Welcome to Last Night on TV, our ongoing series that looks back at what happened on television the night before. If we’re going to stay up all night and watch TV, we might as well talk about it the next day.
Let the teasing continue! When we left The Magicians last time, Penny had button-bamfed his way out of Brakebills and presumably to Fillory. But as fans of the books know, there’s a buffer world between other places and realms much like in The Magician’s Nephew from the Narnia series. This one is filled with multiple fountains (borrowing the pools device from Nephew) that each lead somewhere else. Penny swims up through the Earth fountain, and soon encounters a friendly looking girl. Of course, as with most things on this show, she ain’t so friendly.
After urging Penny to show her the device he used to travel there, she attacks him. He uses his Traveling ability to get away, but is pursued by the girl and her two cronies. And as it turns out, he can’t get out of this place, he can only teleport around Nightcrawler-style. He uses his astral projection power and find himself deep inside one of Quentin’s sex dreams, where a Slave Leia-Julia and white-gowned Alice are making out. Warning or advertisement: there’s a lot of sex in this episode.
Penny talks to Quentin, who is dressed like Indiana Jones in this fantasy, and discovers that while six hours have passed for him, six weeks have passed back at Brakebills. Out of fantasy and into reality, Quentin wakes up Alice and the two of them ask Margot and a drug-besotted Elliot for help to no avail, and Alice says she may know Traveler who can help them.
Catching up with Julia, who unfortunately is not dressed up like Princess Leia in real life, she’s hanging out with a group of magicians from an online group that Richard has introduced her to. They all get together in order to work on a massive piece of magic, and it turns out “Asmodeus” from the online group is actually Kady. And she’s not happy to see Julia at all.
Quentin and Alice head to Chicago to visit Alice’s parents, as her mother may have the answers they need. When they arrive, the Quinn house is in full-on Roman orgy mode, literally. Quentin occupies Alice’s dad with I’m-dating-your-daughter conversation, while Alice tries to speak to her mother in the bathtub. But the two of them haven’t been getting along since Alice’s brother was consumed by magic, and there’s no info forthcoming.
Margot hauls Eliot to the infirmary as he’s convinced something is wrong with him, but it turns out he’s fine. Just really, really high. However, Margot’s life essence is being drained somehow, and the nurse wants to know if she has been involved in any unprotected rituals. Turns out, she has. She heads to the apartment of someone she had a fling with, and he has a non-speaking golem version of Margot on hand. Which is probably about the creepiest thing a stalker could do.
Meanwhile Penny is still trying to escape from the Neitherlands, and has discovered a vast library beneath the fountains. While the librarian he encounters can’t provide him a map, she does explain that the girl who is chasing him has been banished from the library, and that the fountains don’t work for her. Hence the reason she is so keen to get her hands on Penny’s button. And while she can’t help him escape the Neitherlands, she does photocopy some pages from Martin Chatwin’s life book, hands them to Penny, then kicks him out.
Back with Julia, she and Kady have mended the fences, and have begun crash-learning twelve new magical spells to help with the group effort. It turns out that all of the magicians have something in their lives that they can’t fix magically, a terminal illness, a dead child, etc. So they’ve turned to the project at hand: summoning a god. Cue ominous music.
Alice finally apologizes to her mother in an effort to move things forward, and she discovers that her mother and father have taken on “third” in their relationship, Joe. Joe has “adaptable genitalia” (shudder) and can fulfill both of their sexual needs. When Alice and Quentin talk to him, he tells them he knows a spell that light up the Earth fountain in the Neitherlands, but that it requires Alice and Quentin to have sex… and orgasm at the same time.
That’s when Quentin finds out that Alice has trouble… crossing the finish line, and he blames himself. But after some coaching from Joe, and Alice fessing up that she’s not good at asking for what she wants, they get down. I mean, they really get down. It’s a pretty hot and heavy moment for Syfy, and bam, it works. Fountain light on, Penny into fountain, and right into Alice and Quentin’s bedroom. Awkward.
Three episodes left, so when are we actually getting to Fillory?
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