on Blu-ray.
The good news is there seemed to be no glitchiness with the discs this season, so I didn’t miss any parts of the episodes...at least not from
that, anyway. I did miss the end of one episode because I apparently fell asleep. I’d been drifting off but trying to stay awake, then realised I must’ve dozed off momentarily as I woke up just as the episode finished. That’s not the bad news, though. The BAD news is that the character of Julia was just as terrible, if not
worse, than she was last season. This has got to be one of (if not the only) show where I begin my reviews with talking about the character I like the
least. Last season ended with Bitchface nicking the Beast-killing knife from Alice before she could kill him, leaving her defenseless, and this got her killed along with Margo and Eliot, while Penny had his hands magically chopped off (Quentin was the only one seemingly left unharmed). Julia did this so she could make a deal with the no-longer-moth-faced-and-instead-Charles-Mesure-faced Beast (because making deals with murderous Beasts seems like a good idea?) to get him to kill her rapist, the trickster god ‘Reynard the Fox’. Just absorb this for moment...someone screwing over a bunch of people who are friends of her supposed ‘friend’ just for her own selfish vendetta. She pretty much got them killed. While it was the Beast who did the actual
killing, if Julia hadn’t been a massive bitch and stolen the knife, Alice could’ve killed the Beast and
then they could’ve gone after Reynard. But nooooo, Julia’s only thinking of her own desire for revenge and everyone else can go hang as far as she’s concerned. Oh, sure, she includes in her deal with Beastie Boy that he’s not to harm any of her ‘friends’ (what a complete load of crap her referring to them as her ‘friends’ is), but he’s no fool and is onto her, knowing full-well that she’s trying to work out loopholes in the deal even as she makes it with him.
Meanwhile, Alice - who is the complete
opposite of Julia (ie. she’s actually
likeable and thinks of others) - manages to snap back to life thanks to that jizz of Ember’s (the goat-man from last season) she was forced to drink to become powerful enough to kill the Beast. Seems it’s having some lingering effects, one of which is bringing her back and giving her the power to resuscitate Margo & Eliot (I guess their hearts just stopped when the Beast slammed them against a wall?). Quentin, who left them, was running through the forest at the beginning of the episode as freaky music played and he came across a cottage that resembled that of the witch’s gingerbread house from the Hansel & Gretel fairytale. She demanded his blood (I forget why) and then he reunited with his now-
not-dead friends. Penny’s hands haven’t grown back, they’re just bandaged, but the fact that he’s
not dead from blood loss is also thanks to Alice. At one point he goes with Margo to a river that’s meant to heal his hands, but he offends the ‘River Watcher’ dude because he asks for ridiculous payment in return and as a result the annoying dude curses Penny’s newly-returned hands...which he later discovers causes them to have a mind of their own and do dangerous magic things that are out of his control.
If there was one bright spot in the episode, it was the gang having a crowning ceremony (it was revealed last season through a test that Eliot was High King of Fillory, and apparently all these ‘children of Earth’ are Kings and Queens...except for Penny - not that he seems to care since he rolls his eyes throughout the entire thing). After they cross the visually stunning 'Rainbow Bridge', there’s an ancient-looking knight who bears a striking resemblance to the one from
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but instead of asking them to choose the right cup, he gives them a 90’s pop culture-themed quiz which was quite amusing. Even moreso was the characters knowing the answers. One of the most amusing moments, though, was Eliot using Alice to help him reenact Johnny’s big speech scene from
Dirty Dancing (Hale Appleman does a pretty decent Patrick Swayze impression). The BEST part, however, is when once they’ve sufficiently answered the questions and are presented with their crowns, seeing them crown each other (complete with apologies to who they’d ‘wronged’) and the titles they give each other. Yes, it’s a blatant rip-off of the crowning scene in the first Narnia movie...but oh so much more hilarious and had some really nice moments between the characters. How I wish the show could just be about THEM and not cut back to Bitchface.
