The Librarians - '…and the Steal of Fortune', '…and the Bleeding Crown', '…and the Graves of Time', and '…and the Disenchanted Forest'

Time for another binge of Season 4 of The Librarians, and boy howdy do we have some excitement this time out. 

Fortuna channels Cassandra's 'Honey Bear' character.

We begin with The Librarians 'and the Steal of Fortune'(1), in which Jake takes Ezekiel to visit an old buddy who trains race horses. Unfortunately for the friend, his luck has turned bad, and he is in the process of losing his last horse to the owner of the race track and casino, Bernie Konopka. Investigating, the two learn that Jake's friend is not the only one to suffer a run of bad luck, as freak accidents abound and race after race brings no winners, except for the owner of the winning horse; Bernie Konopka.

Suspecting a magical artefact, the Librarians turn out in force, but find themselves falling prey to the bad luck curse. Cassandra is sucked into playing roulette and Ezekiel the slots, losing time after time, until Cassie busts out her mega maths and Ezekiel gimmicks the machine to let him win. Ezekiel steals the suspected artefact, but it turns up a dud, while Cassie is abducted and accused of cheating. She and Jake realise at more or less the same time that Konopka's apparent arm-candy is in fact the goddess Fortuna, who has been stealing back her blessings of luck in order to return to her full power and - dare she say it - rule the world. The only way to beat her is to do as Cassie did and beat the curse, but how can you win when all luck is against you?

"It's like looking in a mirror..."

The Librarians 'and the Bleeding Crown' opens with the entire population of a small town becoming old overnight. The Librarians encounter Darrington Dare, a Librarian from the 1880s who was a huge inspiration to Flynn, and appears to have been pulled forward in time in pursuit of his nemesis, wizard and cloning pioneer Ambrose Gethick (played by The Musketeers' Howard Charles.) Dare is an effortlessly capable polymath, but has no time for friends and comrades, matching it to a secondary theme in '...and the Steal of Fortune', that Librarians can't have a normal life. Indeed, Dare tells Flynn that, with the extraordinary threat of Apep now past, it is his duty to dismiss the other Librarians lest a civil war break out, as once happened, resulting in the ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages.

Dare and Flynn track down Gethick, who turns out to have captured Eve and the other Librarians in order to drain the Library's own power from them using the Bleeding Crown of Elizabeth Bathory to destroy Dare, who is impervious to all other magic. With the empowered Gethick too much for them, Flynn turns to his friends, getting the immortal Jenkins to overcharge the crown and causing Gethick to explode. Dare leaves and, contrary to prior history, connects with friends to live a long and happy life, but leaves a note for Flynn telling him he must still dismiss the other Librarians.

In an episode which might as well have been called The Guardians 'and the
Graves of Time'.

In The Librarians 'and the Graves of Time', Eve tracks down Nicole Noone, who is in pursuit of a group of Eastern European heavies who are breaking into her graves - she having been forced to 'die' from time to time in order to conceal her immortality - to steal artefacts. The rest of the team eventually join them, but then are split up, leaving Flynn and Nicole in pursuit of 'Koschei's Needle', a weapon which can kill anyone with a single wound, and even take the life of an immortal. The rest of the team wind up in the hands of the heavies and their boss - played by one-hit wonder Chris Heyerdahl - who tells them that he is the last descendent of the Romanovs, who were destroyed by Rasputin using sorcery taught to him by Noone.

The team go after Noone and Flynn, but it turns out that the supposed Romanov is in fact Rasputin himself, and that it was to kill him - not, as feared, Galahad - that Noone wanted the Needle. Noone is stabbed, but Eve and Flynn dummy Rasputin into stabbing a pipe full of radioactive waste, which the Needle - which turns out to be a kind of vampiric dagger - conducts into Rasputin until he explodes, which appears to be becoming a theme. To save Noone and make amends for misjudging her, Jenkins transfers his immortality to her, rendering him mortal once more. As if this were not enough of an upset, Flynn resigns from the Library, in order that there should be at least one fewer potential combatants in a Library Civil War. Of course, this upsets the planned binding ceremony between Flynn, Eve and the Library, and I wonder if Jenkins won't end up bound to restore his immortality and leave the others free(ish).

