The Magicians - 'The Strangled Heart'

For my next trick, I shall pull a rabbit out of a hat. And by rabbit I mean cursed
dagger. And by hat I mean rabbit.

Quentin and Alice return from Brakebills South and are immediately super awkward with each other, with Alice wanting to act like they didn't turn into foxes and screw and Quentin stalkerishly swapping lab partners and then denying any interest, to the intense annoyance of Penny, who is stuck as third wheel when he isn't travelling all over the place and hitting on his independent study tutor, Professor Hotchick.

Eliot's relationship with Mike takes a turn for the crappy when Mike rips open a bunny to get at the cursed dagger inside (like a really messy, unpleasant Kinder egg) and uses it to attack Quentin, cutting Penny when he tries to stop him. It turns out that while Mike is an alumnus - and thus permitted to return to Brakebills though the walls - something else was using him as a means of ingress; the Beast. Eliza turns up to help investigate, but it turns out that this is what 'Mike' was waiting for, breaking loose and murdering the woman he reveals to be Jane Chatwin, and almost killing the Dean again before Eliot kills him for extra trauma credit.

Meanwhile the knife wound is causing roses to grow into Penny's chest. Quentin recognises this as a Fillorian weapon which once wounded Jane Chatwin. Only by destroying a proxy - Penny's most cherished possession - can they save him. It turns out that this is the wrapper from a bar of chocolate Kady gave him, because he's secretly a sentimentalist. Then Alice and Quentin hook up again.

Something I only really noticed looking at these images is that not only does
magic shift the colour filter of Julia's world like she's on NZT, but when Mike
is being especially Beastly, he's always in a pale blue palette closer to the
grim, mundane filter.

Away from Brakebills, Julia goes to rehab, where Marina visits her for a bitch off. Then she meets a counselor who turns out to be a classically trained magician and offers her access to magic without Brakebills, but also without the exciting veneer of back-alley heroin addiction that comes from the Hedge Witches' organisation. He seems to be pedaling some form of heterodox quasi-religious approach involving believing in lots of gods and... Okay, we don't know much about the specifics yet, but it seems to be a genuine third option.

'The Strangled Heart' moves the plot forward considerably, but once more at the cost of Quentin as a character. His regression into self-pity and passive-aggression mirrored by increased sympathy for Julia, as her progress through rehab gets her away from the whole 'me, me, me; I deserve this' approach that has so far marked her magical progression. It also seems that the more the story moves up, the less I care about Quentin's role in it.