This was, by far, one of the most authentic episodes The Magicians has done in its three seasons.  It harkens back a bit to Season 1’s “The World in the Walls” where we see a little more deeply into psyches of the characters of this world.  There’s also several terrible moments (but ultimately satisfying to watch) where the writers of The Magicians nail what it’s like to have depression, as well as seizures.  There weren’t any myths about either perpetuated by the show, and that was refreshing to see. Plus Felicia Day premiered as Poppy! So all in all, an excellent episode.

As always, spoilers.

 

I Will Survive

We start out with Alice and Julia using old toys from the 90’s to serve as conductors for magical energy – there is a hedge witch spell that uses aluminum wiring as a conduit to transfer magic.  They, are stopped, however, by an astral plane Penny, who manages to get their attention by planting himself into a fish doorbell that plays “I Will Survive.”  He’s warning them that the last time he saw this spell done, everyone ended up on fire, and Fogg was right to try to stop them.

Which tips the girls off to the fact that Fogg had something to do with the spell.  Turns out, it wasn’t Marina’s spell, but his – it is an incredibly delicate procedure called the Voltaic Transfer.  Fogg is rather unhappy to find out that Julia has had magic all this time, and now she wants to get rid of it.  He’s also super drunk, which is his normal state now that magic has gone away.  Julia provides him with some comfort by repairing his magical glasses, so at least he can see outlines again.  This prompts Fogg to reveal to them that they need the flesh of a magical creature to power the spell, preferably one that is good at sucking energy – an incubus.

Alice and Julia visit the incubus Fogg recommends, who is also a hedge fund manager.  He’s super amused after Julia and Alice dance around the fact that they need his penis to power the spell – apparently, that was a joke he played on Fogg years ago (so no Magic Johnson – heh – from him).  However, because he feeds off of stress, and Julia is full of it, he offers them his tail (which regrows each Spring), if the girls let him get a few hits from their stressed out energy.

Using the tail and the toys (that sounds dirty even though it isn’t), Alice and Julia work to transfer the magic, while Penny frets, unable to communicate.  Hymen (the pervert ghost we met earlier this season) watches as well, and teases Penny about being the one in their group who acts like he doesn’t care, but really, he’s the one that cares the most.  Hymen suggests that if it’s too depressing to watch his friends carry on life without him, he should leave.

Before going, though, he sees that the magic has been transferred, and needs to speak his mind to Julia.  He chastises her for giving up the one thing they all want, and she pushes back, noting that she wants to enjoy just a few moments of existence without being pressured by a god or a quest or a dead asshole like Penny.  She hands the key to Alice so that she can say her goodbyes, but Alice instead offers to make Penny a new body to move into.

Julia takes some time for herself in a nearby park, reading on a blanket, only to find Reynard next to her.  He commends her for trying to get rid of him, but that she never will truly be able to do so.  She wakes up suddenly from Reynard infiltrating her dreams.

Alice, meanwhile, has started practicing bone knitting to make Penny’s new body.  Alas, though, the effort is too much for her tiny seed of magic, and to Penny’s (and our) horror, Alice falls to the floor with a seizure.  Unable to help, Penny can only “be” the fish doorbell, and creepily sing “I Will Survive” to attract someone’s attention.

 

Let’s Get It On

The Stone Queen of the Tribe of the Floating Mountain (Which is No Longer Floating) plots with Margo to take out the Fairy Queen at the right time, but first she has to consummate her marriage with her super nerdy and young husband Fomar.  The Stone Queen locks Margo in the dungeon with Fomar, intending to not release her until they have sex.

Fomar tries to get his new wife to cooperate, admitting that perhaps it was wrong to have killed Micah – however, usually younger siblings inherit nothing and end up relegated to the royal guard, and Fomar didn’t want that for himself. Margo is not amused and tells him that they won’t ever become one flesh – he would need a lot of education before being ready for that.  She offers to show him, though, using an anatomy book.

Margo tries to scare him off from wanting to get it on, showing him how vaginas carry disease, kill men, explode during childbirth and bleed every month.  Undeterred by the idea of blood, she then asks him if he can deal with the fact that they have teeth too. Oh Margo, you silly, wonderful woman. Vagina dentata for the win (a sentence I never once imagined writing before now)!

Eliot, having returned to Fillory without Fray and Fen, tells the Fairy Queen he’ll be leaving soon to go and find them (so are they still in the city with Todd?).  She forbids him from doing that until he can convince Margo to have sex with her new husband, threatening to take some of his body parts to replace Margo’s squished eye as a keepsake if he doesn’t succeed.

