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.

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.

The Magicians - 'Have You Brought Me Little Cakes'

We come to the season finale of The Magicians, and wow there's a lot happening.

"So... this is recursive."

As partially told in the form of Quentin writing a new Filory novel, we get a potted history of the group's adventures in the magical realm. Quentin and Julia arrive in the realm in its heyday, and become embroiled in the stories they know when they turn out to be 'the witch and the fool' who rescue Jane from a trap. They then visit a blacksmith to commission the Leo Blade to slay a master magician, the price being a place at court once they become kings and queens of Filory, as is par for the course for visitors from Earth.

They then encounter the Watcher Woman, a terrifying figure from the books who turns out to be yet another alias used by Jane Chatwin to push herself to learn magic in the first place. She notes that Julia's memory has been blocked, something shiny replacing something horrible (I fucking knew that goddess was no good!) but refuses to remove it. They then bounce forward to join the rest of the group in what can only be described as Filory's whatever the opposite of a heyday is. Everything has gone to shit, even the sunlight. They are able to claim the Leo Blade, but as future High King, Eliot is required to marry the blacksmith's daughter, forsaking all others.

Penny rescues Victoria, who shows him the 'ride along' spell, and also Christopher Plover, who has been held captive by the real Beast, Martin Chatwin, not that anyone has much sympathy for Plover. Julia and Quentin find Ember, one of the twin gods of Filory, in a dissipate state, and learn that his brother, Umber, was killed by the Beast. He gives Quentin a bottle of his 'essence' to imbue him with power enough to wield the Leo Blade, but also unblocks Julia's memories, revealing that rather than some corn goddess popping up to heal their ills, the Free Trader Beowulf's ritual summoned the trickster Reynard the Fox, who tore out Richard's heart so he could use his body, nullified the group's magic, killed the minor characters and raped Julia. Kady was apparently 'saved', although whether she ran or was ever caught is not explored. Marina helped clear up and, at Julia's request, blocked her memory.

Just say no to god 'essence'

Victoria and Josh punk out. Quentin finally accepts that he's not the hero, and gives Alice the essence, a) which is exactly the euphemism you think it is and b) there's a point to that, to drink, imbuing her with divine power. They travel to the source of Filory's magic to ambush the Beast, but Alice finds the knife gone from her belt when she goes to attack. She gets seriously fucked up, Quentin, Eliot and Margo are tossed around like ragdolls and Penny's hands are cut off at the wrist. Ouch.

Then Julia pops up with the Leo Blade, having realised that she too was - violently and unwillingly - 'gifted' with the 'essence' of a god, which gives her the power to wield the blade. She puts the knife to Martins' throat. Hurray, huzzah, and home for tea and crumpets!

This is not as good a situation as it seems.

Except not.

No, Julia clearly stole the blade from Alice not to ninja the kill, but because the Beast killed Umber. He knows how to kill gods, and that's knowledge she is willing to deal for, whatever the cost.

Seriously, it's a good thing the show got picked up for a second season, or I'd be bouncing off walls at this point. Alice is looking pretty dead, Penny maimed and everyone else hurt, and the Beast is loose in the company of a fairly monomaniacal Julia. One could argue that she is determined to expunge the evil that she helped to bring into the world, but it's hard to definitively call the Beast the lesser of those evils and clearly emotion is clouding her judgement. Not that it's easy to fault her for that, given all that happened. Reynard is clearly a shit and needs to die, but one the other hand Martin ruined Narnia - a pretty textbook sign of evil - and squeezed his sister's throat until her head exploded, so he's not some brooding, misunderstood antihero.

And Quentin? Well, Quentin is as much of a useless dick as ever, but a more likable one at least.

The Magicians - 'Remedial Battle Magic' and 'Thirty-Nine Graves'

If magic is basically about throwing shapes, are
rappers a kind of hedge witch?

Faced with the knowledge that the Beast wants the Button, and is flooding the Neitherlands with mercenary battle mages to get it (okay, I kind of missed that last episode; my bad,) Team Filory decide that the smart move is to cut a deal.

In a shocking twist, a few weeks later, they are all horribly murdered in class. I know, right! Who knew they still had classes!

Unhappy with the way this piece of prediction magic (psych!) shaped up, they review: Every option ends in them dead, except for 'go to Filory', which whites out the spell. Thus they opt to go to Filory, but first to tool up by learning some battle magic. To this end, they contact the only person they have seen use battle magic, Kady, whom they find in Julia's apartment. She tells them it needs absolute emotional control, but there is a workaround: enchanted bottles to contain their emotions. Naturally, there is a payoff. All the emotions come back when you open the bottle, so there's a hard cap of three hours on the bottle.