While some of the Beast’s air of mystery was lost after he gained a face that
wasn’t made out of moths, I will say that Charles Mesure (who I remember first seeing WAY back in the Season 5 premiere of
Xena: Warrior Princess as the archangel Michael) at least made this now very human-looking version of the character
entertaining...which is more than I can say for Julia, who remained the
opposite of entertaining. As terrible as the Beast was for all the horrible things he’d done, I still liked him better than her and was glad that he seemed to be annoying the crap out of her with his show tunes and dance moves. Unfortunately, Julia’s ‘specialness’ seemed to affect him like it did everyone else and so I had to sit through him telling her how he liked/admired her and all these compliments he paid towards her while she just kept threatening him. It’s so barf-inducing when writers clearly love a character they write for and feel the need to have ALL the other characters gush over them/praise them, etc when they DON’T DESERVE IT (thank goodness for Margo who calls Julia out on all her BS and doesn't seem quite so willing to forgive her like virtually
everyone else does). When her ‘best friend’ Quentin warns her not to be around the Beast since he and his
actual friends are planning to end him (as Alice has the power to do so), selfish bitch that she is, all Julia does is threaten him and the others because she wants the Beast to take out Reynard first. For a moment I thought Quentin had finally woken up and realised what a truly terrible person his ‘friend’ was when he said out loud that he’d come to warn her and this was how she was thanking him (with threats), but sadly it’s quite apparent that he’s stuck in this toxic friendship with her where no matter how shit she treats him...he just keeps coming back for more, not
learning from his past experiences (like when she helped mind-rape him into being stuck in a mental prison last season, for example).
Next on Julia’s list of people to screw over? Marina (Kacey Rohl is SUCH a better actress than Stella Maeve. Maybe if
she’d played the character of Julia, I might’ve actually had some sympathy for her after her trauma). Marina’s roped into Julia’s plan by being bait for Reynard, she does a spell, it seemingly doesn’t work, but then when she returns home he appears and this was the WORST moment of the season for me. We already knew Reynard was a monster, but it seems this series likes to go overboard in showing just how cruel a villain in this universe can be. Last season it was when the guy possessed by the Beast unnecessarily exploded Jane Chatwin’s head by strangling her with such force (after she was
already dead). In this instance Reynard does something completely repugnant with Marina’s poor pet cat as a means of torturing her, finally getting her to flinch after she’d remained strong in the face of his intimidation techniques/threats. I didn’t actually
watch it (as I’d read about it long before I ever reached the episode it happens in), but apparently he turns her poor innocent feline INSIDE OUT. Worse yet, this doesn’t instantly kill it, it remains
alive and we can still hear it meowing (so its unimaginable pain is cruelly prolonged) before he eats it (I think. I don’t know for sure because I was SO not going to watch any of that, but I’m guessing that’s what happened). Then he proceeds to bite off Marina’s fingers (I still wasn’t watching the screen at that point, as I didn’t wish to accidentally catch any glimpses of the poor feline...assuming any of it was left). It's sadistic shit like this that turns me off the show (well...that and Julia) and makes me question the sanity of the show's writers that they'd not only think of such sick twisted shit, but that they'd feel the need to *show* it in gratuitous detail. We already knew Reynard was a bad guy, this wasn't the least bit necessary and I have to wonder if the writer of the episode got some kind of messed-up pleasure out of it (maybe they're a dog person?). This isn't the first animal death in the show, as last season featured a gruesome rabbit murder and Quentin accidentally killing a puppy riddled with cancer. Seek help, show writers.
