After last week’s explosive episode, Quentin and the squad continue to deal with difficult circumstances on multiple fronts calling for love potions, subterfuge, hexes, and bending the space-time continuum.
In Fillory, Eliot is in full on bridezilla mode as he plans his wedding to King Idri of Loria. He’s unhappy with the food, the wine, the sheets, and the list goes on. Q has spent the last 3 months there sulking and being drunk after he let niffin Alice free so that she could make beautiful magic. Margo tells him that it’s his turn to go be Eliot’s errand boy and reluctantly he agrees. He heads back to Brakebills to bring Josh (who seems back to normal after having some lycanthropy) to Fillory to become head chef.
At some point El finds Fen who is staring outside the window preoccupied in her own thoughts. He confides in Margo that he thinks something’s going on with her and asks his best friend to check on his wife. Turns out, Fen is seeing a fairy pop up all around the castle and she thinks she’s going crazy. Except she’s not because Margo sees it too and asks that they negotiate the terms of their agreement. The fairy quickly vanishes but Fen is right behind her. The High Queen is forced to admit that she saw the creature too and that the other woman is not insane. In addition Margo has to reveal that she made a deal with the fairies to fix the Wellspring and save Eliot’s life by giving them Fen’s baby. Of course the mom to be is livid and tells Margo that she’d better fix this. The last we see of Eliot’s baby mama is a fairy kidnapping her after saying, “A deal’s a deal.”
Eliot has another situation on his hands as well regarding the FU Fighters. The High King has been spending time with his prisoner Baylor, playing backgammon and feeding the man nachos. They seem to be in much friendlier terms until Josh finds a note hidden in the food in the kitchen. He was testing a love potion on the dishwasher and made it a little too potent that rendered the other man in a stupor (the not was intended for the man to take to Baylor’s comrades). Margo then comes up with a brilliant plan to put a locator spell on the note, sober up the dishwasher, and then find out where the FU Fighters are encamped. The Fillorian renegades were planning to attack during the wedding festivities, but instead Josh is to go out to their camp and spike their food with the love potion. The mission is a success and the wedding can proceed as planned thanks to Margo’s quick thinking.
Meanwhile before Q returned to Fillory with Josh, he ate one of the chef’s special brownies that allowed him to peer into other worlds. While enjoying the psychedelic effects, he ends up meeting Julia’s shade who is trapped in another dimension with no way to escape.He tells El that he needs to go back to Earth to help Jules and reluctantly the king lets him go. However, the king proclaims that if Q misses his wedding he’s going to kill him.
Back at Brakebells, Fogg has freed Julia since he knows that she’s made of stronger stuff and needs to just figure out what can save her. In the first scene of this episode we saw another reality where Julia had been an exceptional student at the school and Fogg was like a mentor of sorts. They had the same discipline, which was that of magical knowledge. This makes sense now why he had granted her sanctuary since he was the only one who remembered everything that happened in the previous time loops. Julia and him did have a history together even though it technically never happened. The last time that Jane had set the time loop, the thing that she changed was Julia not being at Brakebills and it led to her own death but also the death of her brother the Beast.
Q tracks Julia down and explains that he had spoken to her shade. After getting info from Todd that the dean had mentioned that he knew someone who was obsessed with shades, they go to confront him about it. Fogg admits that is true but this person technically doesn’t exist in their reality. In the 23rd time loop, Alice had been the only survivor and had become consumed with finding a way to talk to the dead. Julia then suggests that they talk to this Alice via a teslaflection. This is a spell that bends two spaces for a very limited amount of time (two minutes) that would allow the Alice from that universe to converse with them. Julia and Fogg cast while Q goes into the folded space to talk to Alice. She tells him that shades go into the Underworld and it is normally only accessible to the dead but that a living person could enter with the help of a guardian. She only knew that it was an ancient being older than the world. So many things to say and not enough time, Alice apologizes to Q while he tells her that he will always love her no matter what.
Later on, Julia tells Quentin that she understands he’s hurting but she doesn’t know the right words to comfort him. He says it’s alright, since he doesn’t really want to feel better anyways. She then shows him a book she’s been reading, explaining that she’s just figured out what an ancient one is. It’s a DRAGON. A THOUSAND TIMES YES!!!!
Lastly, Penny and Kady have been having their own screwed up adventure as the traveller’s paperwork miraculously is processed through and he is now officially working for The Order. His job? The exciting world of overdue library books. His first task leads them to Fuzz Beat (their world’s version of Buzz Feed) where it turns out that one of their head honchos is a magician. The listicles on their site are actually just a front for spells. Harriet (the magician with a hearing disability) seems to be running this site because she doesn’t appreciate knowledge being kept by authority figures.
We see this when she hexes a book card (from her overdue book), which forces a librarian in The Order to open a locked door. The man though hits a kill switch before he did was able to so and instantly dies from a spell. Freaked out, Penny confronts the other librarian who eventually caves and explains that the locked door is the poison room, a place where books deemed too dangerous to be in the general population are kept.
Kady had been allowed to join Penny in the Neitherlands library to help him “transition” for the moment and she had been searching the stacks for any god killing spells. When she went with him to Fuzz Beat, she had explained to Harriet that she was looking for a way to kill a trickster god and the other woman had hexed the card to help her out. When the duo came back to the web startup’s office it was completely abandoned except for a card. Kady reads it and it contains the name of the book she needed and the call number. Well well, I guess the next hurdle is how to actually get that text from the infamous Poison Room.
Final Thoughts
- Poor Q just can’t catch a break when he’s constantly being reminded of what he lost with Alice so that he still can’t let go and move on.
- Good for Julia in trying to control her actions even though she doesn’t have any kind of feelings anymore. At least she’s trying and doesn’t seem to want to end up like Martin.
- I wonder if The Order will allow Penny to graduate form Brakebills first or is he just going to be forced to drop out since he technically can’t cast until he finds the books that can help him in his spare time.
- Will Eliot be pissed off that his kid was traded to the fairies?
- Can Margo undo her deal? Mmmm seems unlikely.
The Magicians is on Syfy Wednesdays at 9/8 central.
For more on The Magicians click HERE.
