The Brakebills Kids<\/strong><\/p>\n The group bears witness to unexpected horrors as they search for a button given to Martin Chatwin by his sister Jane during a trip to Fillory.\u00a0 The button serves as a key to one of the many entrances to Fillory, and Jane’s quest to get the button is outlined in Fillory and Further Book 6<\/em>, which Quentin manages to extract from Penny’s memory (since he did actually take the book in Episode 1, despite his denials).\u00a0 I say extract like it was some sort of spell, when really he just bugged the shit out of Penny until he told him what he remembered about it.<\/p>\n The button, which has never been found, may still be in the home of Christopher Plover, author of the Fillory book series, so Quentin, Alice, Penny and Eliot head to England to search for it in hopes of stopping The Beast from potentially using it to gain access to them through another door from Fillory.<\/p>\n After a tour of the house that was all too reminiscent of my own experiences at every Harry Potter exhibit I have ever been to, (Quentin’s selfies in Plover’s writing room hit a little too close to home to\u00a0 the geeky selfies I took in front of the Hogwarts Express), the gang breaks in later in the evening to search for the button.<\/p>\n A series of dark, dark, and darker events follows, with various separations among the group.\u00a0 Before they are separated, however, they are confronted by their tour guide from earlier in the day.\u00a0 When they try to coerce him into telling them more about Plover’s past, however, the lights flicker, he disappears, and they find him in the hall with his throat slashed and his mouth sewn shut.\u00a0 Sooo… not quite like any Harry Potter experience anymore.<\/p>\n Seems excessive, but okay…<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Based on this, they decide to abandon their quest for the button for the time being, but Alice and Eliot disappear, and Penny and Quentin are guided by a young ghost boy named George through a time slip, which is a continuous loop of events that has happened in the past.\u00a0 George is Plover’s housekeeper’s son, and has a sister named Beatrix, who Plover and his sister Prudence provided for by paying for their education.<\/p>\n These two always look so happy to be working together.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n We also find out that they provided for them in other ways, as we find Eliot and Alice tied to chairs around a tea party in a little girl’s room. They bide their time appeasing the little girl, Beatrix, by having tea, until Prudence, Plover’s sister, shows up and also ties her to a chair, despite Alice’s protests.\u00a0 Prudence demands that Beatrix, Alice and Eliot drink their tea and stay quiet so as not to disturb her brother while he writes, or she will send them “to the quiet place.” \u00a0Eliot, however, has seen the liquid Prudence has slipped into the drinks and does not partake, although he pretends that he is enjoying it.<\/p>\n If Eliot didn’t look so miserable, I would say this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Meanwhile, Quentin and Penny are watching as Jane and Martin Chatwin head towards Fillory through a closet in Plover’s home.\u00a0 Martin, however, keeps getting denied access to Fillory for some reason, and Plover tries to appease him with tea and cookies.\u00a0 While they are talking, he shares with Martin how he’s almost figured out how he too can get to Fillory to join the children, but the magic he’s learning is wild, and he’ll need an extra finger on each hand to do the spell work properly.\u00a0 Well, that’s not ominous at all.\u00a0 Because The Beast in the first episode certainly didn’t kill that German professor with a six fingered spell or anything…<\/p>\n Before this can get too uncomfortable, Jane returns with the button she has procured for Martin-this way he will be able to get to Fillory whenever he wants.\u00a0 She wants to show Plover, but he begs her to keep it a secret.\u00a0 Seeing George spying on them, Martin gives the button to George for safe keeping.<\/p>\n Martin spots George in the shadows-so many crazy secrets in that house<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n While Quentin is watching all of this, Penny has been whisked away by Prudence for being insolent, and chained up in her storm cellar, which was a little bit pointless other than simply\u00a0for exposition purposes, since he can poof away any time he wants.\u00a0 She threatens to sew his mouth shut too, but, as expected, he travels out of his chains to escape. So…yeah.\u00a0 Kind of a useless scene, other than to show us Prudence is a really<\/em> nasty bitch (in case we didn’t get that concept already), and to set up the storm cellar for later in the story.<\/p>\n Quentin and George continue watching as Jane and Martin have tea and cookies with Plover.\u00a0 Prudence, however, has drugged Jane into sleep, so that she doesn’t witness the fact that Plover forces Martin to strip naked while he takes nude pictures of him with an old timey camera.