So, Penny transports the Beast away (after Julia HESITATED to kill Reynard when she was given her chance to...because she’s an idiot? Because the obviously sick-minded writers of this show, for some twisted reason, LOVE this despicable character of Reynard and wish to keep writing heinous things for him to do and they can’t do that if they kill him off, so they keep finding contrived reasons for him to stick around?) and it’s up to Alice to take care of him (because
she’s the *true* ‘badass’ of the show, despite all attempts to tell us how ‘special’/’amazing’ Julia is) while all Eliot & Margo do is uselessly watch on and Quentin ends up being at the Beast’s mercy until Alice comes to the rescue (though, to be fair to Quentin, at one point - I can’t recall exactly what order events occurred - he *did* jump in front of a magical attack from the Beast that was intended for Alice, causing him a massive slice in his shoulder as a result - so at least he helps her like she helps him). Unfortunately, Alice - powerful as she is - isn’t enough to finish the Beast off (of course this is only because her jizz-fueled power started wearing off thanks to Bitchface hiding away with the Beast and thus it took them longer to find him, whereas if she hadn't been so single-minded about her own revenge, she could've worked *with* the others to help them defeat the Beast much earlier. Once again, thanks a BUNCH, Julia!), so she does what her brother did and gives herself completely over to the magic which engulfs her in blue flames as she screams, but just as the Beast is about to off Quentin, the now Neffin!Alice appears, grabs hold of the Beast’s hand and then he’s begging for
her mercy - which she’s fresh out of, as she literally rips his chest open to release all the moths that reside inside, thereby apparently killing him.
Alas, Niffins are bad news and after saving Quentin, Niffin!Alice is gearing up to off
him next (along with Margo & Eliot), so Quentin is forced to release his cacodemon (they all got one which reside in tattoos in their backs. I know Alice released hers because she felt sorry for it being imprisoned inside her. I forget what happened exactly to Margo & Eliot’s, but I have a vague recollection of theirs fighting each other for some reason). Anyway, it’s basically Quentin giving Neffin!Alice the ‘Old Yeller’ treatment, there’s an explosion after the cacodemon attacks her and all that’s left is her lifeless open-eyed corpse. Kudos to Jason Ralph for selling Quentin’s anguish over having to kill the love of his life (that’s right, Ghoulia, it’s NOT YOU!). It’s even more of a tragedy because Q & A (see what they did there with their names?) were finally reconciling after that whole Quentin-having-a-threesome-with-Margo-and-Eliot thing last season, which it had taken umpteen episodes for Alice to finally start forgiving him for (not that I blame her for being slow with the forgiveness). So, naturally, just as it looked like they’d get back together...he’s forced to kill her. If you’re keeping score of Ghoulia’s sins thus far this season - her leaving everyone for dead, threatening Quentin and the others if they killed the Beast before she had him kill Reynard, getting Marina killed after using her as bait to attract Reynard, HESITATING when she *finally* got to do what she’d been screwing everyone else over to get (ie. kill Reynard), being indirectly responsible for Alice's death (by not letting her kill the Beast when she originally could’ve), and then after she learns Alice died, Ghoulia’s acting all ‘woe is me’ by whining about how everyone blames her for Alice’s death (that’s because it *is* your fault, hag!). She’s SO unselfaware that she doesn’t even get that everything she’s done was WRONG and is now looking for sympathy because of how everyone is (justifiably) treating her. But, hey, that’s not enough. She also tore off the bracelets Penny got given (I think because he boned Anne Dudek’s teacher character? I forget exactly) that were keeping his out-of-control hands in check - clearly not caring that his hands could harm himself or others against his will - because he wouldn’t tell her something she wanted to know (I think that was the reason, anyway).
As if Quentin killing Alice wasn’t heartbreaking enough, we see him crawling across the ground (his massive shoulder wound the least of his concerns) and sobbing over her body (once again, kudos to Jason Ralph for his performance) until Eliot gently comforts him. Once back at their castle, Eliot & Margo discuss building a statue to honour Alice and it was here that I found Margo somewhat unlikeable, since she acts as though Alice was never their friend (whereas I’d thought last season she’d actually come to genuinely
like Alice, so this felt like a betrayal of that pseudo-friendship I’d believed they had formed). Meanwhile, Quentin’s getting fixed up by a centaur and receives a wooden shoulder to replace his ruined one (it’s then painted over with flesh). After Penny hears of Alice’s death, he tries to offer his sympathies to Quentin in his own Penny kind of way. Unfortunately, this amounts to basically “That sucks.” and I could understand causing Quentin to lose it at him. Maybe next time if you can’t come up with something better to say, Penny, don’t say anything at all? At least Quentin gets to work out some of his resentment towards Penny when he asks Quentin to chop his hands off again (since they’re going haywire and are a danger to both Penny and everyone else - THANKS AGAIN, JULIA!). They learn of the ‘White Lady’ of Fillory who can grant wishes, Penny instructs Quentin on how to shoot arrows (he’s about as good at shooting as Tobias Menzies’ character was at shooting a flaming arrow onto a funeral boat in Season 2 of
Game of Thrones), they journey into the forest (it was quite evident that the actor playing Penny just had bandages wrapped around his hands and no effort was made to have it look like his arms were
shorter after his hands were supposedly cut off since they still dangle well below his waist) and become stoned - this drags on for WAY too long.
