The gang knows a bit more about the Beast, that it’s
basically the bug evil writer paedophile with extra powers, and they know it
wants to control all entry into Fillory and out. Which means it wants the button
The gang gathers to figure out what to do next – which involves
some nifty probability spells showing them the consequences of their actions.
The consequences are… death, death, death, mystery, death, death, death. They
choose mystery. Which involves going to Fillory
No-one is really a fan of this idea but what other choice
do they have? It helps that they know of a super powerful-may-kill-beasties
weapon in Fillory which would be quite useful. Penny is still really reluctant
but the Beast’s desire to control the keys to Fillory also means removing all
Travellers (who can zap in whenever they want). He does this by psychic assault
which is really loud – driving his mentor and Joe to suicide and Penny to the
edge with a drug overdose.
But before they go to Fillory they need to be ready to
defend themselves. Which means Battle magic – something none of them can manage
despite doing it before. They do some research – and interview Kady who has
mastered the art of throwing nasty spells about – and learn that anyone can do
it in an extreme circumstances kind of way, but to do it consistently you need
to achieve a kind of zen-like calm. Something which took her a whooooole lot of
meditating
The short cut is to ram your emotions in a bottle leaving
you spooky and calm (and kin of eerie) but when you uncork said emotions they
come back tenfold and you’re a bit of a quivering wreck who falls apart and
gets drunk (except Elliott… but only because drunken quivering wreck is kind of
the ground state of his being at the moment. As opposed to drunken quipping
wreck which was the ground state of his being the rest of the time. If he was
even remotely characterised I would say this is because his emotions are
already so bleak and extreme that ratcheting them up with the bottle doesn’t
really do anything).
Alice and Penny decide to practice without the Spock
bottles because the emotional wreck afterwards is a bad idea. But Quinn is way
to torn with his own lack of self-worth not to take the easy way out (and, in a
moment of character depth that this show is surprisingly good at, he isn’t
helped by being close to Alice who is so effortlessly awesome all the time) so
he, Margot (who is all sad that her happy toy Elliott isn’t such an obliging
toy any more and is drunk allll the time. Honestly, this whole thing annoys me –
because it could be seen as concern for Elliott, but it isn’t because she never
really considers why he’s hurting or why he should be hurting. She doesn’t talk
to Elliott about how he’s hurt – she talks to him about how he doesn’t like
her, how they don’t have fun. She’s not interested in his wellbeing – she is
interested in getting her plaything back).
Anyway these three keep using the bottles and the
emotional fallout may lead them having a threesome. We see brief flashes of it.
Oh and Alice sees them naked in bed together so she’s now mega-pissed
It also means that after GBF stereotype, dead lover,
drunken caricature and dead disabled Black lesbian our latest attempt of LGBT
inclusion on this show is “super drunk, magically emotional threesome to cause
the straight characters angst WHICH THEY WON’T EVEN SHOW”.
Ok, Magicians y’know
I complain about erasure on TV? I totally take it back! Erase! Erase away! All
straight world ho! Let’s go heteronormative!
Over to Julia – who is still following new mentor Richard’s
mission of finding a god or two so they can do impossible magic. In theory this
was done all the time in the past… nowadays not so much. They think it will
succeed because Julia is apparently godtouched (hence the fact she could make a
prayer spell work), a special power: which means we have another group who is
kind of exploiting her for her magical gifts. The plan is to find various magical
creatures (like vampires) and ask them about gods… and the consensus is that
the gods are dead
Which is also depressing for the group – but Julia is not
losing faith (literally) and either gets a visit from a goddess, or a really
vivid dream. Since this is The Magicians
I’m going to assume it’s the goddess of cat murder or bitter disappointment or
finding-no-coffee-in-the-morning
