'Fate: The Winx Saga' Episode 1: How is Bloom linked to the Burned Ones? Here's how Alfea's fairies are introduced
Spoilers for 'Fate: The Winx Saga' Season 1 Episode 1 'To the Waters and The Wild'
The first episode of Netflix's new young adult fantasy series 'Fate: The Winx Saga' titled 'To the Waters and The Wild', brings us Harry Potter vibes for sure. Here, the people with magic fear the Burned Ones. In hopes of mastering her magic, Bloom, a fire fairy decides to lie to her human parents and attend Alfea, a magical boarding school in the Otherworld. She is from the First World aka California and had no idea what the Otherworld was up until three months ago when she was found by Alfea's headmistress Miss Farah Dowling (Eve Best). On her first day there, she not only sees a Burned One but ends up in denial about a secret that one of her suitemates Aisha (Precious Mustapha) lets her in on. Turns out, Miss Dowling has kept Bloom in the dark about something way too important.
The beginning of the episode sees a Shepard being killed by an unknown creature after passing through what looks like a magical barrier searching for a lost sheep. It doesn't take us long before we find out that this creature is called a Burned One — it's been 16 years since the last one was spotted. According to Dowling, someone named Rosalind (Lesley Sharp) — who we have yet to be introduced to — had killed them all, but even the headmistress was in for a surprise. There are seven realms in the Otherworld and Bloom isn't ready for what's waiting for her. According to Dowling, Alfea has produced graduates who have ruled realms, lead armies, and have even rediscovered long lost magic, but Bloom is just there to learn to control her powers.
Bloom's human parents
Bloom has 4 roommates — Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen), who's a "mentor and not a tutor" and has a gateway ring; Musa (Elisha Applebaum), who is a mind fairy; Terra (Eliot Salt), an earth fairy and Aisha, whose fairy type has yet to be revealed. But by the looks of it, she's most definitely some sort of water fairy.
Bloom is the only one who doesn't know how to work her powers as her parents are not fairies. While her parents know that their daughter is at Alfea, they think that Alfea is an international boarding school in Switzerland. Dowling apparently had told Bloom that she may have a fairy in her family tree, "like a long-dormant magical bloodline."
Aisha found Bloom's being fairy daughter to two human parents odd. After finding Bloom out of control while practicing her fire powers outside of the barrier, and helping her with bringing water up from underground, Aisha explains to Bloom that she may be something that she had no idea about.
Bloom tells Aisha the reason why she's so freaked out about her powers. Turns out that one day when Bloom's mother took away her bedroom door after a fight, Bloom was unable to contain her anger. Since, as she found out from Stella, fairy magic is linked to emotions (stronger the emotion, stronger the magic), the fire she produced went out of control. Bloom's mother ended up with third-degree burns. After that Bloom used to sleep in a warehouse outside of her home because she was so scared of hurting her parents — that's where Dowling had found her.
Aisha, who saw how strong Bloom's powers were, realized that there was no way that she wasn't related to a fairy. She thinks Bloom is a changeling, fairy baby that was switched with a human one at birth. Bloom had to be pure-blooded with powers that strong, Aisha said. Of course, Bloom wasn't able to grasp that and storms off angry. But, it turns out, that Dowling knew about Aisha's revelation all along.
The Burned One
The barrier around Alfea is there to protect the school from the Burnes Ones, who not only have inhuman speed and strength, but once they cut their victim, the infection that follows is "swift and severe." We find out that one of Alfea's masters Saul Silva (Robert James-Collier) lost his father to a Burned One.
Silva and Dowling end up finding the Shepards body outside the barrier, thanks to a student. While they initially thought it was a wolf that killed the Shepard, Terra's father who works at the Greenhouse at Alfeat notices that there is "char residue". Adamant that Rosalind had killed all the Burned Ones, Dowling was in no mood to startle anyone and feed rumors — she asks for the body to be cleaned up.
The story gets interesting after that — a fairy named Beatrix (Sadie Soverall) shows up at Dowling's door claiming to be a big fan. We see Beatrix only two other times after — one in which she's flirting with Specialist Riven (Freddie Thorp). Now, with Bloom feeling homesick as she battled with the thought that the people she grew up with might not be her parents, Stella found a perfect way to get rid of her for a bit. The reason being is that Stella had seen Bloom and Sky (Danny Griffin) flirting, and she wasn't too keen on her suitemate chatting up her ex-boyfriend. Since Stella's gateway ring only works outside the barrier, she sends Bloom to a gateway in an old cemetery where the ring would work and allow the fire fairy to enter the First World. After an emotional phone call to her parents, as she watched them from outside their home, Bloom makes her way back to the gateway only to be faced with a Burned One. While Dowling saves Bloom in the nick of time, Stella's ring was taken by the Burned One.
Dowling later admits to Silva that she had not killed the Burned One but had chained it up in a barn outside the barrier and dosed it with oil of the Zanbaq flower. She wants to find out if this was an "isolated incident or something more", because as she tells Silva she found a changeling in the First World. It's been centuries since anyone had heard of a changeling. While we all know that it's Bloom, Dowling doesn't explicitly reveal that to Silva. She tells him that Bloom was left in the First World around the time the last Burned One was seen — 16 years ago, the exact age Bloom is. Dowling fears that the students at Alfea aren't safe, and the chaos would soon ensure. She also believes there's a connection with Bloom and the return of the Burned One — all of this can't be a coincidence.
We believe her too, considering Beatrix seems to have done something with her powers to the Burned One free — "Morning, Sunshine," she says.
'Fate: The Winx Saga' is now available to stream on Netflix.