The Magicians - 'Knight of Crowns'

"Royalty, bitches."

Somewhat out of nowhere, it's the return of surprisingly good, heavily desaturated urban sorcery serial The Magicians.

Quentin trades some of his blood to a healer for her to come and help his friends, only to discover that they are doing much better than expected. The Beast apparently underestimated the potency of Alice's god power; she recovered from her own injuries and was able to revive Margo and Eliot and stabilise Penny. They're all pretty pissed with Julia – understandably enough – although Quentin makes a fairly crap argument in her favour, as he is the one who knows what was done to her. Margo takes Penny to a healing spring to reattach his hands, while the others take stock and decide that they need to get coronated, head to Castle Whitespire and consult the Armoury, a vast library of battle magic which may have given Rupert Chatwin the means to alter the course of WWII, for a means to fight the Beast. At the spring, Penny gets his hands reattached, but antagonises the guardian when asked for payment and gets stuck with defective fingers as a result.

Team Filory head for the Crowning Place, a rocky lake shore where they meet the eponymous 'Knight of Crowns', a Last Crusadesy type who apologises for dying while waiting for them and quizzes them on 90s showbiz trivia to establish their terrestrial credentials, eventually handing over the crowns in appreciation of Eliot's recitation of Patrick Swayze's 'last dance of the season' speech from Dirty Dancing. Insisting on at least a modicum of ritual, Quentin crowns Eliot as High King Eliot the Spendid, then Eliot crowns Margo High Queen and Alice as Queen (dubbing them 'the Destroyer' and 'the Wise' respectively,) and Margo dubs Quentin 'the Moderately Socially Maladjusted.' They also use the occasion to do some much needed apologising for being arseholes, and Alice makes moves to letting Quentin repair their relationship.

Penny returns to the spring to offer the world's worst apology, and the custodian tells him that it is important that someone in his future position understand that actions have consequences. I'm guessing something to do with the Library in the Neitherlands, but we'll see I'm sure. At Whitespire the royalty discover that the Armoury has been well and truly looted, and realise that the only place they can learn the necessary battle magic now is Brakebills. Unfortunately, the high King of Filory can't just up and leave, which means that Eliot has to stay behind. Given the time difference, this could mean that we will never see Eliot again, which would be a crying shame.

It is the creepiest thing that the man who basically killed Narnia and crushed
his sister's head like a satsuma is basically a traumatised manchild who loves
playgrounds and curly straws.

Back on Earth – interleaved with the above and weirdly in roughly concurrent time, so maybe we will get more Eliot (yay!) – Julia cements her deal with Martin/the Beast: He helps her to destroy Renard without trying to murder, harm or control her, and she gives up the Leo Dagger; specifically, she sets it down, so there's still a chance of her picking it back up again, if not a good one. They begin to track Renard through a string of murdered ritual practitioners and Martin proposes creating a net to hold the god, if only for a short moment, thus providing a suitable stabbing opportunity. Martin, who has a creepy love of children and play areas, tries to persuade Julia to join him in his nebulous great cause by severing her shade, the part of her spirit that feels pain and love, but she refuses.

'Knight of Crowns' does a lot of set-up work, and it will be interesting to see how the pacing goes from next week. Season 1 did a lot of setting up before really cranking the pace, and I'm hopeful that we'll see this season pick up faster. After all, we know Brakebills pretty well by now, and have a pretty solid grasp on the magical underground outside its ivy-warded halls, so not much should be needed there. Overall, 'The Knight of Crowns' confirms that all within the series is still present and correct, from Quentin's well-meaning incompetence to Eliot's snark, which at least bodes well for future instalments.