Eventually they find the White Lady who looks somewhat faun-ish in appearance and is played by Emma Dumont who I last saw as Polaris when watching Season 1 of my
The Gifted DVDs (unfortunately, that was the only season of the show ever released here). She’d impressed me in that show and she did so again here (though I wouldn’t have even known it was her in all that makeup/prosthetics if I hadn’t noticed her name in the guest-starring credits for the episode. Hell, I didn't even realise that it was her on the cover of my Season 2 Blu-rays until it came to this scene and eventually I realised. For some reason I'd thought it was a
male creature of some description when I first bought the Blu-rays ages ago. Sorry, Emma!). Like everyone else in this show, she seems to be fond of the ‘F’ word (seriously, couldn’t
some of the characters in the show not be so foul-mouthed? It kinda loses impact when ALL of them - even mystical Fillory creatures - swear like sailors). and informs Quentin that she can’t resurrect the dead (since, naturally, his one wish was for her to bring Alice back after he managed to shoot her in the...was it her butt or the leg? I forget). Penny wishes for his hands back, which she *can* do, but this proves very painful and she silences him because she’s sick of hearing his screaming (which I can sympathise with, since there are certain screaming individuals around where I live who I wish *I* could silence just like that). Quentin then wastes his wish by asking her to send him home (dude, you could’ve just travelled there
yourself as you’ve been doing since you first came to Fillory. Use your wish for something you CAN’T do!) and once he’s back in the normal world, he dumps his bow & arrows in a bin. It’s sad seeing Quentin so disillusioned with the fantasy world he’d loved so much prior to visiting there. Though whoever finds his archery gear will think it's Christmas (especially if it's some kid).
Other things going on - Eliot's stuck in Fillory having sex with his wife when he'd rather be boning guys (oh,
POOR YOU!!!) and she's not really up for the orgy that he suggests. He's also concerned about the others leaving him behind since they can travel to and from Fillory, whilst he can't because he had to give that up (as well as any other partners) when he married her as part of a deal to help them defeat the Beast (I think) last season. He does create a golem version of himself (thanks to Margo, who has experience with such things after the Margolem last season) and *it* is able to go back to the real world and bone guys whilst real Eliot's screwing his wife in Fillory at the same time.
That was weird. Julia continues being the most selfish person ever, not even bothering to seek out Kady (who she last saw when being raped) until she
needs something from her. Disappointingly, she and Kady become 'best bitches' (complete with half-heart necklaces). Even *more* disappointing was watching Margo’s stand-off with Julia where Margo came off
second best. I was cheering her on when she was telling Julia off for all the shit she’d pulled, but then Julia made a comment about how what she needed didn’t concern Margo’s hair, so therefore it’s not important to her (or somesuch), she then had the audacity to make out that MARGO was selfish/self-involved (hello? Pot, meet kettle!) and blamed her and the others for ruining their chance to kill Reynard and the Beast. The hypocrisy here is ASTOUNDING. She then seems to actually wound Margo by telling her she hasn’t really got ‘friends’, just people afraid of her. I HATED seeing Ghoulia be the one to win this war of words when Margo’s the type of character who
should be able to win a verbal sparring match. Once again it felt like the writers *had* to have Julia ‘win’ (though at least Margo pointed out to her that she has NO friends and that’s what she deserves. Too bad she then gave Julia the book she was after, as that kind of undercut her final words).
