The Magicians - 'Remedial Battle Magic' and 'Thirty-Nine Graves'

If magic is basically about throwing shapes, are
rappers a kind of hedge witch?

Faced with the knowledge that the Beast wants the Button, and is flooding the Neitherlands with mercenary battle mages to get it (okay, I kind of missed that last episode; my bad,) Team Filory decide that the smart move is to cut a deal.

In a shocking twist, a few weeks later, they are all horribly murdered in class. I know, right! Who knew they still had classes!

Unhappy with the way this piece of prediction magic (psych!) shaped up, they review: Every option ends in them dead, except for 'go to Filory', which whites out the spell. Thus they opt to go to Filory, but first to tool up by learning some battle magic. To this end, they contact the only person they have seen use battle magic, Kady, whom they find in Julia's apartment. She tells them it needs absolute emotional control, but there is a workaround: enchanted bottles to contain their emotions. Naturally, there is a payoff. All the emotions come back when you open the bottle, so there's a hard cap of three hours on the bottle.

After their first training session, Penny and Alice decide that they would rather learn to do battle magic without the bottles - since they turn them into dead-eyed, robot-talking zombies - but the others are all for anything that makes their lives easier, because they have learned nothing from this or any other series about magic. Penny has his own problems, however, as the Beast starts talking to him again, driving him towards madness. His mentor and that guy Joe the pandimensional pansexual top themselves to escape the voice, but Professor Hottington gives him a psychic inhibitor which blocks them out, although she warns that it will eventually destroy his ability to defend his own psyche.

Rule 7) Never trust a creature that looks like your ideal mate or a dead
relative.

As the team begin to master the forms of battle magic - mostly magical darts, force pushes and the occasional fireball - Kady and Julia are on a mission to find a god, by working their way up from sleazy vampires to find a magical being with enough oomph to still hang with the divine. This leads them to an entity that takes the form of Kady's dead mother and tries to inveigle itself into her grief, but Julia holds Kady's hand - no doubt setting the internet ablaze - and they reject her, prompting her to tell them that the gods are all dead. Despite this, the earth goddess contacts Julia in a dream and tells her that she is waiting for her to find her.

Battle magic training goes well, but then Quentin, Eliot and Margo leave the bottles on too long, and afterwards get drunk and have what must have been the world's most embarrassing threesome even before Alice walks in on them in the morning.

'Thirty-Nine Graves' opens with bitterness and recrimination, and ultimately Penny and Alice having a moment, plunging the entire Filory mission into chaos. Even Alice opts to use the bottle when they go into the Neitherlands, since otherwise her seething resentment of Quentin would doom them all. In a nice moment, emotionally balanced Quentin tells Alice and Penny they'd make a cute couple.

Summoning earth deities must be done in pajamas.

In Manhattan, Julia and Kady finally contact someone who can point them to the goddess, when propitiated with gifts. He lifts Kady's grief and gives them the incantation to call on the goddess. Julia and Richard have a moment, and then they summon the goddess, Our Lady Underground, who heals those of them who are sick before sending all but Julia off on various missions of goodness and light, no doubt or question of that. Goodness and light. For sure.

Arriving in the Neitherlands, Quentin is immediately knocked back to Earth by hoodie girl. The others flee and take shelter in the library, where their emotion bottles - and Eliot's booze - are promptly confiscated.

Librarian lady is pure awesome.

Quentin seeks answers by dosing the Dean with a truth serum. The Dean explains that Eliza was Jane Chatwin, who was given then power to control time on a cosmic level, with only major powers - like the Dean, the Librarian and the Beast - remembering the previous loops. She has set Quentin and his friends on the path to destroying the Beast thirty-nine times, and thirty-eight times they have all died. In twenty-seven alternatives, the Dean has failed not to be dosed. Now Jane is dead, so this is the last time. This time around, Jane arranged for Julia to be kept out of Brakebills in an attempt to make her stronger faster.

Eliot gets the team evicted from the library when he sets fire to Mike's book. They meet up with a member of Brakebills' missing class, a boy named Josh, whose girlfriend Victoria is the traveler Penny saw held captive by the Beast. After a pep talk from Penny, Alice comes up with a way to shield them all against detection as they get to the Filory fountain, but Eliot drops an LSD carrot, forcing Margo to shoot one of the mercenary mages, and Penny to slice open hoodie girl with his magic.

"I never thought I'd say it, but thank God for Hitler."

Buttonless but reconciled, Julia and Quentin come up with an alternate plan. Using a time tunnel established in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, they travel to 1944 and stalk Jane until she enters Filory, then tailgate a pre-teen girl through a magical door in an old-fashioned red telephone box. Which is only a little bit very creepy.

These two episodes really flow together, and I wonder if the show isn't written somewhat with a binge in mind. Put together, 'Remedial Battle Magic' and 'Thirty-Nine Graves' propel the story and characters forward. Quentin and Julia's reconciliation is quick, but linked to her discovery of purpose and the reigniting of their childhood Filory connection, has a true feeling of wonder. Penny and Alice's relationship also moves on in leaps and bounds, such that their one night stand - which felt cruel and self-destructive in the book - came off as natural and even healthy. Speaking of self-destructive, Margo and especially Eliot continue their spiral of darkening rage as Eliot is still coming to terms with killing his boyfriend, and now the realisation that Mike had a happy life (and was a Repuiblican) before the Beast hijacked him. Consequences hang heavy in the Magicians, which is perhaps why I am so suspicious of the white-robed Our Lady Underground.

As a point of minor interest, the Librarian misnames Margo as 'Janet', hinting that the series is somehow a later repeat of the story told in the novel, 'The Magicians'.