The Magicians Review: Episode 1×02 “The Source of Magic”

Just as he thought he’d found his place in the world, Quentin stares down the barrel of having it all ripped away – and finally understand why Julia was so destroyed by being excluded. The Dark Side has lured her with magic and cookies, and Julia is burrowing deeper and deeper into the grey areas of magic

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Brakebills Wonder class finds itself in a perilous position this week, nervously trying to avoid detection by the Law In These Parts, Professor Pearl Sunderland. She is played by Anne Dudek, who you may know from Six Feet Under. She is very chic, with her little black dress and shiny hair, but she means business when it comes to the safety of her school. She finds the book, she questions the kids, she gets the truth and gets it done. Our heroes are trembling in their stylish yet affordable boots, and it seems they are right to do so as Quentin finds himself busted, and facing memory alteration by a ‘Specialist’. Meanwhile, Julia is spending some time at the grimy headquarters of her mysterious Bathroom Assailant Buddy, trying not to punch an obnoxious girl named Marina. Marina turns out to be undercover and is, in fact, an awesome witch (why not Magician, as the others are called?). Drama!

To cut to the chase, Quentin prepares himself for doom, Julia deals with a corpse in a meat locker, Kady and Penny enjoy some more angst (and petty theft), and the lovely Ros from Game of Thrones Eliza (played by the delightful Esme Bianco) sasses and sashays better than the rest of them combined.

Pearl of wisdom…

Oh, the humanity…

We open this week with interviews being performed by Sunderland, trying to get to the bottom of the Beast’s attack, and how he gained access to the campus. The sequence is quite well done, the washed out Beast scenes playing off against the warm sunlight flooding the room during the aftermath. Kady is distressed to still be in the room where the attack took place, and she snaps at Sunderland before storming off. Dudek is a solid choice for this role, she has the kind of presence that is convincingly suffused with a kind of hardness that contrasts wonderfully with her perfect pout and pantyhose combination. It’s visible in her other work too, as she often plays women who pretend to be weaker than they are. I hope to see more of her in future. There seems to be a theme building here of female characters who seem like damsels but are more like dragons and it is enormously satisfying to see on mainstream television.

Another very pleasant element of The Magicians is the complete and utter disregard for their blatant ‘borrowing’ from other source material. Eliot literally says ‘Avada Kedavra!’ with a self-satisfied smirk, to shoo a bunch of other students away. The people Julia is killing time with call themselves ‘hedge witches’, which any role player will recognise as fantasy vernacular for a witch or wizard of ‘low ability’, or who is self-taught and with little education in the craft. (Unless you are a Pratchett fan, in which case a hedge wizard is literally a wizard who specializes in hedges – the plants).

‘Is it dead?’

‘Yeah, but it was already dead, so I don’t know’.

As crass as this open referencing might seem, it’s actually one of the best things about this show. Satire is a wonderful tool, and when done well can legitimise a show in ways that taking everything seriously can’t possibly achieve. It’s why audiences adore cheeky humour thrown into intense dramas, like the golden moments of comedy in stories like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. It’s being done well here, the tongue-in-cheek writing style is earning the show a credibility that many productions like this would lack.

It does seem strange that Alice was not invited to sit the Brakebills entrance exam and obviously, how she got into the building in the first place is going to come up again (as well as the question of why there was even a desk and an exam paper for her – but ‘a wizard did it’ has worked for JK Rowling for years, so it probably applies here too). Her family history needs to be delved into more deeply. For example, is there a connection between her and the Chatwin’s of Fillory? She seems to harbour a dislike for the books and says at one point ‘Honestly, Quentin, growing up the last thing I wanted to do was read fantasy.’ It might be wishful thinking, but it feels like there is something there.

Character Development Waits for No Man (or Woman)

Let’s Talk About the Meatlocker

Julia and Twitchy Marina are locked in a freezer together for most of the episode. The mundane annoyance with which Shady Pete watches over them is a great little addition. Crossing his arms, tapping his foot, as if to say ‘Guys, it’s just a corpse and a spell, come ooooooon….’. Showing us how boring this can be actually fleshed out the world a little bit, letting us see that to some people, this is just another day and they’d really rather be at the beach.

It’s a fairly stagnant scene for much of the time, but it speaks volumes about Julia. She has grit, is not intimidated easily, and will quite happily hack into a corpse if she thinks it will advance her goals. It’s very lucky she speaks French (a wizard did it), and she does figure out that the sand/corpse goo mixture and a pair of scissors are all a girl needs to escape the meat locker.

The moment we realise Marina is undercover and is not a jittery novice at all is nicely done. Here was have another female character taking on magic like a boss, and the actress did a great job of switching from one persona to another. She is played by Kacey Rohl, of a recent episode of the X-Files Revival, and Hannibal. She is deceptively young and slight of build, but appears to be running an underground ring of rogue wizards – and she is totally running Kady. Oh, Kady, you naughty girl. She is stealing things for Marina, and one has to wonder just what Marina has on her to keep her compliant… or is the money just really, really good?

I am encouraged by The Magicians. It’s a rollicking good time that a wide audience will enjoy, and while it’s no high drama or revolutionary thinkpiece, it sneaks in a higher quality when you’re not looking. It might just expose an audience of young fluff fans to some strong female characters, witty dialogue, dreamy lighting techniques (once you notice the lighting of this show it’s hard to unsee), and a few notions of consequences.

