The Magicians
Season 1, Episode 12
Episode Title: Thirty-Nine Grave
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Episode twelve, Thirty-Nine Grave, starts with a recap of the first episode and the last one. We see Kady and Julia walking through some tunnels under a bridge where they find an elevator with a painting of the shadow of the Virgin Mary. After taking the elevator they come out to a room where Spanish music is blasting and a Hispanic man in a suit is playing a video game. He greets them by name and tells them that he has been waiting for them to arrive. Kady gives him the gifts that the Free Trade Beowulf has gathered for him, percipia and honeycomb; the third one was supposed to be platinum, but they were unable of obtained it, but instead they gave him their fate. As a way to win Kady over, he healed suffering she had from her mother’s death. At the end, he gives them a scroll with the summoning for Our Lady Underground (OLU). Before leaving the man warns Julia that once the summoning starts it cannot be stopped.
In Brakebills, Quentin, Alice, Penny, Eliot, and Margo are sitting in the living room while Penny asks about their plan against the Beast, as they know he’s coming for them, and it’s better to strike first. The other four seem to be in no mood to talk. Flashbacks of last night’s events and later of Quentin going after Alice, after she found them all in bed. It shows her screaming at him and slapping him when he tries to stop her from leaving. Penny asks them what did they did last night that was so bad to be in such a bad mood. Margo tells him that they are okay, but Quentin denies it, and Alice tells him to shut up. Alice leaves and after asking what’s wrong with them and not getting an answer, Penny goes after Alice.
In Julia’s apartment, the FTB members are having a party to celebrate they have a way to summon the OLU. Julia feels off as she thinks that it was too easy, but Kady tells her that she feels better that ever felt after the messenger touched her. The other members cheer her up, and toast to the OLU. After a pep talk from Richard, they end up having sex, and him telling her that always be the same and never let go of her inquisitive mind.
In her room, Alice is drinking while Penny walks in. He asks for a drink, which she gives and tells her about the types of beverages he use to drink to try to shut off the voices I his head. She asks him if it work, he replies that not indefinitely, but there are other things that can help. Down stairs, Quentin is mad with Eliot and Margo over sleeping with each other, but Margo tells him that he cannot get mad at her for having sex with him. Still mad, Quentin goes to talk with Alice, only that once he gets to her room, he hears moans coming from inside of the room, and the voice of Penny. Quentin is speechless and leaves.
The next morning, the FTB members start the summoning in Julia’s apartment. All of them dress in white inside a magic circle next to a shrine with different images of the Virgin Mary, all white. They take each others hand and start to chat.
In the physical cottage, Quentin waits for Alice to come down from her room the next morning. When she does, they start to fight over her sleeping with Penny, and doing it to just to hurt him. Before they continue fighting, Eliot tells them that they need to leave or the Beast will kill them.
The five of them gather in the living room, where Penny tells the ones that will use the emotion spell to use it now before leaving. Eliot, Margo, and Quentin do it with Alice doing the spell rapidly after them. Once without emotion, she tells the group that her feelings for Quentin in that moment would have got them all killed. An emotionless Quentin, tells Penny that he and Alice look good together. Penny rolls his eyes and makes all of them take hands, as he touches the button. They all come out of the Earth fountain in the Netherlands and start to walk over to the Filory one. The wind blows away the map they have, and it falls over the Earth fountain. As Quentin is retrieving it, Eve and the hunter appear and start to attack them. Moving back to get some away from Eve, Quentin accidentally falls into the fountain and appears back into Brakebills.
The others find their way to the library in the Netherlands, where the librarian greets them all by name, except for Margo who she calls Janet. Margo tells that is not her name, and her name is Margo, to what the librarian replies that this time that her name. The librarian lets them stay while they think of what will be their next move, but release their bottle emotions as liquids are prohibited inside the library. Penny asks the librarian for books about mastering his traveler’s ability, but they are in a different branch and will take a few weeks to get there. Margo finds Eliot reading the book of Mike’s life and learns that Mike had a good life before meeting Eliot. He gets mad and set the book on fire, causing the librarian to come over with an extinguisher to put the fire out. She gets mad and Margo tells her that they will pay the fee, but the librarian replies that it’s a precious book as it’s the life of somebody, and bands them all from the library and cast them out.