While '...and the Graves of Time' provided some important plot stuff, it felt
sooo good to get back to the ensemble after a Flynn-heavy couple of
episodes.

Anyway, all this melodrama leaves a somewhat shaken team at the top of The Librarians 'and the Disenchanted Forest'. With each one convinced that the others should step down if anyone has to, Eve takes them to a team building camp where weird things happen. The idyllic rural retreat proves to be rife with disappearances, and while Eve tried to ignore the potential cracks in her team, Jake becomes one of them. Cassandra tries to live out the summer camp pranks she has seen in movies, much to the annoyance of Ezekiel, but the come together - along with a team of DOSA agents - to seek out and rescue Jake, at least partially restoring their team mojo.

It turns out that the forest is at the heart of all forests. The tree spirits have been protecting it, while the owner of the camp has been covering up the disappearances as people quitting. Destroying the heart tree would doom all forests, but with Jake's linguistic gifts the tree is able to communicate this. It entrusts a 'zero seed' to Eve, and the DOSA agent in charge offers permanent 'Area 51 status'. Jake then shows a journalist he has become close to the Library and explains that she can't talk about it, and that he can't be with her, putting him at the top of the list if there is to be a singular Librarian at the end of this.

So, it's all change this season, and honestly there's an end of an era/series finale sort of vibe going on. No word on a fifth season yet, and there are two episodes as yet unaired anywhere, but I would not be surprised if this was it for out intrepid bibliophiles. If so, it's been a good run, and I'm glad it seems to be going out on a high, with some strong episodes in this run, and a strong thematic spine of renewal and change.

(1) Actually the second episode of the series, but shuffled around to allow '...and the Christmas Thief' to be shown at Christmas.

TV Roundup: iZombie - 'Looking for Mr Goodbrain'; The Magicians - 'Cheat Day', 'The Cock Barrens', 'Plan B', 'Word as Bond', 'Lesser Evils', 'The Girl Who Told Time', 'The Rattening', 'Ramifications' and 'We Have Brought You Little Cakes'; Emerald City - 'Lions in Winter', 'The Villain That's Become' and 'No Place Like Home'; Dark Matter - 'Being Better is so Much Harder'

Quite a big one this time out, as I spent the past weekend doing some catchup.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

The Magicians - 'The Flying Forest'

"Yes, I have wood. My shoulder is made of teak."

And this is where things get weird.

In the aftermath of the battle against the Beast, Quentin is in a bad way. His injured shoulder has been replaced with a wooden one and he is comatose, forcing Eliot and Margot to leave him and look to their other problems; like Eliot being high king of a dying land (the god dump in the wellspring is almost as bad as the Beast, but sings fewer showtunes,) and married to a horny Filorian girl who does nothing to float his boat. As a workaround for his inability to leave Filory, Margot creates a golem-Eliot, modifying the Margolem's mind-link so that Eliot can occupy his golem as an Earth body while he sleeps in Filory. Until, that is, his wife wakes him up for barely-consensual nooky(1) and sort of gets his mind wedged between the two worlds.

Penny hits the clinic, but Dr Centaur won't try to undo a curse set by the Riverwatcher. Instead, once Quentin comes to and has been a misery for a while, Penny gets him to cut his hands off again, and then they go after the White Lady, a questing beast that must grant one wish for the person who catches her. They manage to make it through the Flying Forest - so called because its atmosphere makes you high as anything - but although Penny is able to get his hands back, the White Lady can't bring Alice back to life. In fact, nothing in Filory can help him. This realisation is a key one for Quentin, who asks simply to be sent home.

It's the woman again!

Elsewhere, Julia finds Kady in a drugged stupour, having retreated into drugs over her guilt at leaving Julia to Renard, and dries her out to help fight the trickster. Kady sneaks her into Brakebills and guides her around the library to grab a particular book. As the book is tagged, Julia hides in the physical cottage to copy the text. Margot finds her, but gives her a blank to mate with the book and whelp a copy.

Had you forgotten how books in this magical library do?

From this they drew a spell to raise Marina temporarily from some kind of hellish afterlife, to tell them that 'hey, Renard was banished by a Hedge, hence his beef, so find her and she can tell you how she did it.'

