The Magicians 1.11 “Remedial Battle Magic”

My first reaction after watching this episode of The Magicians was “Quentin, you are an IDIOT.” But let’s first discuss what led up to that final, idiotic, yet admittedly pretty sexy, moment.

Finally, the Brakebills crew have begun to really focus on the most important task at hand: surviving The Beast. I love a good Beast-filled episode, and though he only makes small cameos, his presence is felt throughout the entire episode, especially during a well-plotted scene where we see him kill everyone during a probability spell. It is through this spell that they reluctantly come to the conclusion that they need to go to Fillory to track down the Beast because in all other scenarios everyone immediately dies. Though the scenario where they go to Fillory does not clearly show an outcome, at least in that one they may have a shot at survival. It definitely does seem better than just waiting for The Beast to come kill them.

Meanwhile, The Beast is already taking action by invading travelers’ minds, including Penny’s, and pushing them to the brink of insanity where they choose to kill themselves. This way, no travelers will be left to transport anyone into Fillory and The Beast will have it all to himself. Penny, already a loose cannon but extremely stubborn, turns to drugs to block The Beast out and ends up overdosing. His teacher gives him a patch to use to block out The Beast’s voice. For some reason, that’s all the help that the faculty can offer? They know about The Beast, they know that he’s trying to kill their students, and they offer them no help whatsoever. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially as they all set out to teach battle magic to themselves, and are only marginally successful so far. Everyone here is pretty much a novice, so I’m sure any help would be beneficial.

Everyone has too many emotions to fully pull off any of the battle magic that they try at first, so they go to Cady for a hedge witch hack which involves bottling all of their emotions while they practice battle magic and then swallowing their emotions again after a few hours, causing their feelings to overwhelm them all at once. It’s brutal for everyone involved, except for Eliot it seems, which makes me wonder, does he truly not have feelings anymore or is he just THAT good at shutting down any expressions of emotion? And in a telling moment, Alice’s emotions are filled with gushing love for Quentin while Quentin’s emotions have nothing to do with Alice and are completely self-absorbed with his own anxiety. Foreshadowing for the end of the episode, for sure.

When Quentin, Eliot, Margo, and Alice track down Cady, she’s in Julia’s house, though sadly, there is no reunion between Quentin and Julia just yet. We do get a nice scene where Quentin explains to Cady that he still cares about Julia even though she cast that horrible spell on him that almost killed him, and Cady admits that she still cares about Penny. Cady explains to Quentin that Julia is doing really well; which actually seems to be the case because after all their work talking to creepy creatures in an attempt to track down a god, it seems as though a god is tracking down Julia instead, as a goddess comes to Julia in a dream and gives Julia the information needed to find her.

Meanwhile at Brakebills, Alice and Penny have decided that using the emotion cheat to do battle magic is relying on a crutch and they want to be able to do battle without it. They practice together and seem to have some really great chemistry, which is good because I predict they will be spending a lot of time together in the future since she finds Quentin in bed with Eliot and Margo after a threesome at the end of this episode!

Yes, they were all under the influence of drinking their emotions and lots and lots of wine, and even possibly drugs though it isn’t explicitly shown, but Quentin, really? He is not mature enough or comfortable enough with himself to be in any relationship at the moment really, and because of this he’s thrown away the best thing in his life. We’re left with the final image of Alice giving a death stare into space, and it will be interesting to see how this impacts the friendships of all involved in the future, especially as they must all work together when they go to Fillory for survival.

Kudos to the writers and Lev Grossman for the source materials for always keeping the audience on its toes. As soon as we get a little bit comfortable with Quentin and Alice, Quentin can’t help but sabotage the whole thing. The group has been irreparably changed, and I’m very interested to see how the new group dynamics will work themselves out. And I really can’t wait for them to actually GET to Fillory- the only question is if it will be next week or the week after as there are only two episodes left for them to take care of this whole Beast business.