Chronicles of Shannara – ‘Druid’, ‘Wraith’ and ‘Graymark’

"I cut my hair. And I wear leather now."

Grab you Elfstones and warm up your snarking muscles. It’s been a while – we’ve had two seasons of The Magicians since the end of season 1 – but at last it’s time to return to the Four Lands, for the further adventures of Blandy McWhitebread and the sassy brunettes who find him unaccountably irresistible.

A year has passed since Princess Amberlie became the new Elcrys in order to restore the Forbidding and lock away the demons. In that time, Ander has been holding together an elf kingdom on the verge of implosion, while a group of anti-magical fanatics called the Crimson track down and murder anyone using even the most inoffensive of magics. Traumatised by having his girlfriend dump him to turn into a magical, demon-repelling tree and apparently so over that whole 'looking for his missing friend' thing, Wil has become a healer in a gnomish community. He has devoted himself to the medical arts, eschewing the use of magic in all save the most vital of circumstances, such as conjuring up images of his dead girlfriend for a pity party. 

"Let none call me an informed bisexual. Now, where's Blandy?"

Some might judge Wil harshly for making such a king-sized hash of looking for Eretria, but we soon discover that her rescuers – not trolls, but a bunch of scavenging types in disguise – are led by an old friend who has deliberately led Wil to believe that she was dead, because heaven forfend that anyone Eretria meet not turn out to be a bit of a tool(1). On the other hand, she’s doing a much better job of moving on and has hooked up with fellow scavenger Lyria (who is a decent-seeming person that Eritrea likes, and thus not what she appears, because despite being a quick-witted, nails-hard survivor with the best wilderness skincare regime in the multiverse, our girl just can't catch a break.)

Bandon and his Mord-Wraiths will be wintering in Castle Greyskull.

Allanon goes looking for the missing seer, Bandon, and finds him leading a bunch of cultists who worship the long-dead Warlock King. His plan is to cast a spell to turn his followers into Mord Wraiths, flying death-cloud things that shoot magic beams and are all kinds of horrible. His motivation is vengeance against Allanon for throwing him to the sharks while trying to train him to be a druid, and his goal is to return the Warlock King to power by recovering the vessels of his power, including his sword and his skull. Allanon arrives late and is thoroughly outmatched by Bandon and the Wraiths (not a pop group,) which I’m sorry to say is going to be a bit of a theme for this season.

"No, really; I'm a badass. Look at my coat and haircut."

Wil is rescued from the Crimson’s bounty hunters by Mareth, a feisty half-elf who adds further evidence to the case that, whatever the series itself may believe, Wil Ohmsford is literally the furthest it is possible to be from being the actual protagonist of the series. It's not just that she's a more engaging character and way more of a badass, it's the fact that she has stuff going on from the get-go, whereas Wil is dragging his heels and being all 'let someone else save the world and stuff.' Mareth explains that she is the daughter of Allanon and Amberlie’s Aunt Murderedbyademon (Pyria, but that was literally all she did,) and that she is looking for her father because she’s suddenly come over all magical and has some serious questions to put to dear old dad. She also makes out with Wil, because of course she does, although it is only as part of a ruse.

Rescue entrance!

Eretria learns that her new father figure is as shitty as the last and, following a mystical vision of Amberlie while drowning that tells her Wil is in danger, tells him to do one and heads off with Lyria. They are soon captured, however, because Amberlie’s competence still operates on a sliding scale, and rescued by badas bounty hunter Garet Jax(2). However, Jax proceeds to abduct Lyria himself, because she is actually the daughter of Queen Tamlin of the massively powerful and hiterto completely unmentioned human kingdom of Leah. Ander is attempting to secure a treaty with Tamlin – who is hella into bling and knuckles deep in every pie going – and she has forked out to retrieve her daughter because she wants Lyria to marry Ander, so that she can manoeuvre for a takeover of parts of the elven kingdom.

"This is sickeningly familiar."

Eretria gets into the palace, gets captured, and is offered cash to forget Lyria. While there she reunites with Ander and Allanon, and sets out to rescue Wil. Unfortunately, on the way out the door, Allanon is captured by the Crimson. General Riga, leader of the Crimsno, turns out to be magic proof. Eretria therefore takes the Queen’s purse in order to hire Jax to find Wil, while Catania goes to tell Ander that Allanon was captured, and gets stabbed by the king’s bodyguard, who is an undercover member of the Crimson. I feel I should be sadder at the loss of Sassy Elf, but she’d been recharacterised as kind of a drip (and, not coincidentally) Ander’s new love interest,) so we’d kind of lost her already. To his credit, Ander notices she's missing, but is clearly feeling guilty enough about throwing her over for a political marriage that he buys the story that she ran off in a huff about it.

"You'll never be half as shiny."