After their first training session, Penny and Alice decide that they would rather learn to do battle magic without the bottles - since they turn them into dead-eyed, robot-talking zombies - but the others are all for anything that makes their lives easier, because they have learned nothing from this or any other series about magic. Penny has his own problems, however, as the Beast starts talking to him again, driving him towards madness. His mentor and that guy Joe the pandimensional pansexual top themselves to escape the voice, but Professor Hottington gives him a psychic inhibitor which blocks them out, although she warns that it will eventually destroy his ability to defend his own psyche.

Rule 7) Never trust a creature that looks like your ideal mate or a dead
relative.

As the team begin to master the forms of battle magic - mostly magical darts, force pushes and the occasional fireball - Kady and Julia are on a mission to find a god, by working their way up from sleazy vampires to find a magical being with enough oomph to still hang with the divine. This leads them to an entity that takes the form of Kady's dead mother and tries to inveigle itself into her grief, but Julia holds Kady's hand - no doubt setting the internet ablaze - and they reject her, prompting her to tell them that the gods are all dead. Despite this, the earth goddess contacts Julia in a dream and tells her that she is waiting for her to find her.

Battle magic training goes well, but then Quentin, Eliot and Margo leave the bottles on too long, and afterwards get drunk and have what must have been the world's most embarrassing threesome even before Alice walks in on them in the morning.

'Thirty-Nine Graves' opens with bitterness and recrimination, and ultimately Penny and Alice having a moment, plunging the entire Filory mission into chaos. Even Alice opts to use the bottle when they go into the Neitherlands, since otherwise her seething resentment of Quentin would doom them all. In a nice moment, emotionally balanced Quentin tells Alice and Penny they'd make a cute couple.

Summoning earth deities must be done in pajamas.

In Manhattan, Julia and Kady finally contact someone who can point them to the goddess, when propitiated with gifts. He lifts Kady's grief and gives them the incantation to call on the goddess. Julia and Richard have a moment, and then they summon the goddess, Our Lady Underground, who heals those of them who are sick before sending all but Julia off on various missions of goodness and light, no doubt or question of that. Goodness and light. For sure.

Arriving in the Neitherlands, Quentin is immediately knocked back to Earth by hoodie girl. The others flee and take shelter in the library, where their emotion bottles - and Eliot's booze - are promptly confiscated.

Librarian lady is pure awesome.

Quentin seeks answers by dosing the Dean with a truth serum. The Dean explains that Eliza was Jane Chatwin, who was given then power to control time on a cosmic level, with only major powers - like the Dean, the Librarian and the Beast - remembering the previous loops. She has set Quentin and his friends on the path to destroying the Beast thirty-nine times, and thirty-eight times they have all died. In twenty-seven alternatives, the Dean has failed not to be dosed. Now Jane is dead, so this is the last time. This time around, Jane arranged for Julia to be kept out of Brakebills in an attempt to make her stronger faster.

Eliot gets the team evicted from the library when he sets fire to Mike's book. They meet up with a member of Brakebills' missing class, a boy named Josh, whose girlfriend Victoria is the traveler Penny saw held captive by the Beast. After a pep talk from Penny, Alice comes up with a way to shield them all against detection as they get to the Filory fountain, but Eliot drops an LSD carrot, forcing Margo to shoot one of the mercenary mages, and Penny to slice open hoodie girl with his magic.

"I never thought I'd say it, but thank God for Hitler."

Buttonless but reconciled, Julia and Quentin come up with an alternate plan. Using a time tunnel established in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, they travel to 1944 and stalk Jane until she enters Filory, then tailgate a pre-teen girl through a magical door in an old-fashioned red telephone box. Which is only a little bit very creepy.

These two episodes really flow together, and I wonder if the show isn't written somewhat with a binge in mind. Put together, 'Remedial Battle Magic' and 'Thirty-Nine Graves' propel the story and characters forward. Quentin and Julia's reconciliation is quick, but linked to her discovery of purpose and the reigniting of their childhood Filory connection, has a true feeling of wonder. Penny and Alice's relationship also moves on in leaps and bounds, such that their one night stand - which felt cruel and self-destructive in the book - came off as natural and even healthy. Speaking of self-destructive, Margo and especially Eliot continue their spiral of darkening rage as Eliot is still coming to terms with killing his boyfriend, and now the realisation that Mike had a happy life (and was a Repuiblican) before the Beast hijacked him. Consequences hang heavy in the Magicians, which is perhaps why I am so suspicious of the white-robed Our Lady Underground.

As a point of minor interest, the Librarian misnames Margo as 'Janet', hinting that the series is somehow a later repeat of the story told in the novel, 'The Magicians'.

