Episodes 1 through 3 established what kind of show Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia was going to be. Episodes 4 through 12 prove it had no intention of staying comfortable.
From Spy to Survivor to Something Science
Episode 4 is where time starts moving differently. Eight years compress into a single episode as Sitara, now known as Fatima, becomes Sorghaghtani’s tutor and confidante while burying her hatred deep enough to make it invisible.
Genghis Khan dies. Tolui holds court. Ögedei rises. The episode closes on Sorghaghtani asking Fatima not to serve her anymore but to spy for her instead, which is the pivot the whole back half of the season runs on.
Episode 5 throws Fatima into the deep end immediately. Sent to spy on Chagatai’s camp, she fumbles through a series of increasingly catastrophic accidents, gets discovered by Ögedei’s wives, and in a split-second decision claims to be Töregene’s slave. Töregene, rather than exposing the lie, calmly announces that Fatima was there to kill the Khan. It is the first real look at how Töregene operates and the show understands exactly what it has in her.
Episodes 5 through 7 are where the political machinery fully clicks into place. Sitara and Töregene are two subjugated women who were violently removed from their homes and placed into proximity with power because their intelligence and education made them useful. The show makes very clear that this proximity is not the same as safety and both of them know it. Their alliance is not warm. It is strategic and necessary and built on a shared understanding of what the empire has cost them.
Then Borakchin arrives and the show finds its most genuinely frightening character. The flashback of her studying scrolls by firelight and grinding stone into powder is a villain origin scene that the fandom keeps coming back to. She poisons herself to simulate a divine healing while real women die around her.
She has everyone accounted for and everyone knows it and nobody can prove anything. The episode where she emerges as the central threat is where Jaadugar stops being a historical drama with sharp edges and becomes something closer to a political horror story.
Tolui’s sacrifice in the Tengri episode lands hard precisely because the show has spent so long establishing what he means to the power structure around him. Ogedei falling ill, Toregene under suspicion, Sitara volunteering herself as a human antidote, and the Mongols performing an exorcism instead all happen in the same episode and somehow none of it feels rushed.
The finale preview for episode 12, titled “The Steppe, Ever Unchanging,” describes Sorghaghtani refusing a political marriage to Güyük after being moved by Sitara. Fatima choosing honesty over manipulation in the penultimate episode, goading Sorghaghtani into fighting back rather than letting her break, is the most revealing thing the show has done with her character.
It puts her directly in Borakchin’s path and the henna-stained hands scene that follows, with Sorghaghtani nearly surrendering her entire dignity to protect her children, is the emotional peak of the season.
If you have not read the Episodes 1-3 review, the link is here.
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