Pieces are being moved into place for what can only be several different confrontations in the next few episodes of The Magicians. While there weren’t any major showdowns this week, the bomb is in place and the fuse is lit. The only question is which battle will come first. Margo may have bitten off more than Fillory can chew and Quentin may have accidentally taken on a backseat driver. Kady and Julia actually get some information on banishing Reynard but in true Magicians fashion, it is not what they were hoping for. “The Cock Barrens”, written by Noga Landau and directed by Kate Woods, may have been a set-up episode but it was far from uneventful. Here is what went down.
CASTLE-NAPPED | Eliot (Hale Appleman) and Margo (Summer Bishil), the unofficial parents of this motley crew of magic children, once again try to cross another item of the never-ending list of problems Fillory is dealing with. They welcome Prince Ess of Loria (guest star Arlen Escarpeta) and his posse of fur-clad dudebros. He is less than pleased with the new rulers and Fillory as a whole after The Great Befouling of the Wellspring started affecting Loria’s magic as well. His proposed solution is a treaty in which he gets everything he could want – access to the Wellspring and Virgin (oh hun…) Queen Margo as a wife – and Fillory gets… not really anything as far as I can tell. His first mistake was his arrogant strut and tone. His second, and arguably more heinous mistake, was to call Margo a virgin queen. She tells them to get lost and, not being familiar with the concept of “no”, Ess has his personal wizard, wand and all, seemingly pick up and move their entire castle to Loria. Penny (Arjun Gupta), who was outside consulting about magic moss with the purest spirit in all the land, the mapmaker (guest star Harvey Guillen), sees the entire castle just disappear, leaving a giant crater in its place.
Ess tells them that as soon as they agree to his deal, he will put their castle back and he and his bros leave to play catch or towel-whip each other or whatever it is boys do to bond. Eliot reminds Margo that while he isn’t telling her she has to agree to this, he had to up and marry a complete stranger and a woman no less who he likes but in a, “hey that’s neat but I’m still not attracted to girls” kind of way. Margo agrees to talk to Ess but only to negotiate new terms but when she gets there he isn’t budging. He has the gall to question her sexual prowess and it takes her all of a few sentences and one strategically placed hand to have him saying, “fair point” and then they smash faces. While Margo is ‘dealing with’ Prince Ess, Fen (Brittany Curran) confesses to Eliot about her past with the Fu Fighters (that joke is never getting old) and he does not take it well. She tries to tell him that she isn’t with them anymore, she is with Eliot and believes in him, but he is not ready to trust her again. Margo has that nightmare we all say we’ve had where you walk into an exam unprepared and naked but unlike the rest of the world, she is paid a visit in-dream from Reality Penny who was just trying to find out where they went and instead saw a lot more than he anticipated. She tells them the castle is in Loria in a canyon of ‘a variety pack of stone dongs’ and he takes this to the good and pure mapmaker for directions. Margo wakes up from her dream and she and Ess have what could almost be called a moment. She goes to Eliot and tells him that she may actually be considering the treaty but now it’s his turn to talk her out of it. He cryptically references spousal betrayal but clams up when she asks about it.
Penny poofs back to the wise and just mapmaker and tells him he went to the valley of the dongs and found nothing. He realizes that they are in a magical world full of trickery and poofs himself into the center of the crater… where the castle has actually been this whole time. Margo and Eliot, after being caught up by Penny, call the Lorian Dude Squad to the throne room. Margo steps forward and tells Ess she agrees to the marriage if and only if she can take a tour of the kingdom right now. Ess tries to save the charade but Margo just smirks and breaks the illusion herself, reappearing the castle JUST has the mapmaker, beacon of all that is good, has finished updating all of his maps. Because he is the best, he still took the time to make Penny his own map to the magic moss he needs. Back in the throne room that Margo is about two seconds from turning into her own personal Thunderdome, Ess is sweating in his furs. Eliot is perfectly content to sit back and “yas gurl” while Margo lights the Lorians on fire with her words. Everyone on Team Fillory is feeling victorious and righteous right up until Margo formally declares war on Loria and they’re all like, “Wait, hold on. Rewind that last part.”
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MIRROR, MIRROR, IN THE YARD | Quentin (Jason Ralph) is determined to get Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) back from the other side after she came to him in a Zombie-vision. He tries first to summon her niffin using some kind of weird interpretive dance he would do to cheer Alice up back in the good old days when things were only slightly tragic. It doesn’t work so he takes the button Margo and Eliot give him to go back to Earth and attend the memorial at her parents’ house. At the memorial, which is the most reserved the house has even looked even WITH a sacrificial goat, Quentin follows the sound of crying to find Zombie Alice outside a locked door. She disappears but not before etching the password onto a picture frame for him to use. It works but when he opens the door and goes into her dad’s study, we see the numbers were never really there. Inside, he hears knocking coming from inside a cabinet and every horror movie be damned, he’s gonna open it. He does and Invisible Zombie Alice knocks over a book to expedite the quest but before he can flip through it, Alice’s father, Daniel (guest star Tom Amandes), finds him. Figuring he has nothing else to lose, he tells Daniel about Zombie Alice and it just so happens Daniel has a plan.