The Magicians - 'The Writing Room' and 'Homecoming'

"So... this is what Britain looks like."

Road trip!

As a note, I'm pretty sure that the 'previously on' scene of the Beast/Mike murdering Eliza/Jane Chatwin included an image cut from the actual showing of the episode, in which Eliza went the way of Oberyn Martell.

A locator spell points to Penny as the one who stole the final Fillory book, and he admits that, yes, he took it, read it, spilled beer on it and threw it out rather than admit that he'd been interested. His fuzzy recollection was that it was written by Jane Chatwin rather than Christopher Plover, and described her attempt to find a means for her brother Martin to get back into Fillory when 'Ember and Umber' stopped admitting him. Eventually she tracked down a questing beast - possibly a rabbit or pig - who gave her a magic button, and there the book ends.

"So... this is what the British look like."

To learn more, Quentin, Alice and Penny head to England to visit Plover's house, accompanied by the bored and grieving Eliot, who also allows them use of a magic door he and Margot created to visit their favourite pub. The big old house is run as a museum, so they take the tour, and of course Quentin nitpicks at the tour guide throughout the presentation on Plover, the neighbouring Chatwin children, his hyper-protective sister and that totally unsolved mystery about the disappearance of the housekeeper's kids (who were apparently too poor to go to Fillory, even in fiction.)

Since they can't ransack the place for a button during the tour, they break back in at night and find a number of books of real magic in Plover's collection, including several that Penny calls the 101 of Travelling. The tour guide catches them, but Eliot claims to be a supervillain and he starts to tell them something, but is interrupted when the lights go out and he is instantly murdered with his lips sewn shut and OMFG the following ghost story is creepy as shit, as they gang witness not only the Mrs Danversesque sister flat out murdering the housekeeper's children for disturbing her sainted brother, but said sainted brother drugging Jane and molesting Martin, all while excitedly describing the adventures they can have together once he unlocks the magic to travel to Fillory, even if it would require him growing some extra fingers.

They find the button, but are forced to flee, escaping only thanks to their magic, and unable to do anything to give the ghost-children peace, much to Alice's distress.

"Wait; I'm burying the gays? And just as I was getting likable again."

Back in New York, Richard tasks Julia with contacting the mind of Kira, a magician who has suffered some sort of locked in syndrome since a spell went wrong. Specifically, she used the spell she used to torment Quentin to create a safe space to make notes on Kira's now perfected spell, and is then asked to give her peace. She balks at first - after all, introducing a black lesbian character and then offing her right off the bat is a bit weak - but then assents, Richard explaining that this is part of using magic for good.

"Welcome to Limbo. I'll be your bandit."

At Brakebills, Quentin muses on the fact that his literary hero was a child-raping bastard, and his sister a child-murdering monster. Penny touches the button - largely to spite Quentin - and immediately vanishes, bringing 'The Writing Room' to a close.

Penny finds himself climbing out of a fountain onto planet hedge maze in 'Homecoming' and is almost immediately met by a chirpy lass in a hoody who explains that he is in the Neitherlands and then tries to steal his button (which sadly lacks the innuendo potential of all those attempts to bag Wil's Elfstones.) Penny quickly becomes completely lost in the labyrinth of courtyards and fountains, and decides that it's time to make like ET and phone home.

He does this by homing in on the brain he is most accustomed to invading, and I'm not the only one to notice his mutual antagonism with Quentin evolving into near-bromance. This time he pops into Quentin's Indiana Jones/Princess Leia/Danaerys Targaryen sex dream, and we learn that not only is he a complete nerd, but even his fantasies think he's a bit of a loser. It's here that Penny learns that what has been about six minutes for him has been as many weeks on Earth.

"If you would just shut up for two seconds, this sex dream would pass the
Bechdel test."

Alice takes Quentin to meet her parents, not for the usual reasons, but because their mutual boyfriend is an extraplanar traveler named Joe. Joe explains that they can create a beacon to guide Penny back to the Earth Fountain, but they'll need to do some sex magic to achieve it. Cue awkwardness and also some decent exploration of the relationship. Damnit, The Magicians, you were supposed to be my big, dumb fluff show.

Julia has now become an active member of Richard's online magical circle, the Free Trader Beowulf. Hosting a meet up, she discovers that one of the members, Asmodeus, is actually Kady, and the two of them are assigned to 'level up' by mastering a set of spells (given to them in what Richard genuinely calls a 'spell binder'; he's so adorably nerdy that I can't help but think he's going to die or turn out a major heel) while the rest of the group work on fucking with causality in the spare room. Seriously; mystery cults aside, it's fucking rude to break time in someone's house without telling them. Also, they apparently want to control a god, which just feels... dumb.