He goes to find Quentin first, who is disguised as a Fillorian guard (as I would assume that if the Fairy Queen knew he was there too, she’d control him as well).  Getting an update on the key quest, he learns from Q that they need to take the Muntjac out to an uncharted area of Fillory, the Abyss.  Eliot unfortunately can’t go, given his duties to the Fairy Queen, so Q will have to go by himself, with mapmaker Benedict as his companion.

Eliot is interrupted again before he can figure out what to do with Margo with an urgent message from Prince Ess.  They had let him go from the dungeon, since it wasn’t him shooting arrows at Micah, by Fomar, in the last episode.  There’s something out in Fillory the High King needs to see, and Eliot kills two birds with one stone by proposing to the Fairy Queen that he take Margo and Fomar on a honeymoon, which will surely cause them to consummate the marriage.

In a carriage on the way to where Ess directed them to, Eliot encourages High Queen Margo to drink her wine, along with Fomar.  Luckily for Margo, Eliot drugged her new husband’s drink, knocking him unconscious and allowing them to discuss the orchard where Ess is sending them.  Apparently Ess saw some crazy things in the Northern Orchards – rivers running red and three eyed fanged toads, among other monstrocities.  Eliot suspects the fairies are poisoning the ecosystem, and when they step out of the carriage to examine the area, instead of trees, they find a massive patch of mushrooms.

They contemplate the fact that mushrooms shouldn’t be growing this far north, and realize rather quickly that the fairies are teraforming to make the climate of Fillory more moist and suitable for their survival.  After one of the mushrooms moves, they discover something even more horrific – fairy embryos growing underground.  The fairies aren’t just changing Fillory’s ecosystem, they are growing an army.

While Eliot monologues about what they need to do, Margo grabs several of the embryos as hostages, along with one of those fanged toads Ess talked about and they head back to White Spire in the carriage.  When Fomar wakes up in the carriage later, his non-magic Johnson is rather sore from what he believes was sexy time with Margo and her toothy vagina, when in fact, he got off from a particularly skilled fanged toad.  So, win-win for everyone!

 

Paint It Black

Q sets off on the next adventure to find the key, having way too much fun being a swash buckler of sorts on the high seas.  The fun stops, however, as they enter the inky blackness of the Abyss.  They soon hear someone calling for help, and they rescue a woman from a raft. She introduces herself as Poppy Kline, draconologist, postgraduate fellow from Brakebills, and field researcher.

As she changes into dry clothes, she and Q talk about the fact that she came with the Spring Break group from Brakebills that Victoria and Josh were in, and she offers to tell Q the whole story of how she ended up alone on a raft over a drink.

Studying dragons for two years in Fillory on a tiny island in the Truthwaters, Poppy’s ship wrecked three weeks ago, leaving her stranded on a raft until the Muntjac picked her up.  They talk about the fact that magic is gone, and Q shares information with her about the quest for the keys.  Conveniently, Poppy has the next key tied around her neck.  She stole it from a dragon’s treasure nest/breeding ground in her travels, while the dragons were getting it on, and offers it to Quentin as a gift from one questor to another.

But that seems far too easy for our gang, and it is.  Quentin, who is super drunk by this point, passes out and wakes up the key in his hand and an abusive version of himself following him around the ship.   We saw Poppy slip the key into his hand the previous night, as the last person who touches it is cursed to be tortured by what can only be seen as a Depression Monster.  It eats away at a person’s psyche until they can pass it along, or till they kill themselves.  While Q is horrified by this shitty part of himself that won’t leave him alone, he’s more horrified by the idea of giving it to someone else and potentially causing their suicide. That’s what happened to Poppy and her shipmates – they didn’t all die in the wreck, some of them died from holding the key.

He vows to keep it on him until they return to White Spire, but the Depression Monster just makes life more and more soul crushing for him.  Jason Ralph does a phenomenal job with playing these sides of Quentin – the writers lull us into a false sense of security by making some of Dark Q’s insults a little silly at first, but then it quickly goes downhill when he starts to make Real Q believe that his actions caused Julia’s sexual assault and all of Alice’s troubles over the past year.

He eventually makes his way to the side of the boat in a suicidal haze, but is stopped from jumping overboard by Benedict.  Benedict shares that he too has had suicidal thoughts, but has never spoken of them, given that in his family, he was taught the proper way of expressing emotion was…well, to not express it. Bottle it up and turn it into something productive, like…maps.

