surprise, bitch!

BUT WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT HIS HAND ON HER LEG??????????

from the very start, michael always eyed mallory when he said “almost all of you” will he sent to the sanctuary, which meant he had the slightest suspicion of her power and yearning regardless. (ex: below he is already looking at her when he speaks and doesn’t break eye contact regardless.)

during the interview, he did the most to try and provoke her, even by breaking protocols that allowed him to touch her which were against the outpost’s rules. you could say it’s because she didn’t want to take his offer, but he says during his first entrance that he simply doesn’t care for the people who don’t want to go and that they could just “die and stay there”, but he’s eager to get mallory to not only stay but to show him who she was.

(gif credit: @albion19)

you could say that this is bc he wants to see if she was actually a witch like cordelia and thus a threat, but when he actually SAW that she was a witch he in turn became terrified and dropped the effort to get her to stay, so whatever presence he sensed within her wasn’t her magic beforehand as he wouldn’t have been so carefree. and if he had sensed her magic, why didn’t he sense coco’s or become scared that the other witch would turn on him? it’s bc he didn’t sense her magic, or at least didn’t presume it to be witch magic. he sensed her yearn to accept something she didn’t want to b much like him and that’s what drove him to try and to get her to accept her place at the sanctuary.

since we have established he sensed her outcast place and didn’t think of her to be a threat but moreover a kindred spirit he related to, let’s get into the reasons why he said he was going to the sanctuary: to start a new world. well, it seemed that he was only eager to take mallory and ms. meade with him, and to start a new world which required reproduction for the new adam and eve, the only real candidates would’ve been him and mallory. he knew exactly what he was doing to ask mallory not only bc he related to her, but because he was definitely attracted to her or whatever was buried inside of her, as seen also when he held her hand and broke the contact rule to in a half-assed attempt to be soft with her (ex: see this here when he decided to try and attempt to reason with her).

(gif credit: @allbridgesburn)