<\/p>\n Yes…let me point that out again.\u00a0 Christopher Plover, the writer of the Fillory book series who Quentin has worshipped all of these years, was sexually abusing Martin Chatwin. Dark…and in a totally different way than before.\u00a0 Like nauseatingly dark.\u00a0 Like where the line “trousers off too, darling,” just makes your skin crawl.<\/p>\n Then, it gets darker.\u00a0 When George points out to Quentin that they do that all the time, and there are lots of naughty pictures hidden in the dictionary in the library, Prudence overhears and grabs him.\u00a0 In his struggle to get away from her as she tries to take him to the storm cellar to punish him, she smacks him hard into the wall, killing him.<\/p>\n Again, this was a new level of dark.\u00a0 You really have to smack someone hard into a wall to kill them, so the sheer brutality of the act to a child, coupled with the fact that Plover was still taking sexual pictures of Martin in the next room was killing me.\u00a0 I actually had to turn the show off for a bit and come back later.<\/p>\n I had to go to my quiet place for a while after this.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n On a slightly lighter\u00a0note\u00a0(maybe?), Eliot has managed to stay awake, although Beatrix and Alice are both drugged into sleep.\u00a0 He frees himself from the ropes and wakes up Alice.\u00a0 They try to ask Beatrix if she knows where the button is, but she complains that her stomach hurts and then begins gasping and coughing.\u00a0 So they watch her die in front of them from the poisoned tea.\u00a0 Eliot moves past it and tries to get Alice to leave, but Alice is shaken, realizing that Beatrix keeps repeating the same dying moments over and over again.<\/p>\n If there wasn’t a dead little girl here, this is a sweet example of that brother-sister vibe developing between Eliot and Alice.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n When the four do finally meet up again outside the house, and Quentin shares with them what has happened, and what he has witnessed, and that they now know who The Beast is, they make a plan to get the button out of George’s body’s pocket, which is in the storm cellar (hence Penny’s pointless kidnapping by Prudence).\u00a0 Quentin spreads the pictures of Martin throughout the house, then taunts Prudence into going into the house to destroy them, buying them time to find George and the button.<\/p>\n After they find it and make their escape, which seems all too easy, Alice insists that they have to go back and help the children who are trapped by their circumstances.\u00a0 After some arguing about how it can’t be done, the shell shocked students make their way back to Brakebills to examine the button and decide what to do next.\u00a0 Alcohol, unsurprisingly helps them to dull their horrifying experience (well, at least for Eliot), while Penny wants to examine the button to see if the magic surrounding it is real.\u00a0 Despite Quentin’s warnings, he gets pulled away immediately to somewhere unknown (most likely Fillory) the moment he touches it.<\/p>\n Really, Penny? You really didn’t see that coming?<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Julia and Richard<\/strong><\/p>\n Julia had an interesting and redemptive parallel arc this week with Richard that was mostly self-contained, save for a brief moment when she flashes back to a time when she and Quentin used to read the Fillory books together as children and drew a map of the land on the underside of her dining room table.\u00a0 She and Richard help free magical equations from a brilliant but completely paralyzed magician Keira using the mental projection spell Julia had initially used with Marina to torture Quentin.\u00a0 Rather than being used to harm someone, this time it was being used to help Keira share her knowledge, since she could no longer move or communicate.<\/p>\n In the end, Julia fulfilled Keira’s wish to help her die, both as her own redemption and as a gift to Keira.\u00a0 Keira helps Julia realize that magic doesn’t have to amount to some great ending-it can be just a simple beautiful small experience, like a party trick.\u00a0 She says that magic is science, which has some truth to it.\u00a0 There’s joy in simply doing experiments, but not having them amount to anything – not every hypothesis is meant to save the world.\u00a0 Keira also gives Julia some of the best advice ever, and I feel like every girl should have this on their wall somewhere: “Smart girls scare the shit out of the world.\u00a0 If they come after you, take it as a compliment.” Sadly, Keira gets killed off at her own request before we really get to know more about her, but hopefully, Julia will meet more magicians like her now that she’s under Richard’s tutelage, rather than Marina’s.<\/p>\n![\"overanalyze1\"](\"http:\/\/docpalindrome.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/overanalyze1.jpg\")
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