Despite some lighter moments, 'The Flying Forest' is a bleak encounter overall, as Team Filory deal with Alice's death and Team Julia - which is basically Julia plus a rotating and highly ablative extra body - takes a more measured and less deal-with-the-Devil approach to god hunting. Honestly, it isn't just Quentin realising that he was shooting for easy answers. It's good to see Kady back again. She has one of the brightest relationships with Julia, which keeps the series from getting too deep in melancholy, and that's all to the good. Presumably Team Filory's quest to keep magic from dying altogether will tie back into the hunt for Renard at some point, but at the moment it's the latter that's most interesting.

(1) It's played lightly, but literally creepy AF.

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.

The Magicians - 'Hotel Spa Potions'

I feel bad harping on Professor Sunderland being the hot professor, but she is
just so blatantly the hot professor.

Leaving Eliot to be sensational, the rest of our merry band – who lack a satisfying collective moniker, since Penny is neither a Physical nor a monarch of Fillory, but let's go with 'Team Fillory' where necessary – return to Brakebills, where they approach Dean Fogg to teach them battle magic. Unfortunately Professor Bigby, the last battle magic instructor at the school was escorted from the premises after a number of fairly destructive incidents, and hid the text books in the library before she left. The Dean ropes in Professor(1) Sunderland (Penny's hot traveling instructor/supplementary love interest, also pretty up on the library,) and reads her into the whole Fillory thing.

Sometime earlier, Martin's magical alternate dimension had thrown him out,
requesting that he never return.

Julia, meanwhile, is trapped in a whole Odd Couple sort of thing with the Beast, who has taken to singing show tunes while he waits for her to create a new summoning totem to call up Renard; one not too like the original to tip her hand. He again advises her to give up a little of her Shade, especially when her conscience balks at almost literally roping Marina into helping with the plan(2). Marina is somewhat put off by the abduction thing, although she allows that a rogue god ripping the hearts from hedge witches is, on some level, legitimately her problem. Once released, she goes to Dean Fogg to seek his help, but the Dean is a dick to her because of her problems at Brakebills and so she signs on with Team Julia.

In Fillory, Eliot struggles with the whole King thing. He tries to circumvent his marital problems by organising a group thing, but realises that the other people are only involved because the King said so, which gives him a hella icky feeling. Meanwhile, the Kingdom faces starvation due to failing crops, and now Eliot's shameful past as the black sheep, ascetic gay son of a large family of robust and wholesomely homophobic farm folk(3) comes into play. He realises that, thanks to Fillory's magical nature, no-one in the kingdom waters or fertilises their crops, so he organises great shipments of dung.

Sunderland does some kinky mojo to fix Penny's hands and rebuffs his advances until he graduates, which based on how much schoolwork he does will presumably be a week on never. The cure involves him wearing some beaded bracelets, so presumably it would be bad if he lost those at an inopportune moment.

Etch-a-Sketch of the gods.

Following a kind of scavenger trail left by Professor Bigby, Team Fillory locate the book they need, but find a page missing and a note pointing to an address. Alice, Quentin and the Dean go to the address and meet Bigby, a perky and ageless pixie who makes out with the Dean and comments on Alice and Quentin's sexual energy(4) and Alice's raw power, before handing over the spell. Essentially the mystical equivalent of high explosives, it will take out the Beast and anyone else within several hundred feet. Thus Quentin meets up with Julia to warn her not to be close to the Beast when the balloon goes up, and to once more belittle her trauma. Good job, Q. She does pass on that the thrones of Fillory are cursed by the Beast.

Alice works on the spell, noting that the divine power she received is fading fast. The Dean has each member of the team tattooed and a demon bound into the marks to serve to slow the Beast down when they attack. Then they head for Fillory – which seems to have synched its timeline to Earth's – to warn Eliot about the curse.

I've got those,
Ten tap-tap-tappy toes,
And a dozen fingers for extra magical oomph.