In the Physical Cabin, Margo is just starting to notice that Eliot is actually pretty damned shook up over not just killing someone, but basically murdering his not-actually-boyfriend-because possession, in order to temporarily inconvenience the thing that was puppeting his body. They are briefly distracted when uncharacteristic faint spells tip them off that Margo's ex has created a replica of her which has been drawing off her life force. Dubbed the Margolem, she confiscates it, but decides to keep it around because having a version of her permanently in 'party' mode is good for Eliot. The Margolem also provides confirmation that Margo and Eliot's inviolable relationship is, however, not sexual.

"No, wait. This is what Britain is like."

Back in the Neitherlands, Penny falls through a trap door into a library, where a librarian calls him 'William', and suggests that he has been there before, but doesn't remember. The library is full of books of people's lives, although she warns him that 'people who read their own books often find that they don't like the main character,' and never mind the ending. This includes the life of Martin Chatwin, who also disappeared, but without a card Penny can't borrow it. Instead, and to avoid harm to her books, the librarian photocopies the pages he would have torn out while she kicked his arse, then punts him back to the fountain maze, from which he exits via the beacon into the bedroom where Alice and Quentin are having sex.

So, yeah... The Magicians is steadily improving as it goes along. I've read the first book now, and the changes in plot, pacing and whatnot are substantial, but I think I'm liking the series better, if I'm honest. I would not have expected to say that six weeks ago.

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.

The Magicians - 'The Mayakovsky Circumstance'

"Welcome to McBrakebills sir or madam how may I serve you today."
"I'm lovin' it."

Following on from last week, we see what happened to the students after they got goosed.

As a flock, the freshmen fly to the Antarctic, where a near-identical Brakebills house (it's like it's the same set with a blue filter) awaits, along with the possibly insane Professor Mayakovsky, a magician of great power and obscure methodology. He takes away their voices and tasks them to complete a series of spells without incantations, then begins instructing them in mind control, despite the fact that to do so runs against the previously taught ethics of magic (never practice on living beings.) During this time, Quentin and Alice exchange a lot of furtive looks, prompting the Professor to suggest they just screw and get it over with.

After they find it difficult to manage the mind control task, Mayakovsky locks Quentin and Alice out in the snow, forcing them to work out how to shapeshift into foxes. They have fox sex, because turning into stinky verminous carnivores really floats their collective boat, apparently.

Everyone booze up and riot.

Meanwhile, Eliot and Margot are preparing for their annual trip to a sun, sex and sorcery trip to Ibiza, which includes both an opening orgy and presenting gifts to the organising faculty.

Brakebills!

Actually, I should remember when being outraged about Brakebills student-staff relations that, despite being indistinguishable from TV high school students (because TV,) the characters in the show are at least all grad students.

Anyway, to impress the faculty they translate a spell to make magical gin, with help from passing stranger Mike, to whom Eliot takes enough of a shine to provoke uncharacteristic jealousy in Margot. Naturally, it turns out the the spell actually summons a djinn, which impresses on Margot and responds to an unspoken wish that Mike would 'go back where he came from and suck on some other knob' by making him tongue the front door handle. The Magicians gets weird sometimes.

In Antarctica, Mayakovsky tells Penny to lose the anchor tattoo and has him travel around to see where he ends up (home, desert, volcano.) Meanwhile, Penny and Kady reconnect as she lets her mental wards down, but this allows Mayakovsky to see what she's been doing. When they try to steal her one big score to break away from Marina, the Professor stops her and gives her the option to leave instead of going back to Brakebills to face the music and take Penny down with her. He also breaks the news that her mother is dead.

Speaking of that, Julia is picked up by her sister when the police determine she probably didn't make someone's organs liquify, who tells her that she needs to get help or their mother will have her committed to save face.

Actually, despite being quite such a bright blue, it's a moth. My bad.

The freshmen return home, sans Kady. Penny is mad as hell, since the note she left suggested that she just took the thing he nicked for her and scarpered. Quentin thanks Mayakovsky for his teaching. Eliot opts to stay with Mike, but promises Margot that nothing and no-one will come between them, so Margot takes a keen fellow student named Todd to Ibiza. Mike sees a butterfly on a mirror and his eyes glow blue, so that's not good.

The Magicians is kind of weird, you know. It's sometimes sombre, sometimes whacky, and always with this muted colour palette that suggests it ought not to be quite so filled with sight gags about oral sex and humping spell books. Quentin remains a somewhat unengaging lead and I'm not really sure what's going on with Julia. It feels like they're speeding through a lot of material with her in a very short time. Eliot continues to be awesome, and is no longer merely an informed bisexual. I will be deeply saddened if he gets eaten by moths, since it will make the series about 40% less engaging.