Benedict shares with him that in older days, when sailors were going mad, they would be tied to the mast to prevent them from jumping overboard.  Q goes full Odysseus and has his mapmaker tie him up until they reach White Spire. Poppy comes to see him, offering to take the key, and sharing how it affects some people more quickly than others (which is how she lost so many shipmates right away).  When he refuses, she accuses him of being a martyr.  Q tells her that not all of the key’s side effects are bad – sometimes the keys are really helpful if you can find a keyhole.  Poppy, realizing that she might have a chance at returning to Earth, dons a pair of gloves and steals the key away from Quentin in an attempt to use the keyhole Eliot escaped through earlier in the season.

Q begs Benedict to untie him, but Benedict holds true to his word to not untie the king.  Instead, Quentin sends him to get the key from Poppy before she can leave.  Benedict does manage to knock Poppy out, but in the process, ends up being the next person to touch the key.

Which is both a good thing and a horrible thing.  Dark Quentin is now gone, as it has passed to Benedict.  However, because Benedict never really let out any of those dark feelings he has had over the years, the curse affects him almost immediately, causing him to jump overboard with the key and getting eaten by a dragon in the dark depths of the water before Quentin can stop him.

Angry at Poppy, Quentin initially refuses to hear Poppy’s recommendations for getting the key back from the dragon, but eventually does – apparently dragons don’t just create portals, they ARE portals.  Which means, best case scenario – the key is in the Underworld with Benedict.

 

Q and A About Q and A and Everything Else

• There’s a very clever nod in this episode back to one of Hale Appleman’s first roles in the independent movie, Teeth.  He plays a character named Tobey, who after trying to rape the character of Dawn, gets his dick bitten off, as the girl has vagina dentata.   That movie actually involves several dicks getting bitten off, but that’s just an aside.

• Yay! Felicia Day joins the cast as Poppy!  Poppy is a great character from the books, and Day does an excellent job portraying her upbeat, adventuring nature.  I’m starting to wonder who else we might get from Supernatural in upcoming episodes – first Julian Richings, and now Felicia Day.
• The worst part (and best part) about the Depression Monster was how realistically it was portrayed.  I tried to explain to my husband that depression is like that – an irrational part of you telling you things in your head that you logically know aren’t right, but you can’t make those thoughts stop.  And like Q, we all try to eat them away, drink them away, or masturbate them away, to no avail.  I’m not sure my husband ever really fully had an understanding of what me and my daughter go through sometimes with depression, so I am deeply grateful to the writers of The Magicians for helping to make this concept concrete and, more importantly, acceptable.
• Oh, dear sweet Benedict – I knew you were potentially going to die at some point, given what happens in the books, but I didn’t expect your downfall in battle would be your own mind.  We will miss you! I do, however, sense a greater role for Penny finally to play – it seems he might be the only one in the group who can access the Underworld and obtain the key.  I’m not sure how he would get it back though, given that Alice’s attempts to build him a new body didn’t get very far.
• I do very much enjoy the fact that the only item in the Physical Kids Cottage that Penny can “be” is the fish doorbell that sings “I Will Survive.” Touche, Magicians.
• Kudos to the writers as well for Alice’s accurate seizure portrayal.  Working for an organization that teaches about epilepsy and seizures, it is incredibly frustrating when shows depict someone with a seizure, and those around them doing things like sticking spoons or belts in their mouths.  While Penny couldn’t do anything to help her at the time of the seizure (him not having a body and all), they did at least show Alice on her side, so as not to choke as she was drooling during it.  And in the previews for this week, when Q finds her, he doesn’t do anything stupid and inappropriate to help.  So, a big thank you to the writers for not perpetuating the myths about seizures – it is very much appreciated.

 

Next Week

Argh, how are we more than halfway through this season already? Episode 7, Poached Eggs, will hopefully have us going after the key in the Underworld and Margo coming down on the Fairy Queen hard.  I think Julia may also have to re-accept her gift in order to keep her and Alice healthy, as well as get Penny into the Underworld. So, then we will have two people with magic, which can only be a good thing! Wednesday’s episode can’t get here soon enough (and luckily it will be here…tomorrow)!

 

Big Mouth Billy Bass picture courtesy of Pinterest: https://goo.gl/images/Aan4us

Teeth picture courtesy of Villians Wiki: http://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Tobey_(Teeth)

Other photos courtesy of Syfy.com