Quite a big
one this time out, as I spent the past weekend doing some catchup.
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| Half outed as a zombie, Liv tans and dies and she looks weird. |
First up,
two episodes of iZombie season 3 that
weren’t out when I did my big marathon. When Ravi’s ex-boss/anger hookup turns
up murdered, Liv eats her brains and turns into a bar-crawling sex addict, as
well as being haunted by memory flashes of Ravi’s O face. Under the influence
she has sex with Chase Graves, ruining her budding relationship with that one
Philmore-Graves soldier, and meanwhile Ravi’s indiscretion with a hack
journalist and faux zombie truther leads to D-Day coming ahead of schedule. Major becomes a zombie again after a zombified ex-prepper suicide bombs his farewell bash, killing most of the squad and his ex-zombie new girlfriend.
With the world falling apart and D-Day closer than ever, Graves’ PA initiates the Doomsday scenario, releasing Aleutian flu into the
city so that Philmore-Graves can spike the vaccine with zombie blood and then
offer conversion to the sick, creating a critical mass of zombies to declare to
the world. It’s a bold and radical shift in the direction of the series, and I
am perhaps more curious than excited to see where it goes from here.
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| So, this shit is horrid. |
From there
we move to the closing chapters of Emerald
City, 'Lions in Winter', 'The Villain That's Become' and 'No Place Like
Home'. These truly are the closing chapters, as the series was cancelled after
one season, and finally bring Dorothy up to full spin. Lucas/Roan and Sylvie
both give her the heave-ho in favour of Glinda, but persuade the Witch of the
North to give her a job caring for the child-soldier witches who have burned
out under her demanding training regime. Dorothy gets hacked off, unlocks the
power of East’s elements by hmrrmphm and escapes. She goes back to the
munjakin, having worked out that the chief’s imprisoned wife actually created
the stone giants.
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| Yeah, so... Eamonn is the Cowardly Lion analogue, having killed Ozma's parents while wearing his lion hat and cloak or something. |
West invests
Ozma/Tip with East’s magic, because that was totally a thing, right? Then they
recruit a bunch of battle witches from… that place, and take over Emerald City
while the Wizard is off warring with Langwidere, who tries to keep the guns she
promised to make for him. The Wizard’s commandos take Langwidere hostage and
Jack accidentally shoots her in the head, before discovering that in fact she
was a robot made by Jane. He goes a bit loco and tries to kill the wizard, then
Jane reveals herself as Dorothy’s mother, the witches attack, Sylvie crumbles
the Stone Giant, but Dorothy activates the giant in Emerald City to smash that
thing that is important to Glinda and…
All right,
clearly, I’m not remembering this series very well. I was never all that taken
with it, but it held my curiosity at least. However, I can’t say I’m gutted to
see it go.
Next, I
finished up Season 2 of The Magicians,
and by finished up I mean 'watched the majority of.' Having lost pace after
Episode 4, I got caught up on Episodes 5-13: 'Cheat Day', 'The Cock
Barrens(1)', 'Plan B', 'Word as Bond', 'Lesser Evils', 'The Girl Who Told
Time', 'The Rattening', 'Ramifications' and 'We Have Brought You Little Cakes'.
This is basically three seasons of crazy in a nine episode marathon, so I don't
think I'm going to try to do anything more than the highlight reel.
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| God foetus isn't keen on being aborted, it turns out. |
Quentin tries
to vanish into obscurity and ends up getting very drunk and having ill-advised
shapeshifty sex with Emily Greenstreet, the girl whose affair with Professor
Mayakovski ended in Alice's brother being niffined. Julia finds the Hedge Witch
who formerly banished Reynard and learns that she used the power released by
the birth of the child he got on her (by rape, of course, because Reynard is a
douchebag) to fuel the spell. Julia discovers that she has the potential to do
the same, as she is pregnant.
In Fillory, Eliot
is attacked by a pro-Fillorian assassin(2), and Margot insults a visiting
diplomat – Prince Ess of Loria – when he shows up to demand a royal wedding.
She has sex with Ess, but when Penny discovers that they have not been
transported to the titular Cock Barrens, but merely illusioned away, she gets
mad and declares war. The gang reunite to carry out a bank heist, during which
Eliot's dopelbanger is killed by a security Magician, but escape with
sufficient funds to bankroll Fillory's army and pay for Julia to have Reynard's
child exorcised. Unfortunately, the operation also excises Julia's Shade, and
thus indirectly leads to the extermination of a forest of pro-Lorian talking
trees. With the kingdom up in arms, Eliot sees no alternatives but devastating
war or personal combat with the King of Loria. Fen is able to give him a sword
and a spell to make him a master swordman, but the Wellspring is still kind of fucked
and so magic is failing erratically.
 |
| Total sucker fro a decent musical moment; you may have noticed. |
Julia and
Kady track down Reynard's son, a senator and presidential hopeful, and bring
him to Brakebills. Learning that Niffin Alice has been caught in the demon trap
on Quentin's back, Julia tries to force him to release her to attack Reynard,
but it all goes wrong when Reynard uses the Beast's time-freeze on them and the
senator surrenders himself to save the others. With niffin Alice wearing on his
body, Quentin releases her and takes the chance that she might go psycho on
him. She doesn't.
