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.
We’re getting closer to Fillory, folks. After tons of teasing and foreshadowing, Syfy finally handed us a gigantic Disneyland-sized turkey leg episode where the meat is all about getting to the fictional world Quentin is obsessed with. Although we don’t quite go there ourselves, someone does at the end and you can be sure the next installment will be all about that.
We open with a little forgiveness. Quentin reads Julia’s apology letter, and writes her a brief email back saying he got it, he hopes she’s well, and he’s sorry too. Julia is still rehabbing, although with her new magical chaplin buddy, she’s experiencing something entirely different. She learns about a powerful spell that may be locked up inside a comatose body, and with some encouraging she decides to dive inside to see what she can find.
Back at Brakebills, Quentin continues to lament the fact that he lost the Fillory Book 6 that he was handed in episode one, and Alice is pretty much like “Duh, let’s use magic to find it.” Not sure why that never occurred to Quentin. Anyhow, they use a magical flame to track it down and it turns out Penny took it, read it, spilled his beer on it, and then threw it away. Why Quentin doesn’t sock him in the balls at this point, I’ll never know.
Anyhow, Penny semi-recounts the contents of the book, which turns out to have been written by Jane Chatwin and not author of the other five books Christopher Plover. Jane wanted to set the record straight, and she details how she tracked down a magical beast in order to grant a way for her brother Martin, whom Fillory had ‘abandoned’, to travel there whenever he wants. Her wish is granted, and the beast gives her a magical button.
Quentin thinks the button could still be at Plover’s house in London, which is now a museum, and they decide to go there. Penny insta-travels himself there, leaving Alice and Quentin in the lurch, but Eliot reveals that he and Margo installed a magical door to their favorite London pub years prior. How very convenient. So Eliot tags along and they tour through Plover’s house, and Quentin can’t help by out himself as a mega Fillory nerd / Plover expert, pretty much embarrassing the whole gang. He even takes a grinning selfie in front of Plover’s writing desk.
They sneak back at night, break in, and start looking for the button. That’s how they discover Plover has books on magic in his writing room and he was studying some hardcore stuff like traveling, possibly to try and get to Fillory. The caretaker discovers them wandering around after Alice hears mysterious voices, and he urges them to get out. But then the lights go out, he vanishes and reappears seconds later with his throat cut and his mouth sewn shut. Oh, crap.
The gang soon finds out that the house is haunted by two ghostly children who are forced to relive their deaths at the hands of Plover’s menacing sister Prudence over and over again. And they find out that Plover wasn’t quite the saint he was made out to be. Not only has his sister been torturing the children of his groundskeeper who he agreed to take in, he’s also been taking nude photographs of Martin Chatwin and doing god knows what else.
Over in the b-storyline with Julia, she enters the comatose Kira’s mind, and discovers that she’s a genius who studied at MIT before getting into magic, and she teaches Julia a powerful spell. Afterwards she says she has one request: kill her. Yes, this is a pretty grim episode. Especially because back at Plover house, the gang escapes, but can’t do anything to help the ghost kids who stare down at them from the windows as they leave.
This unhinges Alice somewhat, and it’s all they can think about when they return to Brakebills. Penny asks to see the button, which they found buried on the corpse of ghost kid George, and Quentin tells him to put it away. Of course Penny doesn’t listen, and when he touches it both Penny and the button vanish. Yep, he’s in Fillory. At least, I assume he’s in Fillory. We’ll find out next week.
Quote of the Episode: Quentin to Penny and his attitude: “You can’t possibly want to be a dick more than you want to be alive!”
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