The Magicians
Mar. 16th, 2018 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkI watched "The Magicians," and it was fun. It gets better as it goes along.
First arc, beginning until 2x03. Sooo…atheist!NarniaFillory has a high king now but the well is not only drained but also poisoned, the Beast is dead but a homicidal trickster god got loose and now has the moonstone blade, and Alice is probably dead, but maybe some kind of spirit? Kathy is in hiding, Penny's magic is fucked up, and Marina died in really horrifying way. Basically everything went from bad to worse.
I'm not quite sure why I find this show so compelling: the worldbuilding has big holes in it, the plot is so-so, and the characters are almost all assholes. Though most of them seem to at least be developing in a better direction, otherwise I would have stopped watching by now.
Season 2:
Margo is such a bitch – getting Fillory into a war because she is pissed? She has no clue what a war means. She's getting on my nerves. At least she seems to learn a little bit? Every time I get angry at her she tries to fix what she broke.
Alice is also getting on my nerves a lot, but she is not herself so less her fault. Julia-sans-shade also appears to be pretty terrible, but again, less her fault.
Penny a librarian?!
Dragon! With a button now…
Poor John Mulaney. I mean John Gaines.
Julia is the best – she started to recover even before getting her shade back, go her. She brought back Alice's shade instead of her own! And then she actually got to meet Persephone, and spared Reynard, and got her shade back, but Kady is pissed at her, oops.
Eliot is growing into a king, who actually wants to do right by his people, hurray.
Fillory being a result of Ember creating something ridiculous to amuse himself makes so much sense! He is a scary villain. And then Quentin kills him, only, uh-oh, Ember and Umber's parents turn off magic. That is going to be a problem. And now the fairies have invaded Fillory.
Season 3 is my favorite so far. I especially love Eliot and Margo's arc. From how cavalierly they, especially Margo, treated Fillory in the beginning, to actually caring about the land and its people. Most recently when they heard that Fillory was being invaded they immediately recused themselves from the quest because Fillory is their responsibility. With Margo threatening the Stone Queen and Eliot seducing Idri, nice. And Eliot and Margo's relationship is wonderful as always.
I also really like Julia. She didn't want that power but she has it now and she wants to use it to help people. Especially slaves, even if they're fairies. And she gets Fen to help, even though fairies were responsible for her daughter's death.
Penny is a librarian in the underworld now, huh. "Be the Penny" was one of my favorite episodes.
Kady is really angry all the time, which, she has reasons and now she has no direction, but I hope she finds something.
Similar problem but bigger, Alice. I don't like her very much in this season so far, but at least some of it is that she's directionless and therefore not as interesting and taking away time from more interesting storylines, and she doesn't have many interesting interpersonal relationships either. The show is aware of her being in limbo though so I hope it's going somewhere. (Recently not telling Quentin that she's working with the library now was stupid.) We saw her as Cassandra, that was odd…
Quentin is being Quentin.
Fen is great, I liked Harriet and I'm sorry she's dead, I hated Poppy and hope she doesn't come back, I'm neutral on Josh, I'm sorry about Benedict and sort of delighted that Tick betrayed Eliot and Margo because he's a Fillorian freedom fighter.
As for the fairies, they demanded Eliot and Fen's baby and tried to give them a fake substitute (I hope we see Fray again btw), they invaded the castle and ordered everyone around, they got Margo to bargain her eye away and forced her to marry that psychopath teenager, they're starting to terraform and breed, and then we find out that on Earth some fairies are being kept as slaves and killed as resources, and also they have the seventh key and need it for the existence of the fairie realm. (The fairie queen did not really put on a functioning collar, right? That would have been stupid. It was not properly closed, right? But then why didn't she use her magic to defend the slaves?) The fairie queen respects Julia now, one human, and it looks like it's going sloooowly eventually in the direction of mostly-peaceful coexistence as the only solution? After all the fairies have done to fuck with them… We'll see what the consequences of the queen breaking a deal will be.
First arc, beginning until 2x03. Sooo…
I'm not quite sure why I find this show so compelling: the worldbuilding has big holes in it, the plot is so-so, and the characters are almost all assholes. Though most of them seem to at least be developing in a better direction, otherwise I would have stopped watching by now.
Season 2:
Margo is such a bitch – getting Fillory into a war because she is pissed? She has no clue what a war means. She's getting on my nerves. At least she seems to learn a little bit? Every time I get angry at her she tries to fix what she broke.
Alice is also getting on my nerves a lot, but she is not herself so less her fault. Julia-sans-shade also appears to be pretty terrible, but again, less her fault.
Penny a librarian?!
Dragon! With a button now…
Poor John Mulaney. I mean John Gaines.
Julia is the best – she started to recover even before getting her shade back, go her. She brought back Alice's shade instead of her own! And then she actually got to meet Persephone, and spared Reynard, and got her shade back, but Kady is pissed at her, oops.
Eliot is growing into a king, who actually wants to do right by his people, hurray.
Fillory being a result of Ember creating something ridiculous to amuse himself makes so much sense! He is a scary villain. And then Quentin kills him, only, uh-oh, Ember and Umber's parents turn off magic. That is going to be a problem. And now the fairies have invaded Fillory.
Season 3 is my favorite so far. I especially love Eliot and Margo's arc. From how cavalierly they, especially Margo, treated Fillory in the beginning, to actually caring about the land and its people. Most recently when they heard that Fillory was being invaded they immediately recused themselves from the quest because Fillory is their responsibility. With Margo threatening the Stone Queen and Eliot seducing Idri, nice. And Eliot and Margo's relationship is wonderful as always.
I also really like Julia. She didn't want that power but she has it now and she wants to use it to help people. Especially slaves, even if they're fairies. And she gets Fen to help, even though fairies were responsible for her daughter's death.
Penny is a librarian in the underworld now, huh. "Be the Penny" was one of my favorite episodes.
Kady is really angry all the time, which, she has reasons and now she has no direction, but I hope she finds something.
Similar problem but bigger, Alice. I don't like her very much in this season so far, but at least some of it is that she's directionless and therefore not as interesting and taking away time from more interesting storylines, and she doesn't have many interesting interpersonal relationships either. The show is aware of her being in limbo though so I hope it's going somewhere. (Recently not telling Quentin that she's working with the library now was stupid.) We saw her as Cassandra, that was odd…
Quentin is being Quentin.
Fen is great, I liked Harriet and I'm sorry she's dead, I hated Poppy and hope she doesn't come back, I'm neutral on Josh, I'm sorry about Benedict and sort of delighted that Tick betrayed Eliot and Margo because he's a Fillorian freedom fighter.
As for the fairies, they demanded Eliot and Fen's baby and tried to give them a fake substitute (I hope we see Fray again btw), they invaded the castle and ordered everyone around, they got Margo to bargain her eye away and forced her to marry that psychopath teenager, they're starting to terraform and breed, and then we find out that on Earth some fairies are being kept as slaves and killed as resources, and also they have the seventh key and need it for the existence of the fairie realm. (The fairie queen did not really put on a functioning collar, right? That would have been stupid. It was not properly closed, right? But then why didn't she use her magic to defend the slaves?) The fairie queen respects Julia now, one human, and it looks like it's going sloooowly eventually in the direction of mostly-peaceful coexistence as the only solution? After all the fairies have done to fuck with them… We'll see what the consequences of the queen breaking a deal will be.
