The Magicians - 'Divine Elimination'

"Do you like the throne room? We've just had it cursed."

Things are hotting up as Team Filory prepare for their confrontation with the Beast, and Julia prepares for her own battle with Renard.

In Filory, the rest of the team realise that Eliot is acting strangely. Quentin realises that this is the curse that Julia mentioned, but they can't get the details in time to stop first Alice, then Quentin and finally Margo sitting in their thrones and triggering the curse on themselves, the terms of which are basically to drive the four monarchs into murderous paranoia against one another. It is up to Penny and the Queen-Consort to defeat the curse by fulfilling its terms, 'killing' and then resuscitating each of the monarchs, although by the time they are finished Margo has already loosed her cacodemon on Quentin, forcing Penny to counter with his own, leaving them only one of the four to delay the Beast (Alice let hers go.)

Perfectly according to plan.

Back on Earth, Marina is persuaded to perform the supplication to Our Lady Underground. Martin zips himself and Julia away to avoid tipping their hand, and Renard follows Marina home. Martin and Julia bust in and freeze Renard, but before Julia can finish him, Penny travels in and nabs Martin. Julia catches the wake of the ridealong, leaving Marina alone with the fox. Team Filory use a basic shield charm to hold the Beast for Alice's killshot, but Quentin breaks ranks to get Julia away and the blast only catches Martin in the arm. Penny zaps Julia back to Earth, but one of the chains binding his hands to his own control is broken by accident, and Julia breaks the other in rage before rushing to find Marina very much dead.

Alice and Quentin look for Martin at the Wellspring, the source of all magic. He has indeed gone there to try to recharge, but finds that Ember the ram god has taken a dump in the waters to spite him. Alice fights the injured Martin, and unable to muster the power to destroy him she attempts a spell so complex that it utterly consumes her, transforming her into a niffin, a being of pure magic and easily able to destroy the Beast. After that she turns on her former friends, but Quentin unleashes his cacodemon, leaving her apparently dead on the ground.

"'Tis but a scratch!"

Which is a hell of a lot of resolution for episode three, don't you think?

Actually, the fact that Martin only lasted to episode three confirms for me that this season's real big bad is Renard. This is a smart move, as Martin was sufficiently affable in his evil that an extended run would have eroded his menace. Instead, as terrible a threat as he represented, in Season 2 terms he is basically a smokescreen preventing Team Filory from seeing that, while she might not be great at communication and consultation, it is Julia who has recognised the real threat. Martin was a twelve-fingered quasi-sorcerer, with a lot of power but no formal training. Renard is an incarnate god of virtually unbounded potential, and unless we are foolish enough to think that he is killing and raping powerful Hedgewitches for shiggles, is presumably playing his extraordinarily brutal game for much larger stakes.

The Magicians wound up season 1 in a pretty dark place, and has basically managed to continually go darker in season 2, yet without losing a certain lightness of touch that makes it bearable, despite its protagonist's insufferable bleating. Actually, Jason Ralph does an amazing job with Quentin, capturing both his eternal air of mingled dissatisfaction and entitlement, and the real humanity beneath it. The average viewer surely wants to slap him, but part of that must come from feeling that he is worth slapping. The only thing that bothers me is that this episode saw the deaths of not one, but two kickass female magicians. Marina may have been a cast iron bitch who was happy to use Julia, melt people's brains for crossing her and leave Quentin a comatose wreck, but there is really no level of unpleasantness that would make someone deserving of the kind of deaths that Renard hands out, and I'm not happy with even a villainous strong female character getting torture porned to death. Alice at least went out with agency.

I anticipate a bit of regrouping and aftermath next week, and after that… it will be interesting to see where the series takes us next. I'm really hoping to see Kady back in the mix, especially with the series haemorrhaging female characters this episode.