So, first of all, I don't know what's up with the timelines synching; maybe it’s a royalty thing. Also unexplained is the fact that the Neitherlands reavers have stopped trying to kill them all, and the Beast's sudden shift into comedy housemate mode. He's like a disgracefully whitewashed version of Titus Andromedon from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, only with less floaty outfits and more potential to tear the world apart from the foundations up. Speaking of tearing worlds apart, I wish people would stop treating Julia as if she were having a strop because Renard dumped her or something. Sure, the Beast is bad news and has the potential to kill magic (and a lot of people besides,) and Julia proved last season that egoism is a core failing, but rape isn't just a thing that happens and you move on. Julia plays this close, but it feels just awful that Quentin – who is not just her best friend, but was there in the raw and immediate moment when the memories were unlocked – is apparently so tremendously up himself(5) that he hasn't realised.

Also, even without the personal angle, the fact is that Renard has, within the confines of the series at least, already killed way more people than the Beast. He's not a non-issue, indeed he is arguably more powerful and dangerous than Martin, he just isn't targeting posh(6) wizards yet. Also, we still haven't found out what happened to Kady.

In 'Hotel Spa Potions'(7), Season 2 is doing a lot of set-up, from the curse to Alice's waning god-power to the battle magic to Julia's gathering dream team. The scavenger hunt was a bit odd, but explained by Bigby's pixie nature, while Penny's subplot seemed somewhat tacked on. Hopefully his powers and his evil hand syndrome will be more relevant in the future. Still, he did get to sass the fuck out of Josh for ducking out on the big confrontation with the Beast in Season 1. Eliot, conversely, got some excellent character work, but was desperately hurting for sass, unable to pour withering scorn on his subjects because their inability to answer back derives from servility and not tongue-tied inadequacy. It's interesting to see a character who gained much of his status from wit and bitterness struggling to cope with an independent status which turns his defensive sarcasm into pure bullying.

(1) Does no-one teaching at magic schools not have full tenure?

(2) By which I mean that Martin/the Beast kidnaps her and ties her to a chair. With ropes.

(3) Very much a thing in the book, but not mentioned before now in the series.

(4) So awkward.

(5) Not that Quentin being completely up himself is a shocker; it's kind of his whole deal.

(6) Classically trained; even a lot of the hedge witches are pretty Ivy League.

(7) The anagrammatic title of the skincare magic book which concealed the battle magic text Last Hope Options.

Shadowhunters - 'Parabatai Lost'

The morning after, Shadowhunter style.

We begin as we ended last week's episode, with Jace and Clary free, Gretel the werewolf dead, and no real idea what the fuck is happening with Dot.

At least one oversight comes back to bite our putative heroes on the arse, as Jace washes up on the shores of the East River right next to Gretel's body, and instead of doing anything smart like, say, urging the bystander who finds them to yes, please call the police, he instead tells her not to, acts like a scary person and runs away before Luke and the other werewolf cops show up to reclaim their own and draw unflattering conclusions. Being the best and brightest that the Institute has to offer, he then goes to a werewolf bar to use a phone to call Clary, where he is pegged for Gretel's kidnapper and chased until he collapses and gets taken to hospital.

"Don't make me hex a bitch."

Meanwhile, Alec is fading after a part of him got lost trying to track his Parabatai bond to Captain Insensitive. This being TV, a coma naturally means flashbacks, and Alec relives his training with Jace, who was always a cocky little jerk, although the fact that it was instilled at a young age actually makes him a little more sympathetic, since it is clearly a taught rather than an acquired behaviour. We see them train and become a great team, Alec reluctant to undergo the Parabatai bond because he is in love with Jace, and Jace utterly insensitive to any such nuance.

Jace escapes the werewolves again at the hospital and tries to get to Alec at Magnus's loft, but when Aldertree finds that Alec has been removed from the Institute in, as is now traditional, direct opposition to his orders, Izzy has no choice but to make a deal; to bring Jace in, in exchange for helping him get to Alec in time to save him. It turns out that arresting him is about the only thing that gets him out of being eaten by werewolves, despite Luke's attempts to rein in the pack, so there's that.

"There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this..."

This episode, Clary mostly dithers and worries about Jace while lying to Aldertree. For the alleged heroine, she's really a bit of a sideshow this season. Jocelyn is in more of this episode, now apparently keen to protect 'Jonathan', which makes a change from shooting at him, and getting chewed out by Magnus for dragging him into this whole colossal clusterfuck in the first place. Simon has way more going on as his mother, frantic with worry, tries to contact him and he makes contact only to learn that Raphael has smoothed things over so that he can get back to finding Camille and bringing her in to face the music.

