This was kind of a weird episode of The Magicians – not my favorite, to be honest with you.  It had some heartfelt, “punch you in the feels,” and genuinely surprising moments, but the writing was kind of all over the place and the story was a bit hard to follow at times.  There also seemed to be the random entry of various characters (I’m looking at you, Professor Lipson) that didn’t seem to flow smoothly with the storyline.  Some of the gang’s plans seemed highly convoluted and baffling – I’m assuming we are going to learn the reasoning behind those plans in later episodes, but for now, it was just puzzling, and not in a good way – I was confused, rather than intrigued.

There were also some really pessimistic thoughts about the world today within the storylines – male privilege, the inevitable misery of adulthood and loss, blissfully tuning out the world through heavy drug use, and revolt against the bureaucracy. Maybe I didn’t enjoy this episode as much because I watch The Magicians to escape the shittiness of our world at the moment – I don’t want to necessarily feel miserable and disillusioned as the ending credits roll.  While many of the episodes have had dark storylines, they are all still enveloped in the context of magic and hidden worlds.

Still, though, there was some outstanding work from Brittany Curran (Fen) this week, and her scenes with Hale Appleman (Eliot) were phenomenal.  As a mother, she was making me ugly cry.  But hey, it wouldn’t be an episode of The Magicians if I didn’t do that at least once.

As always, spoilers

 

Heading to the Underworld (or a Mental Institution…Same Dif)

Q and Poppy make their way out of the Abyss to meet up with El and Margo in the forest of Fillory, only to return to Brakebills and find Alice still slumped over near the fireplace.  Now in bed, Alice insists she’s fine – there have been brief surges of magic since she took it from Julia, but Fogg isn’t quite as convinced all is well – it’s like organ transplantation rejection, her body is not happy about the magical intruder.  He also hopelessly notes that this is really all an experiment anyway, and they will just need to see how things play out. Q wants to stay with Alice, but Julia encourages him to try to get the key while he still can.

Q asks Penny for help in securing the key from the Underworld.  Penny is a little hesitant to get involved, given that he was supposed to return to the Underworld Library branch to serve, and he burned his body to avoid that.  Penny finally agrees, given that the fate of the world is at stake.  Q notes that they need a dragon to serve as the gatekeeper, and Poppy recommends using the Library’s dragon, an Albanian Pygmy called Bookwyrm.  The problem is, Bookwyrm is only large enough to serve as a portal for books to travel to and from the Library, so Q suggests Penny “be” a book to use the dragon as a portal to the Underworld. Penny agrees to this somewhat complicated plan, but notes that even if he does obtain the key, he’ll still be a book and get transported to a satellite library.  Poppy, Q and Penny realize they need another Traveler to get the key from the satellite library (and I would assume Penny the Book) back to Earth.  Poppy is thrilled to learn that Victoria (the Traveler taken hostage by the Beast in Season 1) is still alive, and insists she can find her for Q. In exchange, she wants to tag along on the quest.

Poppy and Q make their way to Victoria’s only to have her slam the door in their faces.  Turns out Poppy slept with Josh while he was still dating Victoria during that hellacious Spring Break trip to Fillory.  Even if magic was back and she could use her traveling abilities, she wouldn’t help them as she doesn’t trust them.  Q gives her the key so that she can see that Penny also needs her help.

While Victoria acknowledges to Penny that she owes him, it’s not that simple to help him out.  She works for an underground group now, led by Harriet  –  the same Harriet from Season 2.  Victoria is sure that Harriet would have no problem dicking over the library, but Penny knows he also has a terrible track record with her.  Harriet would, however, probably help Kady.

Unfortunately, Kady’s still locked in the psych ward after her outburst earlier this season.  In a plan that shows that Q and Poppy know waaaaaay too much about being in a mental institution, they propose to pose as doctors doing an external evaluation of Kady – if someone has been held involuntarily for over 15 days, they need to bring in clinicians from outside of the hospital to determine if she’s truly mentally ill.  Because it’s a state hospital, and they are short on resources, Q is confident that they won’t check his and Poppy’s credentials.  Q will slip her a security badge while they are doing the evaluation, and then Kady can just walk out undetected.

But, of course, because it’s our group of magicians, the plan goes awry – the hospital’s chief medical officer, Dr. Walton, requests to stay during the evaluation, and it’s not like Q and Poppy can really say no.  Q does manage to slip the key to Kady under the table, where Penny tells her the plan and to pretend he’s not there.  Q tries to also give her the badge, but Dr. Walton notices it on the floor and assumes someone has lost their badge before Kady can retrieve it.

