Penny uses the new button to transport to himself… not to
Fillory but to a place called the Neitherlands (yes, really) a place with a
whole lot of fountains that transport you to many many different realms. Which
would be nifty if it weren’t for the angry Beast-serving people who try to
throw fireballs at him. He does his Nightcrawler thing to dodge them and end up
being dropped into the huge library underneath. This apparently contains copies
of every book and a very powerful librarian. She has wisdom, snark, the ability
to see the future and power enough to be not impressed with Penny – she does
banish Penny from her library with a few pages of a book written by one of the
kids from Fillory (she predicted Penny would try to steal the book, they’d
fight, she’d win but he’d manage to get away with some pages of the book. By
photocopying the pages instead she manages to save her book from damage
More of her please.
But Penny’s stuck in the Neitherworld and his only contact
with the outside world is to invade Quinn’s sex dream (poor Penny can’t keep
out of Quinn’s disturbing brain) involving Julia and Alice making out and
cosplaying (y’know, after the treatment of LGBT characters these last three
episodes they really should step back from women making out for a man’s
pleasure).
So Penny has recruited Quinn for help – having to
actually ask for help from Quinn which is so very galling.
Where do they go? Well Alice’s mother knows a traveller,
Joe (from another world and with an unpronounceable name) which means going to
Alice’s parents. Who are enjoying a Roman orgy and are generally sexual enough
in front of their own child to cross the line from “quirky” to “creepy,
predatory and possibly abusive”. It also greatly overturns any conceptions we
had of Alice as a virgin – lack of experience of relationships and fleeing from
her parents’ example shapes her a lot more.
In between the awkwardness and learning a whole lot more
about Alice there is an interesting exchange between her and her mother: she’s
furious at her mother for not caring about what happened to her brother. Her
mother hits back with some quite good points about other people having feelings
and not everyone has to deal with emotional trauma the same way Alice did. It’s
a nice point and a surprising one: just because someone doesn’t grieve as we
grieve doesn’t mean they’re not hurting.
Anyway there is a spell they can use to help Penny – a spell
that will launch a beacon so Penny can find the right fountain. And it involves
using sex magic – sex magic in which both Quentin and Alice must orgasm
simultaneously. Quinn doesn’t think that’ll be a problem…
…Alice does.
And we get another scene that is surprisingly mature.
Yes, of course Quinn is insecure and touchy and upset but Alice makes some
excellent points about not loving people because they’re perfect and liking
flaws as well. And another good point about how, yeah, he’s not perfect in bed
but part of that is she feels embarrassed about asking for what she actually
wants. It’s a good conversation, points there.
They then put this in practice and cast the spell
perfectly to guide Penny home. And Penny has another mental image for his
collection.
B plot time – Elliot is settling back into his role as
comic relief by being constantly drunk and high which irritates Margot. What
also irritates her is that an ex of hers has cast a spell to steal some of her
life force and crate a clone – a Margot Golem. She is not amused and they head
off to tell him how very wrong he is and confiscate said golem as a creepy fetishistic
sex toy. Point to Margot, because uckies uckies uckies, NO to the sex clone and
nothing he says can possibly make what he did sound right. Though she does keep
the Margolem which suggests future shenanigans
But she also gets annoyed with Elliot, in his endless
drunken state, for not supporting her in this… given what he has been through
in the last few episodes, hardly helped by Margot and her damn nasty
djinn wishes, then that is just galling. For a second it looks like Elliot
is going to tell her that he’s hurting and even tell her off for being so
utterly clueless to her supposed friend, but it passes.
I hope in future episodes Elliot can step away from the
comic relief and object furiously to how he’s been treated. I can hope, right?
Last plot line brings us Julia with her new Mentor
Richard and a whole circle of magic users he’s working with – including Kady.
Things are… a little tense between them. But they manage to bury their
differences as they work on the magic together while Richard and the rest of
his coven focuses on their big project – time magic
See, all of them have something in their lives they want
to rewind and re-do – though this is somewhat impossible without a whole lot
more magic. As in a god load of magic. Literally – Richard intends to use a god
to power his magic… there’s absolutely no way that can backfire, I’m sure.
It could be worse. It could be Loki.