There is definitely a degree to which Shadowhunters suffers from old teen syndrome. The characters are supposed to be in their mid-to-late teens, but the actors are all in their twenties, which means that whenever they act like teenagers, I feel like they ought to just grow up and stop being so selfish(1). In particular, it probably does make sense that they would just run when they had the chance, but I still hope that Gretel's death will weigh on them, as well as whatever the hell is happening to Dot, because straight up the Warlocks are the bitches of this particular demimonde and helping out a Fray seems to be the fast-track to getting terminally screwed over. As a result, I don't much care for mother or daughter at this juncture, and am more sympatico with the warlocks and the werewolves, and even Raphael's vampire faction than either the Clave or the protagonists.

(1) Because frankly, they are hella selfish. I know the older Clave members are supposed to be hidebound and hard-hearted, but they make a lot of sense to me(2), and where the young protagonists are right it is frankly by chance more than by intent.

(2) Although a fair few of them are also complete jerks in their own way.

The Librarians - '...and the Curse of Cyndi', '...and the Eternal Question', '...and the Fatal Separation' and '...and the Wrath of Chaos'

"I'm a bloodsucking fiend; look at my outfit."

Okay, it's been a little while, but I've got the rest of Season 3 of The Librarians watched now, so let's bring it on home.

'...and the Curse of Cyndi' (or possibly 'Cindy'; the character in question changed her name one way or the other,) takes the entire team to a cult compound in search of an artefact responsible for the cult's meteoric rise. The Centre of the cult is Cyndi, a seemingly ordinary young woman and unlikely focus of absolute devotion, who effortlessly sucks Flynn and Jake into her orbit, although she has no effect on Ezekiel. Jenkins suggests that the cause is an obsession potion, and that Ezekiel is immune because of his total devotion to himself. As the team seek out the maker of the potion, however, it is Ezekiel who is able to reach Cyndi herself, convince her of the lie of her existence and that there is a better way to live with loss and rejection than mass ensorcelment.

MVL of the Week: Totally Ezekiel. This is one of those episodes which reminds us that Ezekiel is more than just a one-note trickster, and like '...and the Point of Salvation' it once more does so in a way that emphasises his determination to hide his better self from his teammates. He would rather be thought of as too much of a selfish jerk to be affected by a love spell than have it be thought he possesses a sensitive soul. Moreover, it is critical that he presents himself to Cyndi as a friend, and the show never suggests that he might have done otherwise. It is established that he is in love with her, and clear that she is utterly for any kind of affection. Ezekiel gives her the validation that she needs in an utterly selfish fashion and, and this is rare, without anyone ever making a big deal about it. It would be utterly reprehensible to take advantage of Cyndi, but not doing so is not admirable, it's just right.

Also, I love that the moral of the story is 'when other people cast you aside, seek solace in egoism.'

"I actually am a bloodsucking fiend."

Solace is also being sought in '...and the Eternal Question', as Cassandra learns that her mathemagical tumour is about to kill her. She invites Jenkins on a date, which is kind of awkward, as he explains that as fond as he is of her, he swore his love eternally to another, who did not choose him. He is also a little distracted, helping Flynn to decoy Eve off on holiday.

Back on the ranch, as it were, a golfer and his wife spontaneously combust after his cancer was miraculously cursed at a spa, the Librarians discover that the spa is run by vampires, but vampires who walk in the sunlight and do not appear to feed on blood. They learn that the owner of the refuge came there with her children from Spain and found that the place seemed to free them from the curses of vampiric life. Cassandra forms a bond with the daughter of the family, Estrella, who is shocked that the golfer and his wife seemed to have been turned, let alone that they were able to survive away from the sanctuary. When Estrella's brother turns out to be experimenting on guests to try to become an unstoppable, daywalking predator, Jenkins appears to settle the hash of his goons, while Estrella and Cassandra take down the brother.