Together they build a pyramid-like contraption in the back yard that, with the help of a mirror, honest words from a blood relative, and some Egyptian Arabic, should help Alice’s spirit be at peace. They have to hang said mirror at the top which involves standing on a ladder and that is Daniel’s line in the sand. He admits to Quentin (with a little push from a picture of a cat) that he is afraid of heights but newly determined to be better for Alice, he hikes up his khakis and climbs up the ladder. Unfortunately, in all his gusto, he throws himself off balance and manages to break both his legs in the fall. Alice’s mom, Stephanie (guest star Judith Hoag), decides it’s up to her now. Teensy question. If they could just hang the mirror lower like they do for her and avoid the whole ladder fiasco all together… WHY DIDN’T THEY? Regardless, Stephanie can’t seem to grasp the ‘honest’ part of the instructions and instead makes her speech to the mirror all about herself. Quentin yells at her to for once put herself in Alice’s shoes. Stephanie breaks down and while not the loving picture one would hope for, her words are at least honest. She runs off and Quentin turns to see that Zombie Alice is no more – it’s Niffin Alice now. The cacodemon didn’t actually kill her. Instead, it trapped her inside Quentin’s back tattoo where she has been waiting but now she is ready to have some fun.
HIJINKS IN SUBURBIA | Julia (Stella Maeve) and Kady (Jade Tailor) focus on finding the mysterious woman who was actually able to banish Reynard all those years ago. Kady reached out to some contacts about the baby problem but is still waiting to hear back. Julia thinks she’s found her after connecting a ripple of random events starting in Hoboken New Jersey. They take a field trip to the warehouse they narrowed it down to and find all kinds of spells etched to the floor. They try to use the remnants of it to make a locator spell to find the actual caster but it doesn’t appear to work. Kady gets a call from her contact and sends Julia home to sit tight while she follows this lead. Julia is asleep on her couch when the locator spell kicks in and instead of waiting for Kady, she heads out to the suburbs check it out herself. She does give Kady a heads up and texts her the location to which Kady responds with “text if things go sideways” and a poop emoji. Because it is this show, specifying it was a poop emoji is actually important for later. The woman in question, Dana, sees Julia unsubtly spying from her car and instead of trying to play it cool, Julia throws caution to the wind and tells Dana exactly what happened and what they are trying to do. She invites Julia inside and tells her about her own encounter with Reynard where she too was raped and impregnated but that even though she tried everything to get rid of it, nothing worked so she actually had the baby.
She brings Julia down to the basement but before she goes inside, Julia leaves a magical signal on the wall for Kady to hopefully find if this goes badly. And does it ever. Julia gets not three steps into the basement before Dana whacks her in the head, knocking her out. She comes to, bound on the floor and looks up to see Dana and what looks like a giant naked man-baby with a hood on its head, chained in a plastic pool full of kitty litter. Dana breaks it to Julia that the only way she can banish Reynard is by harnessing the nuclear-reactor-level power source of the baby that is only accessible when she is giving birth. Her own son is apparently alive and doing very well for himself with no idea who or what his parents are. She is briefly left alone with what she learns is a Haxenpaxen (I’ve decided to call him Haxy) that can hide them from any kind of magic, even Reynard’s. After her calls to Julia go straight to voicemail, Kady breaks into the house and following Julia’s Poop Emoji Beacon, blasts through the wall like a battering ram. Dana comes at her and when Kady realizes her magic doesn’t work down here, decides her fist will do just nicely and drops Dana with a single blow. She unties Julia and they grab Haxy and skedaddle. I think this is the first time I have seen Julia genuinely smile all season and it made my heart soar. Dana comes to hours later and missing Haxy so she bolts upstairs to strengthen her wards but it is too late. Reynard (Mackenzie Astin) is already here and tells her she’s got some apologizing to do.
OTHER THOUGHTS:
• Line of the Night goes to Margo for the second week in a row. This time for, “And now we’re gonna put our Jimmy Choos so far up your ass you’re gonna taste next season.”
• Episode MVP goes to Kady for her fist of fury and stellar emoji usage.
• Regardless of Eliot’s reaction to it, I am still curious about what a unicorn milk latte would taste like.
• The mapmaker is my watchful prince and beacon of all that is good and pure in the world.
So what did you think? Are Margo and Eliot really about to lead Fillory to war? Now that Quentin literally has Niffin Alice on his back, how much chaos is she going to cause? Will Julia and Kady and their new friend Haxy be able to outrun Reynard? Let us know your theories in the comments below!
The Magicians Wednesdays at 9pm on Syfy.