Quentin’s peril is not genuine. We know very well that he’s not going to have his memory wiped and be expelled because he’s the main character of the show and it’s only the second episode. But the danger to him is not the point – it’s how he reacts to it, and, unfortunately, he comes up annoying. Jason Ralph is doing his level best, but the character of Quentin is just a bit irritating. Especially during interaction with Alice, as those two bring out the most grating aspects of each other. Alice is rigid and snappish and cranky, and Quentin is anxious and hunched over and letting his hair flop in his face. If they don’t receive some kind of Hero’s Journey or Character Reveal soon, leading to some growth, both are going to get very tiresome.

The most arresting moment of the episode was the reveal of the Dean still being alive. It really looked like he was desiccated by the Beast last episode, so while his return feels right it did take me by surprise. He is eyeless, handless – both of which are totally fixable, it seems – and somewhat miffed by being so incapacitated (and who wouldn’t be, I mean, he’s really restricted to books on tape at this point). His survival means one of two things: what happened to him at the hand of the Beast was not what it looked like; or, the magic being wielded by all these very good-looking people is far more powerful than it previously appeared.

The writer really needs to get a mention today. This episode was done by Sera Gamble, also the executive producer, and she did it well. Some of the lines of dialogue are positively Whedon-esque, and it brings a level of engagement that has become harder and harder to find in shows that don’t demand you be part of an intense fanbase. For a casual viewer, lines like everything that Eliza says, and the doctor holding down a screaming Quentin and simply saying ‘Hold still please’ might not seem like much on their own, but stitched into the episode overall and the ability to write short, tense moments of dialogue is everything. Marina and Julia’s exchange is brief but important, and not only because it shows how adept Marina is at adjusting her speech and mannerisms based on who she is talking to. The gamble seems in tune with the characters, and that is going to matter.

The character of Julia is actually receiving more development than Quentin, who has frustratingly not moved an inch since the pilot started. He is still scared, anxious, talks too fast (so fast that the actor seems to think it qualifies as a character trait, but it sadly does not), and spend all his time obsessing over how boring the human world is and how much he doesn’t want to go back there. Eliot schools him a little bit this episode, telling him that unnerving story about hitting his tormentor with a bus and discovering his telekinesis. Eliot is a thoroughly entertaining character, but the ‘gay man hiding behind flamboyance’ trope is getting a little old after the plethora of shows that have used it.

‘Do you believe in destiny?’

‘Yes.’

‘I used to believe in that crap too.’

The audience should be feeling hooked in by now, with the next two episodes being pivotal with regard to viewer retention, so if you’re looking forward to next episode you can already be sure of one thing: The Magicians has done what it set out to do. Even though some of the acting is a little High School Play, and some of the characters are trying so hard to pretend to be grown-ups that it’s a bit sad cough kady and penny cough, the characters feel an awful lot like All Of Us as Teenagers (or at least what we thought we’d be if only we were given the right hairdresser), and the show is simply fun to watch. That’s actually much harder to achieve than you might think.

Where do we go from here?

Do you believe in destiny?

Eliza is my favourite. It feels like she’s just popped by from Wonderland to give everyone a few pointers. She throws around inappropriate humour and little pearls of wisdom like she’s just having fun with everything. There’s no sense of urgency or fear from her – not until she visits the Dean. Esme Bianco brings this flippant joy to many of her roles and it is especially effective here. Eliza breezes in to erase Quentin’s memory and despite the suffering on his face, she lets him believes she’s really going to do it – right up to the last second when she bursts into laughter. The other characters are constantly bewildered by her and it’s always fun to see lead characters being tripped up.

The mood switches that happen in this show are done in ways that make it easy to almost miss them. It’s jarring in the opening sequence, as we jump back and forth between the brightly lit room and the same room with the Beast swishing around in it. Even though it must be only moments apart in the timeline, the atmosphere of the scenes is completely divergent.

All in all, ‘The Source of Magic’ was satisfying. It pushed a few things forward, reminded us of the conflicts already brewing, moved some chess pieces around. It did what a second episode needs to do. The characters inspire an odd kind of affection from viewers, but that might be exactly what’s needed to keep us all coming back every week.

‘Years reading internet crap, accidentally poisoning myself twice and now I’m stuck in a freezer with some bitch.’

CONCLUSION/FINAL VERDICT:

Close, but no cigar… yet.

One final thought, on the title of the episode. ‘Magic doesn’t come from talent. It comes from pain.’ It’s a self-indulgent belief that comes from Eliot. It’s a poetic thought, but if it were true, there would be about seven billion magicians in this show. Although it is arrogant, it doesn’t detract from his character. Pain can galvanise a person, create steel where before there was cartilage. His theory is in a way true. Pain can push a human to their limits, push them to new heights, push them to seize what they need to be powerful. And what is that, if not magic?

QUESTION COMMENTS AND CONCERNS

• Eliza dresses like a flight attendant.
• The Dean’s hands appear to be in a giant manicure dryer.
• Can’t they use magic to tattoo those stars onto Julia?
• Why does Quentin have to physically steal the amulet from Penny? Can’t he materialize it like he did with the pocket watch?
• Why does everyone think Quentin is crazy for thinking Fillory is real? Have they seen where they live?
• Penny saying the Beast was his only trustworthy voice and then betrayed him…. Creepy…