Cassandra collapses and agrees to surgery, despite knowing that she might lose her gift and fearing that she might then become a liability to the team. In fact, she soon discovers that her gift has grown with the removal of the tumour, allowing her to project thoughts into other people's heads.

MVL of the Week: Actually, all three of these episodes are pretty easy, as they each focus on a different character, much as '...and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy' was Baird's and '...and the Trial of the Triangle' Flynn's. This was Cassandra's show, exploring both her fear of irrelevance and her openness to the supernatural world. Where Jake and Ezekiel immediately begin collecting crucifixes, she doesn't need to be told that Flynn once loved a vampire to put her trust in Estrella.

Honourable mention to Jenkins for being a total badass.

"We're relic hunting fiends; just look at our outfits."

'...and the Fatal Separation' takes the team to Shangri-La, where Jake has been training for a month with the Monkey King, because of course he has. When Shangri-La is invaded by ninja, Jake summons the team to help. Cassandra and Ezekiel hilariously pose as relic smugglers, but Eve is dummied away and accosted by her ex-boss and mentor, a general who now runs DOSA and wants her to betray the Library to them for the good of the nation. She also claims that Eve was placed in the Library by arranging her encounter with Flynn, although that seems hinky given that she received a magical invitation and all. Back in this week's plot, Jake has to fight his sifu, who has been driven into a rage by a relic, while Flynn discovers that Charlene arranged to be captured by the ninjas as the ideal place to hide from Apep. It all ends well, but then Charlene has to sever her connection with the Library so that she can not be used to attack it, which results in the loss of her immortality after a fond farewell to her knight, Jenkins.

MVL of the Week: Jake takes a serious level in badass this week, but he does have to share the spotlight with a arc-service far more than the others did.

"Just look at our outfits."

Which brings us to '...and the Wrath of Chaos', as the team are dummied into the wilds while Eve lets DOSA into the Library. Flynn attempts to hide as many artefacts as possible, while Jenkins tries to delay the invaders, only to be confronted by the head of Medusa, nicked by Eve for the purpose. The three Librarians rescue Jenkins from a cage designed to be Librarian proof (the right answers trigger security measures; only the exact opposites will work,) while Eve's insistence that DOSA's Apep containment is substandard causes the General to check and be possessed. She then brings a bomb to the Library, where Eve reveals that she has been working with Flynn to set a trap for Apep, although only Jenkins knows that Eye of Ra-ing the God of Chaos requires that Flynn sacrifice his own life.

In the final confrontation, the Librarians unleash their secret weapons on Apep - the 'gift of inner soul' awarded by the Monkey King, Cassandra's ability to transmit thought, and the last of Cyndi's love potion so that Apep can 'have a heart'. The god is thus granted all the essential qualities of a human being, and his life can be sacrificed to contain the evil he sought to unleash in the Eye of Ra. Flynn and Eve point out how easily the General was tricked into becoming the host of Chaos and rather gleefully take back all their things, while the Librarians swear off using magic save as a last resort, having seen how easily it can corrupt or be abused.

MVL of the Week: The ensemble, for sure.

This final batch of episodes are a slightly mixed bag. '..and the Curse of Cyndi' is top notch, as Ezekiel episodes often are. '...and the Eternal Question' is decent, but '...and the Fatal Separation' is trying to do too many things at once and the finale does not cap off the season as beautifully as the first two seasons. I still love the show, but that's probably why I'm tougher on it than I might be if it were purely disposable to me.

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.

Emerald City - 'The Beast Forever'

Left to right: Elizabeth (Roxy Sternberg), Toto(1), West (Ana Ularu), Jack (Gerren Howell)(2), Glinda (Joely Richardson), Anna (Isabel Lucas)(3), Small Child Monster Who Has Seen Lard and is Friend of Somebody, the Wizard of Oz (Vincent D'Onofrio), Dorothy (Adria Arjona), East (Florence Kasumba), Eamonn (Mido Hamada), Lucas (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and... some other nun in a fantastic habit. Damn that's a lot of cast (and a surprising amount of diversity.)

This is not your grandfather's Oz. Honestly, it's not your father's Oz, either, nor your older brothers, nor that of any member of your maternal line. This is Emerald City.

"While I queue this up, can we discuss the hat policy?"

