Yaga: who is Logan, the roommate who looks exactly like the heir who vanished?
The first person Yaga's detective interviews looks an awful lot like the man he's been hired to find.
Yaga is a Canadian supernatural mystery from Kat Sandler, who adapted it from her own 2019 stage play, a loose reworking of the Slavic folk tale of Baba Yaga. It premiered on October 23 on Crave in Canada and AMC+ in the U.S. with two episodes, and the season runs eight half-hour episodes. Noah Reid plays Charlie Rapp, a private investigator hired to find Henry Park, a 22-year-old college student and heir to a commercial fishery, who has vanished from the coastal village of Whittock. Clark Backo plays Sergeant Carson, the local detective on the case, and Carrie-Anne Moss plays Dr. Katherine Hargrove, a professor with a reputation.
Hudson Williams, of Heated Rivalry, plays Henry. He also plays Logan.
Who Logan is
Logan Casey is Henry's roommate. He tells Rapp and Carson that Henry invited him to share the house after they met at the start of the school year. He's the same face with glasses and acne scars, while Henry has the more boyish look.
Logan doesn't exist in Sandler's play. He was created for the series, and Crave sold the casting about as subtly as you'd expect: "One Hudson Williams just wasn't enough."
Spoilers for episodes 1 through 3 from here.
What happens to him
Episode 2, "Dark Solstice," ends with an occult-themed costume party at the Park estate. Carson corners a masked figure upstairs who she thinks might be Henry. It's Logan, who shoves her against a wall and disappears. By the end of the night, a body is floating face down in the tide, and it isn't Henry's. It's Logan's.
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What episode 3 reveals
The third episode starts filling in why Logan looked so much like Henry, and the answer is that he was working on it:
- The tapes — Logan kept a hidden surveillance office, and his recordings show him demanding that Henry's girlfriend, Pam, call him Henry.
- The habits — he spent months copying Henry's.
- The autopsy — he was castrated before he died and stabbed with a blade made of obsidian and bone, which Katherine identifies as an Aztec ceremonial midwife knife tied to fertility deities.
- The symbol — a triskelion turns up on a powder canister in Logan's room, and again painted in blood under Henry's bed, with a white chicken feather at each point.
Logan spent months trying to become Henry. Whoever killed him may have taken him at his word.
Where Baba Yaga comes in
The show keeps leaving the witch's calling cards. In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs, and in episode 1, Rapp finds a severed chicken foot tied to Henry's bedpost. Someone later nails a burning rooster to his motel door.
There's also a name to keep an eye on. Sheila McCarthy plays Olena Yaha, a local woman originally from Ukraine. In Ukrainian, the witch's name is Baba Yaha.
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