The other big issue here is Bess’s devotion to Temperance. These are the behaviors of someone we might reluctantly admire but are also right to fear. Yet she’s also willing to use her own pain as a tool, readily using those around her to get what she wants and doing so with the air of calm cunning we’ve seen from her all season. Related All Rise Review: Yeet (Season 2 Episode 17) Because Temperance is here to get her daughter back as the Copperhead kills the people Charity’s souls was bound to, we can assume that all the heartbreaks we witness are real too, and that Temperance genuinely is a grieving mother. Nancy Drew - “The Burning of the Sorrows” - Pictured (L-R): Bo Martynowska as Temperance and Kennedy McMann as Nancy - Photo: Shane Harvey/The CW - © 2021 The CW Network, LLC. Only in the very end do we see Temperance, in reaching out to Charity, reveal that she endured everything with the specific purpose of manipulating the one person who both mistrusted her most and had the smarts to see through her- Nancy Drew. It’s enough to work on Nancy, who early in the episode demands accountability from Temperance after Trott dies from the stroke she likely gave him. It’s an effective and brutal way of gaining our sympathizes, told in rapid flash cuts and images of ghosts come to life.
The monster only wants Temperance’s story of her daughter, Charity, who abandoned her mother for the women who betrayed her, fell in love with one of their sons, got killed, and then had her soul split four ways to prevent Temperance ever saving her. Nancy Drew - “The Burning of the Sorrows” - Pictured (L-R): John Harlan Kim as Agent Park and Kennedy McMann as Nancy - Photo: Shane Harvey/The CW - © 2021 The CW Network, LLC.
Joined by Agent Park, who is entirely too casual about accepting everything the Drew Crew presents to him, they attempt to dissuade the light monster with their sorrows instead, including his own story of a young child killed in a school shooting. Temperance pushes Nancy away and is struck, then forced to “feed” her heartbreaks to the monster. In attempting to capture the second Frozen Hearts Killer, now known as the Copperhead, Nancy and Bess inadvertently capture some kind of beast seemingly made of lighting. Nancy Drew Season 3 Episode 8, “The Burning of the Sorrows,” does its best to get us to fully empathize with her– at least until the final minutes. All season, Temperance has existed in a moral grey area and been foreshadowed as a likely villain.