Back in her room, Kady and Penny scheme to figure out how to get her out (as well as lament their relationship – seriously, this angst is getting more common than banging with these two).  Penny does admit that this isn’t a completely altruistic jail break – they do need her to talk to Harriet.  She’s annoyed that Penny once again has to sacrifice himself by going to the Underworld and getting the key, noting that normal couples don’t have to deal with this kind of shit on a regular basis (hey, speak for yourself Kady – my husband goes to the Underworld – i.e. our basement – to game. All…the…time).  Penny encourages her to yell at him to attract the attention of a staff member, given it will look like she’s alone and screaming in her room. When someone comes to her room, Penny snags his security badge, and in his surprise at an invisible force stealing his stuff, Kady manages to get off a punch and knock the staffer out.

They move through the halls to leave the hospital, with Penny playing lookout for staff.  When she hides in a closet as a nurse passes by, Penny takes the opportunity to tell her that even though he’s going to the Underworld, he wants her to let go of her anger towards him and be happy.  She points out that she can’t truly be happy without him.

And of course, Penny’s timing to have a heart to heart makes it even more difficult to break Kady out – the hospital goes into lockdown mode once the staff member is discovered, and Poppy has to slip away and start a small fire to get all of the doors to open again.  While she tries to slip out unnoticed, Kady is spotted by security, and is only able to get away after Q and Poppy intervene.

Meeting with Kady after she breaks out, Harriet initially refuses to help them – she’s been planning for months to infiltrate the library and that can’t be interrupted.  Kady offers up herself, Poppy and Quentin to rob the library for her.  Again, this isn’t really clear as to what the hell is going on – I get that these characters all have a role to play in the quest (Q, Poppy, Kady, Victoria, Harriet), but not at all clear on what everyone’s motivation is, and how all of this going to actually work.  Penny, meanwhile, heads off to secure the key in the Underworld.

Q heads back to the Physical Kids cottage and is worrying about how all of this could go wrong; Poppy, on the other hand, is more rational and helps him understand that much of this out of his control.  She gives him a perfect antidepressant – Sexy Time with Poppy (this should be another spin off – Storytime with Uncle Eliot, Sexy Time with Poppy…).

 

Magic is a Hell of a Drug

Julia and Fogg are discussing Alice’s situation with rejecting the magic, and Fogg tries to get Julia to realize that while it fit for Julia, it doesn’t fit for Alice.  She needs to take it back or Alice will die, and he’s pretty sure she’d rather deal with whatever uncomfortable reason she had for trying to get rid of it in the first place (“entitled Millennial bullshit,” he called it) than have Alice’s blood on her hands.  Because they need magic to transfer magic, Fogg suggests they go see Irene McAllister, the obscenely rich Brakebills board member who has a reserve of magic.

Irene is rather annoyed that Julia had magic and lied about it, and has now given it up and wants her help in getting it back. Irene agrees to help her in exchange for a favor in the future.  She hands her a bottle of powder, which is the excretion of a very rare magical creature, which concerns Fogg a bit.

Meanwhile, back at Brakebills, Alice has gone searching through the campus’s magical supply closet, only to meet up with Professor Lipson, looting to sell items on the black market.  It seems she’s highly medicated now and needs to make a living outside of the psych ward, so she’s selling off some of the supplies.  Before she heads out with her loot, however, she offers her Alice steroids to help stabilize her with her transplant.  She starts to judge Alice for her desperation to hold onto the magic, but then realizes she’s not really in a place to do that, given that she recently almost blew a werewolf so he would turn her into a magical creature.

That tips Alice off to the fact that she too could hold onto her magic if she became a creature, and she leaves Brakebills to find something that can help.  Julia and Fogg discover that she’s missing, and Fogg encourages her to use the magical cocaine to conduct a locator spell.  Julia does, and finds that this magic is very different than what she was used to, but doesn’t reflect on it too much since she needs to find Alice.

And find her, she does, in a shitty part of town dominated by vampires.  The vampire Alice is meeting with is morally conflicted and reluctant to turn her, given that none of this seems like a good idea.  He finally gives in, though, but before Alice can turn, Julia magically threatens to break his arm if he doesn’t kick Alice out of his car and stop her from doing this.

