The Librarians have
an issue with sabre tooth tigers which they have to deal with with the help of…
Jeff
He looks like Jenkins
in the mirror but we see a much younger man. Yes, it’s a body swap episode. And
fake Jenkins - or Jeff - is much less skilled and knowledgeable that Jenkins.
And he is definitely not qualified enough or awesome enough to be Jenkins.
Oh - Easter Egg, are
those the Game of Thrones house banners?
 |
| Baratheon and Greyjoy it seems |
Jenkins is clearly in Jeff’s body - which means dealing with frustrations like Jeff’s mother and her vast horde of cats and his three friends, all of which are somewhat bemused by a rather obviously bemused Jenkins. He tries to get back in the Library but Jeff manages to do enough to distract the team so they don’t let him in
This leaves Jenkins
to convince Jeff’s friends to help him. There’s some things going for this
since it seems that Jeff was completely obsessed with the Librarians and had
full dossiers on all the Librarians including Jenkins - so much so they’d
turned them into RPG characters
It’s still a stretch
that everyone decides to believe Jenkins - and the whole idea that the fact
they play DND makes them more likely to believe this is both dubious and a
weird misreading of their audience. Seriously, you’re a show about magical
artefacts with an arthurian knight, us DnD players (well, I’m more a WoD but I
have a players guide and monster manual) are not going to be vanishingly rare
among your audience
Still while we do
have a lot of tropes with them, we also have them being generally genuinely
likeable, intelligent and making a good case for being outsiders WITHOUT
falling heavily on the “woe to the geeky” (because “woe geeky” hasn’t been that
on point for some time) with some nice looks at Jenkin’s own past
He learns that Jeff
had a very bad magical book so he needs to get in the Library back door.
Surprisingly the back door doesn’t require magical, say, aura reading or
quizzes, but instead a series of puzzles which Jenkins, the man who actually
has been in the Library longer than anyone else in history, cannot actually
solve. Instead they’re solved by his new friends. And I totally get that the
story is to show these folks are kind of awesome, but it seems weird that the
emergency entrance to the Library is not actually accessible by Library people
but is by random DnD players. This security system needs addressing.
Inside the library
the gang has quickly realised that Jeff is the worst as he utterly fails to
pass himself off as Jenkins. But he’s also unleashed a demon, Asmodeus, who Jenkins
talks up as the worst thing ever. He’s a guy in a rubber mask with a sword. So
I’m not feeling the menacingness
This requires Jenkins
to unleash his awesomeness, and Jeff to be a distraction here and there. Of
course we see Jenkins wield a light sabre which makes everything good in the
world.
In the aftermath with
Jenkins duly described as awesome we have some not-so-subtle lessons about
Jenkins accepting his new reality, particularly the good side of being human.
Being mortal is not all bad and humans can be quite good people. Someone keep
him away from any 24 hour news network
While giving Jeff a
much better lesson in appreciating what he has - health, food, a loving if
somewhat cat obsessed mother, and three extremely good friends who all seem to
be way more awesome than him
So I am kind of sort
of floating the idea now of a kind of extended Librarian circle? Perhaps as a
rather awesome counter to Derrington Dare’s insistence that there can only be
one Librarian and the very isolated life he led. Because an equal counter to
Librarians acting selfishly and turning on each other is to have a network
capable of calling out, demanding accountability and generally keep an eye on
and supporting each other. Apart from anything else, there was doom and gloom
because each brother was selfish and turned on each other - but wouldn’t this
equally apply if there were just one Librarian who exploited the resources and
powers of the Library for their own gains?
And with Cassandra
last episode we saw some nifty characters she befriended and who are now in the
know. Now Jenkins has created his own circle. We have Ezekiel’s family. As
magic becomes more and more prevalent there are going to be more people aware
of magic, artefacts et al - to create a wider circle of Librarian aware people:
deputies, none of them at Librarian level but ready to be called upon when
needed.
Especially if random
guys are capable of doing sufficient research to not only get the full names of
every Librarian, but also Jenkins (who hardly ever leaves the Library) AND be
able to identify him as Galahad. The Library utterly fails at keeping this top
secret stuff secret