Quentin goes to tell Dean Fogg about what happened and to get some answers, and he manages to slip some truth potion in the Dean’s tea. Dean Fogg tells him that Ember gave Jane Chatwin a pocket watch that could change time and space. After she fails to kill the Beast, he created a time loop to try to kill the beast. He tells that the group has died thirty-nine time, and because Jane (Eliza) is dead this will be the last try. He asks the Dean what was different this time, and he tells them that it was Julia not going to Brakebills.
Quentin goes to Julia’s apartment to see her and tells her about the Beast and what happened to the others, and why she didn’t go to Brakebills. He notices that she is different and she tells him about the FTB members summoning the OLU. A flashback shows that the summing work and the OLU granted their petitions. She tells Quentin that Our Lady Underground gave her a quest to do. Quentin asks her to go with him to Filory and save his friends. They come up with the idea of traveling to the past, to a time where a door was open to the Chatwins and go through there to Filory. Thanks to an Alumni key that Richard gave her, they decide to go back to Filory as there are many time artifacts in the school.
The group in the Netherlands tries to go back to the Earth fountain, but they find it secured by hunters. While spying over the hunters, they meet Josh Hoberman, a student from Brakebills that was part of the class of 2016 that disappear over two years. He takes him to his hideout, where he tells them that Victoria, the traveler in the dungeon of the beast, took her class to Filory for spring break. Flashbacks show the Brakebills students in Filory, and Josh tells them that they were ambushed and killed, but Victoria was able to take him to the Netherlands before going back for other survivors. To him it has only been a couple of weeks since everything happened.
In Brakebills, Quentin and Julia find different artifacts that travel through time in the Brakebills’ library. They find one to London of 1922, where students in the 70’s tried to go back in time and killed Hitler, but they didn’t know he was a magician and kills them. Quentin remembers that Jane Chatwin when to Filory around that time and decides to use that artifact themselves.
With her Phosphermancy, Alice bends the light around the other ones to make them invisible and walk to the Filory fountain. Eliot, who stole a carrot (drugged) from Josh, is very high and separates from the group accusing a hunter that was walking by to see him. In his condition, Eliot is unable to concentrate, and as the hunter is about to attack him, Margo shot the hunter with a gun that she brought, even when they told her not to. The shot makes other hunters appear and persuade them. A hunter blocks the Filory fountain, but Alice is able to use battle magic and knock him out. Alice, Margo, Eliot, and Josh jump into the fountain, but Eve appears and blocks Penny from jumping. She is about to attack him, but Penny also uses battle magic and kills her, and jumps as more hunter run his way.
Quentin and Julia take the door that Margo and Eliot have to their favorite Pub in London, and from there they use the time artifact to go back to 1922. They find a young Jane Chatwin buying groceries and wait for her to be called to Filory like in the books. The call comes from a phone booth, they see as the door opens and light shines out, as Jane walks by. She steps in and Quentin a Julia go after and going through the portal to Filory.
The episode ends with Quentin and Julia stepping out from a tree into a forest in the afternoon, marveling over the landscape and surroundings. Julia calls Quentin and they see over an opening from of trees a castle on the horizon.
We are in the last episode before the season finally of the first season of the Magicians. I liked the episode, it was more that I had imagined of their journey to Filory. While I feel that the last episode will go very fast and it might not show us everything that happens, I liked the idea of Julia going with them. I didn’t like that Julia side of the story wasn’t shown and even if we just saw the flashback, which we are not sure where true, as fans, that read the books know what happened during the summoning of OLU. Another thing that the writers changed was the Julia slept with Richard instead of Pouncey. Many fans of the books will be happy to see Josh appear in the tv show, as he was actually part of the psychical kids group in the books. A side effect of turning books into tv shows, is that sometimes scenes don’t have the same time length that in the books, and gives the impression of not having the same important like in the books. Either way I liked the episode, and now I wonder what was Kady quest and what actually happened during the summing. I loved how the librarian broke the fourth wall to called Margo, Janet, it was a great scene. Eliot seems to keep spiraling down. I can see that the writers made the hunters into the servants of the beast such as in the books he had creatures that served him, Janet killed somebody with the gun she had. We have that scene in the show, but instead is a hunter. Next episode is the season finally of the Magicians, are you ready for it? What do you think will happen? Tells us in the comments.