The vampire has no problem with this, but Alice does.  She’s confused as to where Julia got magic from, and angry that she’s trying to stop her.  Julia casts a barrier spell to prevent her from leaving the area, and Alice, jacked up on the steroids Professor Lipson gave her, uses her magic to toss Julia into the side of a trailer, knocking her unconscious.

Realizing that this probably wasn’t the best way to handle the situation, Alice gets her back to Brakebills, and transfers all of the magic back to Julia.  The two women realize that they share the same pain of being magicians without magic – Alice now, and Julia when she was initially sent away from Brakebills in Season 1.  Julia also realizes that even though she still sees Reynard, it has nothing to do with having his magic – sometimes horrible things happen, and leave a mark, and it just takes time to deal with them.  She can finally accept the magic as truly hers, rather than a lingering effect of her trauma.

 

Margo and Eliot’s Egg-cellent Adventure

Margo and Eliot meet in the fairy proof hallway to take the eggs to Brakebills, telling Tick that he needs to lie to the Fairy Queen about them being contagious and sick to disguise the fact that they’ve left.  Tick expresses concern that the Floaters feel that Fillory is their land now that Fomar has married Margo, and the Fillorians are none too pleased about it.  There’s a revolt brewing among the people, but Margo needs to get rid of the fairies first and then they can deal with the Floaters.

Margo and Eliot hide the stolen fairy embryos in a crawl space in the Physical Kids cottage, while Fen, Fray and Todd return from New York city.  Fen is super excited about having seen the “Square of Time,” going to Broadway and eating pizza; Fray, on the other hand is annoyed that a man peed next to her on the street, and that the show Cats is merely people in grease paint.  Margo secretly leaves Todd in charge of the fairy eggs, and tells him not to let Fray see them, or she will go tattling to the Fairy Queen.

Todd is kind of the worst egg keeper ever, however, as Fray quickly finds the hidden fairy babies.  Fray insists that humans are terrible to Fen – while her being bargained away to the Fairy Queen was a fair deal, this was kidnapping.  She sees herself as a honorable fairy, and Fen has to sadly remind her that she too is human, and that the fairies will never see her as anything but that – her name literally is short for “Frail Human.” Fen also reminds her that sometimes good people make bad decisions – she needs to trust that her father did this for a good reason, and that she should be loyal to her true family.

Returning to Fillory, Margo and El find that Fomar and the Stone Queen have returned to their island, not wanting to catch the “chicken pox” the High King and Queen had.  While it seems like everything is great (the Fairy Queen didn’t even know they were gone), the Fillorians have taken to killing Floaters and hanging their corpses on spikes near the castle in protest.

El and Margo meet with the Fairy Queen, demanding her bathtub in exchange for her babies.  The Fairy Queen expresses her surprise at this act of extortion, and they express their surprise at the dead Floaters – it appears she didn’t know about that either.  The Fillorians and Floaters engaging in civil war can’t be good for the fairies either.  The Fairy Queen is still confused about the bathtub thing (yeah, me too, sister), but Margo specifies that by giving her tub to the population of Fillory, everyone will be able to see them (and know then that the Fairies have been behind all of the weird decisions El and Margo have ordered lately that have caused unrest).  They give her till the next day to make a decision about the tub; otherwise, they are killing her babies.

Eliot frets that night about if the Fairy Queen will take the deal, and if they are making the right decision for themselves and Fillory.  He worries that they could cause a full-scale war, and suggests they take off, help complete the quest and then return when they have magic on their side and a chance to actually win the battle.  Margo, however, isn’t having Eliot’s anxiety – she points out how much they have both sacrificed for Fillory, particularly her, and she’s not handing over her well-earned kingdom to the fairies. As much as El wants to understand her struggle, he simply can’t, given that his designation as High King was handed to him.

It seems, however, that Eliot had a reason to worry about something going wrong – Fen returns to Fillory to warn Eliot that Fray found the eggs and then disappeared.  She appears rather quickly, though, when she brings the Fairy Queen to them, after having shared all of their secrets.  Fray is feeling rather self-righteous about what she’s done, remaining loyal to her fairy family.  But she soon sees the error of her ways when she’s bound against her will by the Fairy Queen – the queen offers to not harm Fen and El’s child if they don’t harm hers.  Fray is confused, since she was loyal to the fairies, and the Fairy Queen points out that she betrayed her human family for them – how can she ever really trust her not to do the same thing to the fairies in the future?  Fray explains that she just wanted all of this to stop, and the Queen promises it will – as soon as she gets her eggs back.

