she ends up confessing every man (except Zedd) in a ten miles radius. When she put the ju-ju on Richard, I looked forward to her end at the point of one blade or another, but that didn't come around either. After the anticlimactic retrieval of yet another magical whatsit designed to find the Stone of Tears, they use the sorcerer's magic-stealing crystal to de-Confessorize the girl so everyone gets released from the spell. Boring? Yeah. Maybe I'm just too much of a Team Cara cheerleader and I don't mind when annoying, useless characters get stabbed.

But the big missed opportunity for juicy darkness in this episode was the convenient baby production between Kahlan and a still-confessed Richard. Of all the times to deviate from the books, this was it. The giant, awkward ball of drama that would result from Kahlan carrying a baby she conceived with Richard under the one circumstance in which he could never love her would have done wonders for the character depth in this show. Instead, everything goes back to the tension-free status quo.

Oh, well. At least Flynn is out of the picture and Richard's still available for some more fur blanket shenanigans with Cara.

Best Moment: The thirty seconds during which it seemed plausible that Kahlan might just cut Little Miss Confessor's throat. Bridget Regan plays scary-crazy well.

Notes: I thought that banelings needed to be completely consumed by fire to keep them from coming back, not just, ya know, singed a bit. At least give me a line of dialog about piling up the bodies for a bonfire.

Episode Rating: 3/5- The glimmers of pathos, while not satisfying, were like a few drops of precious water in a desert of predictable storytelling. Also, looking to the future at least now we know there won't be any more Random Disposable Confessor plots (at least I hope). I can't complain about an episode in a sword-and-sorcery show that has plenty of both, so I'm being generous.