Twenty years after being handed over to a pair of Kansas farmers to be raised, Nurse Dorothy Gale is contemplating whether to make contact with her recently returned mother (a brief appearance by Leverage's Gina Bellman,) when a storm whips up out of nowhere, a corpse appears and her injured mother tells her not to involve the cops or ambulance (presumably because she's shivved a fool, or because something something magic princess(4), I guess.) When a police car does turn up, Dorothy is threatened with a gun (because a girl out in a storm is clearly about to start some shit?) and leaps into the car for cover, which is whipped up in the storm and lands in another place, bringing a hapless police dog with her. She the car crashes down, it hits a woman who seems to step in front of it. It soon emerges that the woman she hit and killed is the Witch of the East, which is not good.

"Ding dong the witch is dead?"

She is captured by the Munja'kin, who reckon her for bad news. The other Witches and the Wizard of Oz are going to be mad as hell that she ran over East; besides, having killed the Witch means that she must be one too. Apparently these are the rules. Therefore they vote to kick her off their territory and send her to the Emerald City to tell Oz that she is very sorry. Meanwhile, Oz is looking for her. His acolytes inform him that her arrival is the first sign of the return of the Beast Forever - and in their huge radar wimples they look like they ought to be tuned in to the frequency of the universe - a sort of colossal force that appears in many forms to bring badness upon the land; sort of like Gozer the Gozarian, but without the whole 'choose the form of your own destruction' bit. Fearing the implications for his magnificent and totally real hair(5), he sends a guy named Eamonn who practically has 'ruthless enforcer' tattooed on his forehead to look into things.

The straw is presumably meant to suggest the Scarecrow, but
actually just hints that it isn't mud he's covered in.

Dropped off at the border of their snowbound territory by the Munja'kin leader (whose wife, we learn, has been trapped in the mud of a cave for possessing magic, I suspect this will become important,) Dorothy soon finds herself in the desert, where she encounters a man on a crucifix. He's an amnesiac, and despite her protests he browbeats her into naming him Lucas (after her home town in Kansas.)

Elsewhere, the Wizard visits West, a Witch who appears to have retired to be a drunken brothel madame or something; possibly just a drunk. Regardless of her state of dissipation, she realises that his supposedly chaste ADC has been knocked up. Eamonn reaches the Munja'kin village, where not only is Dorothy gone, so is the Witch's body. Perhaps Dorothy was not Witch enough to kill her after all.

"There is no charge for fabulousness."

Sure enough, East is not dead and catches up with Dorothy, trapping her and Lucas in an illusion of a muddy pit, apparently holding a grudge for the whole getting his with a car thing. She goes through Dorothy's stuff and finds a pistol, and as only a witch can kill a witch, Dorothy misleads her into shooting herself in the head, which... is apparently not as much of a kicker for Dorothy as you might expect.

West gets all psychic traumaed and the Wizard sends Eamonn after Dorothy while giving a speech promising to protect the land from the Beast Forever.

Directed by Tarsem 'Style Over Content' Singh(6), Emerald City may be the fix I've been needing since the end of Season 1 of The Shannara Chronicles. It's pretty, flashy and not too complex (yet), and has a lot of excellent visuals to illustrate the review with. The cast are decent (a cut above Shanarra, I would say,) and so far they aren't mining an alternate interpretation that anyone has done before (in, for example, Wicked, Wicked the Musical, Tin Man, Oz the Great and Powerful.) There are also a couple of really interesting bit, including the winged monkey drones and the way East's powers work, making Dorothy and Lucas believe that they are trapped with no ability to get free rather than actually moving them. The power of suggestion, I guess.

(1) I didn't get the actor's name, and even 'toto' is just Munja'kin for dog in this one.
(2) Character not in the first episode, also holy shit it's CBBC's Young Dracula!
(3) Character not in the first episode, also I'm assuming that's not blackface...
(4) Dorothy has a tell-tale a) birthmark, or b) tattoo given to her in infancy, in the shape of either a) a load of dots, or b) a constellation. This sort of thing is always highly indicative of destiny.
(5) It is revealed in-universe to be a piece.
(6) In fairness, a lot of his content is pretty good, but his style is peerless.