Eliot tells Margo they have to give in – he’s not going to have harm come to his daughter, even if it isn’t in the best interest of Fillory.  Fray, realizing that she’s made a mistake in aligning with the fairies, yells out that she’s not really his daughter and is silenced by the Fairy Queen before she can say anything further.

And here’s where things get devastating – Fen and Eliot’s baby died during childbirth, and Fray is just a human the fairies have been pretending is their child.  So really, the Fairy Queen has no leverage now, and Margo takes advantage of the moment to get her to hand over her bathtub before her babies die as well.

Later, we see Fen sharpening a knife to deal with her grief when Eliot goes to comfort her, and she shares with him that when their daughter was born, she never heard her cry, and the fairies wouldn’t let her hold her.  She’s devastated by the fact that she didn’t know, inherently, as a mother, that her baby was gone – Fen thought that if deep down, she believed they were a family, that Fray was hers, she could will their happiness into existence.  Eliot hugs her as she weeps, apologizing to her for being a shitty father and an even shittier husband.  She wants some time alone away from Fillory to process everything.

The Fairy Queen has finally acquiesced to Margo’s demands, giving up her bathtub to the FIllorian people. She won’t reveal what her end game was though, but Margo thinks they’ve won – now the Fillorians will see why they were being asked to do so many weird things.

Or have they won? The Fairy Queen, Margo and Eliot are traveling in a carriage together during their negotiations, but they are stopped by an angry mob. Apparently, the Children of Earth were messing things up well before Eliot and Margo arrived, so it won’t matter if the people know that they were under the fairies’ thumb.  Our favorite albino royal disappears, leaving the High King and Queen of Fillory to be separated and dragged away by armed, frenzied Fillorians.

 

Q & A About Q & A and Everything Else

• How great was it when Todd accidentally referred to Eliot as Dad? I could see “F’ing Todd” being a part of the weird little Waugh family.
• We get mention of another old money, magical family – the Hewitts.  They would have sold off everything at Brakebills when it closed and turned it into an amusement park had Irene not purchased it.  Will we see them cause trouble for our gang in future episodes?
• If they need the assistance of a magical creature to transfer magic, why hasn’t Fogg contacted Professor Bigby, the pixie who gave Alice the spell to defeat the Beast in Season 2? Amanda Brown is adorable, and I loved her portrayal of Bigby with Fogg, so I would be very happy with her return.

• Is this magical nose candy fairy dust? We did see those two fairies behind Julia when she found the key that reveals hidden truths in the McAllister home – is that what happens if they don’t get enough moisture? I’m leaning more towards fairy dust given the little black magical squiggles that appeared from her hands when Julia snorted it were the same as when the Fairy Queen disappeared from the carriage, but we don’t know for sure.

• I know they wanted to get Kady out of the psych ward, but might it have been easier to have Victoria convince Harriet to go to the hospital posing as a doctor in order to talk to Kady as well? Maybe not because Harriet likes to keep a low profile.
• Like I said earlier, Brittany Curran destroyed me with her acting this week – her heartbreak over the loss of her daughters – both her biological daughter, and Fray – was so palpable and raw.  And Hale Appleman somehow manages to communicate guilt, sorrow, and empathy all at the same time in one expression.  I do wonder how Eliot is going to process this loss – he was willing to give up what’s best for Fillory for someone he believed was his daughter, so when he finally thinks through what could have been, I think we are going to be in for a bit of Season 1 Eliot, after Mike’s death.  Of course, he might have more to worry about at this point, given the Fillorian revolt, and have matured a bit, but still.

• Will Fen use her contacts with the FU Fighters to help free Eliot and Margo? She’s featured in one of the vignettes in next week’s episode, so perhaps she uses this mission to save the High King and Queen to help her avoid losing herself in grief.
• How were the Floaters so scared off by 6 of their people getting impaled on spikes? Didn’t the Fairy Queen force the alliance to gain the vast army of the Tribe of the Floating Mountain (Which is No Longer Floating)?

 

Next Week

Episode 8, “Six Short Stories About Magic” seems rather interesting – it breaks up the overall normal structure of an episode, while still thematically playing into the concept of the short stories that tell our gang how to achieve their quest.  We also get to return to the Library and the Underworld, and hopefully to the delightful characters we haven’t seen for a bit (i.e. The Librarian and Benedict).  Wednesday is only a few short days away for Episode 8 on Syfy, 9 PM EST!

 

All photos courtesy of Syfy.com