Wil and Mareth head to Shady Vale when they realise the Crimson are going after his Uncle Flick. They find him safely hidden, but then the Mord Wraiths show up and Bandon takes Flick hostage, threatening to kill him of Wil doesn’t retrieve the skull of the Warlock King from the Druid fastness of Paranor. At around or about the same time, Riga is menacing Allanon to try to get his grubby mitts on the Codex of Paranor, the Druids’ magic 101 textbook. There is also a bunch of argument about the nature of magic - basically it boils down to a largely irreconcilable back and forth of 'magic is a necessary tool', 'magic is inherently evil' - and the fact that Riga was infected by a Mumbletymumble(4) which attacked his pregnant mother, hence leaving him immune to magic.

"We're on a team."

Eritrea and Jax find Wil and Mareth. There is a reunion and a lot of suspicion and ‘you’ve changeds’, and then they set out to rescue Allanon from the Crimson so that he can take them to Paranor to get the skull to trade with Bandon, which all feels like a frightfully bad idea, but there you are. Wil does have a history of really bad ideas, so at least there is consistency. They goad a rightly skeptical Jax into helping them with some grade school level reverse psychology, and in a rare show of gumption Wil is the one to realise that the bounty hunter actually just plans to hand him over for cash. He doesn’t care because he wants to get inside. 

The Crimson wanted flyers just look so much like some sort of trading cards.

Mareth taunts Jax with her illusions, mostly because the show really needs us to understand that Mareth is hella good at illusions. Then they reach the Crimson fortress of Graymark and Jax takes Wil in as a prisoner. So far, so dumb, but luckily for Wil 'God's own idiot' Ohmsford, one of the Crimson’s officers basically gets all up in Jax’s face about how he has backstory(5). In much the same way as Arion got all up in Allanon's face about not really being a druid in Season 1, he's all 'weapons master my arse', and reminds Jax tells the audience how Jax was the only survivor when his unit in the Border Legions was wiped out be demons during the war before dropping the reward purse in the mud for Jax to pick up. Stung, Jax decides to throw in with our heroes.

"The concept of the suction pump is centuries old..."

Wil stuffs up a rescue attempt, despite breaking out of his cell(6), and Riga has him hooked up to a knock-off of Count Rugen’s Machine, which pumps out his blood into a jar in an attempt to force Allanon to reveal the location of the Codex. He's also savvy enough to order the tunnels under the fortress sealed off as soon as it becomes clear that Wil had what I will charitably call a plan. Wil and Allanon bond over the whole torture thing by yelling at each other about how Allanon doesn't care about anyone and Wil is a whiny brat who managed to be the only member of the first season posse who never learned an important lesson about sacrifice, necessity or the number 4. Actually, that one may not have come up; I basically just insert that dialogue into any scene involving Wil.

Fortunately, the others manage to bust in before the tunnels are sealed off. Mareth locates Allanon’s staff and is able to wield it, lobbing burning coals at Riga when he boasts of his magic immunity. A massive fight ensues and, despite Jax briefly succumbing to PTSD and some false tension as Allanon magics the door open, our heroes escape.

Looking back, I am not 100% convinced that they recovered Wil’s Elfstones. I guess we’ll find out.

The Kingdom of Leah. Hydroelectric, apparently.

So, that was the first three episodes of Season 2, and there’s a lot going on. I’ve skipped over most of the politicking in Leah, because it’s a bit plodding, but the Four Lands remain a minute place where it’s hard to believe it took so long to find Wil since everyone either knows everyone else or lives just down the road from them. Allanon has come over a bit useless, but then that’s kind of required of an active Gandalf, lest he leave the rest of the party in the dust. Wil has had a haircut, taken a level in brooding badass, and is marginally less bland, while Eritrea has ditched the informed part of her informed bisexuality, making the fact that she canonically hooks up with Wil even more depressing since it effectively doubles her alternatives to the Milquetoast Marvel (although of those, Lyria is one of the more tedious, being a pretty stock character(7) with little to mark her out so far.)

Shannara Chronicles continues to be tosh. Good-looking tosh, but tosh nonetheless.

(1) Yes, Wil; including you.

(2) Whose appearance has provoked some dissatisfaction because he’s a cocky, sexy bounty hunter instead of an enigmatic perfectionist driven to become the greatest of all warriors, and probably rather more because OMG Garet Jax isn’t black(3)!

(3) It’s been quite a while, but I think in the book he spends the whole time wrapped in cloth for some reason, so it’s not as if he’s even in passing described as white.

(4) Mwellret; no wonder I couldn’t make it out.

(5) Something which he explicitly denies earlier in the episode, as part of an apparent move towards metatextual humour which may yet prove to be a mistake.

(6) For this part of the plan, Eritrea gives him a tiny bottle of high explosive, warning him to be careful of his ‘precious Elfstones’ when concealing it, so there you go; the euphemism is official.

(7) The wealthy hedonist slumming it and seeking meaning in a down to Earth relationship.