Margot uses
a spell to give Eliot a musical boost by getting the court to perform 'One Day
More' with him on the way to the duel, then negotiates with the fairies to get
the Wellspring cleaned. The opening bid from the fairy ambassador is the
Wellspring for the child of Eliot and Fen makes her scoff, which insults the ambassador
so much that there can be no further discussion of terms. Eliot wins the duel,
but spares the King of Loria on learning that monarchs are allowed a wife and a husband. He also has Margot locked
up on discovering the deal that she made (which he does after Fen is dragged
off by the fairies.)
 |
| An actual fucking dragon. |
Quentin and
Julia visit the Underworld – with the help of a dragon voiced by Igrid Oliver –
where the dead members of Free Trader Beowulf help them reach Elysium to rescue
Julia's lost shade. There they discover that Our Lady Underground is real, and
is in fact Persephone, currently absent from duty. Julia opts to rescue Alice's shade instead of her own,
enabling Quentin to restore Alice to life, much to her annoyance on account of
how as a niffin she basically knew everything.
Penny signs
up with the Order who run the Library of the Neitherlands in order to relearn
magic after having his hands restored. A Hedge Witch curses a book he retrieves
in order to force a Librarian to take something out of the Poison Room, the
rare book section, which also holds a volume on god-killing. With the help of a
fellow reluctant librarian he gets into the Poison Room via the fountains, only
to find out that it is literally poisoned. Still, he gets the book. The senator
realises that his life is a lie, and that Reynard has murdered his wife to
punish him for talking to Julia and Kady. Distraught, he uses his inherited
trickster powers to force Kady to kill him and ritually steal his power to make
a godkilling bullet, only for Julia to not use it when Our Lady Underground
turns up and makes an appeal for her son's life. Persephone returns Julia's
shade and Kady is understandably pissed that this was the finale to all the
shit she had to do to set up the kill shot, including murdering a decent man
and getting Penny a terminal dose of magical poison.
 |
| The other ram god; a different kind of dick. |
Just as all
seems well, everyone in Filory gets turned into rats and Eliot is expelled.
Tracking down the first and last portal to Fillory, they find it in the keeping
of the supposedly dead Ember, who explains that he agreed to get out of the Beast's
way and is trying to work on a new, better world. All that is going wrong in
Fillory is down to the chaotic Umber getting bored and having no ordered god to
balance him. In a last ditch effort to have magic not end, the gang bring Umber
and Ember together. Umber kills his brother and sets out to destroy Fillory,
but Julia binds the death energy of Ember into a blade with which Quentin slays
Umber.
In
punishment for this, the greater gods of the cosmos shut off magic altogether.
Only a few inherently magical beings remain, one of them – the Lamprey – set on
revenge against Alice for something she did as a niffin. Julia, however, is
still able to conjure a spark of magic, for reasons unknown.
 |
| The Great God Luigi. |
And there's
a tonne of stuff missing from that, like Josh being hired to use culinary magic
to make the Fillorians like Eliot and ending up king of a drugged-up court with
everyone else missing, to Margot going into the fairy court to try to retrieve
Fen and the baby and then losing an eye as the cost of coming back, and, oh
yes, the fairies taking over Fillory at the end.
The Magicians remains a pretty unique
piece of television, with its magical themes juxtaposed with a washed out colour
scheme and downbeat central thesis that magic doesn't complete you. Professor
Mayakovski suggests that life is inherently shit, and that magic is a way of
making it one minute iota better; still shit, but just marginally less so.
Season 2 also opens out the world and reveals that the titular magicians,
classically trained or otherwise, are all just small potatoes in a cosmos where
universal forces(3) will straight up cut you off from magic if you stab their
children (even if those children have been murdering their own brothers and
acting like colossal dicks to the world(4).)
We've got a
season 3 coming in, so presumably magic will come back in some way as otherwise
the show would now be called The
Management Accountants or something.
 |
| Five got badass. |
So finally, for
now, to the first episode of season 3 of Dark
Matter. In the wake of the bombing of the corporate summit and the theft of
the blink drive, Truffaut, Five and the Android end up under fire in the Raza, while Three ends up with an Enemy Mine sort of scenario as he and a
GA cop fight off a security drone in a disused warehouse, and Two and Six are
stranded in the crippled Marauder. Meanwhile, Ishida Ryo – the badass formerly
known as Four – releases an old teacher from prison to be his adviser, angering
his axe-crazy captain of the guard who feels that treason against the throne
should be punished, even if it was against the Emperor you lately helped to assassinate
and replace.
The rest of
the crew eventually reunite, after Two has hallucinated a pseudo-Sapphic
farewell from Nyx – now confirmed dead – and discuss options. Three wants to do
pirate shit. Six wants to hit Evil Corp from the shadows. Two wants to go after
Ryo. And Five... Five has created a virtual version of Three's late ex Sarah.
Can't imagine that going wrong.
Dark Matter continues to be an also-ran
for me, Season 3 losing further ground to my space opera of choice, Killjoys. It's not that anything about
it is actively bad, but surprisingly little happened in this episode except
that it got everyone back together and tried to make me feel bad about the death
of a character I felt basically nothing for.
(1) Oh, The Magicians. You do you.
(2) A member
of Fillorians United, or 'FU fighter'. Honestly, they could have done worse with
an organisation called FU.
(3) Which,
somewhat bizarrely, manifest as the very humanocentric image of a plumber.
(4) In a
voiceover intro to the final episode, Umber explains that basically he's pushed
and prodded to make a lot of shitty things happen, including the rattening,
expelling Eliot for trying to make Fillory actually work, and making the River
Watcher pissy enough to curse Penny up good.
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