How’d Ghoulia know she needed a book? She briefly brought Marina back to life just to extract the necessary info out of her even as undead Marina was begging her
not to send her back to the world of the dead or whatever - but, hey, once you’ve served your purpose to Julia, she discards you (Marina should’ve known that). Oh, and we learn that Julia and her coven of idiots brought Reynard to Earth...so once again THANKS FOR THAT, JULIA. She learns she’s pregnant with a rape baby, basically jumps ahead of the queue by either playing on sympathies or blackmail (I forget which - though knowing Julia, it’s probably the latter), then gets the abortionist killed because Reynard’s child won’t allow itself to be killed (either that or Reynard himself mojo’d it so it wouldn’t be killed) and the woman gouges herself in the eye with one of the tools she was going to use (I’m guessing this was the writer of the episode making a statement about where they stand regarding abortion - ie. they’re against it - so naturally the abortionist had to die. Meanwhile, you’re FINE with turning cats INSIDE OUT?!). How many people’s deaths does this make Julia responsible for now? I’ve lost count. It just occurred to me that this review is becoming exceedingly long and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fit everything in (since Proboards apparently has a word limit for posts - which I learned when trying to do a review for the last season of
Riverdale that I watched), so I guess I’ll have to summarise the rest of the season. I forgot to mention there’s a scene-stealing tree sloth named Abigail who screeches advice which an interpreter translates for the main characters. She’s not the only talking animal, though, as there’s also a rabbit that announces Eliot’s wife being pregnant (pregnancy tests in Fillory are
bizarre) and probably other talking animals I’ve forgotten about.
Things improved somewhat when Neffin!Alice returned (that happened at the end of the episode which I missed seeing on account of falling asleep), albeit just in Quentin’s head. She bugs him and is snarky towards him (though amusingly so). She’s not the
real Alice at all and wants her freedom, but will settle for possessing Quentin’s body for a period of time. He keeps refusing until he *needs* her when everyone’s come together to do a magic heist because of - you guessed it - JULIA. I couldn’t believe for a second that any of them (except maybe Quentin, since he’s clearly her bitch) would
ever team up with the one who got most of them killed. The writers really go out of their way to make these characters who should HATE her somehow
forgive and/or sympathise with her. It’s complete crap and I hated seeing Eliot being nice to her while at the same time essentially telling Quentin to move on from Alice. Anyway, I totally missed the part where Julia somehow gained some grey fat creature with a bag over its head as some sort of bodyguard that was supposed to keep her safe (that’s right, even
mystical creatures are falling over themselves to PROTECT this person who doesn’t deserve protection). As comes with the territory of being around Julia, it
dies (protecting her from another invisible creature) - so chalk up another casualty to Ghoulia (how I wish fat grey bagman had just let Mr. Invisible Monster strangle her to death like it almost managed to do before being interrupted). As you’d expect, the heist goes awry. I have to say I wasn’t fussed on this episode at all. Margo took on a really weird exaggerated accent when laying out how the heist would go down (was she supposed to be imitating someone?), Penny was awesome when her referred to Julia as a 'psychopath'...but then instantly changed his mind about not wanting to work with her (which made me think less of him) and there was some really weird discussion prior to the heist about gaining the necessary thumbprints from people required to get into the vault or whatever it was (which involved doing magic and literally
getting the person’s finger). It was all very confusing. Oh, and Eliot’s golem gets killed when they’re making their escape during the heist.
I HATED seeing Julia in Alice’s bedroom (she has no right to be in there!) where she was still playing the victim regarding everyone holding her responsible for her actions and *still* didn't get that what she did was
wrong. There’s some really bizarre editing in this show, where it’ll cut away from characters virtually mid-sentence or at really odd points during scenes that makes it feel as though parts of the scene have been cut out. It’s quite jarring. Anyway, at some point Julia got her abortion but then Kady informed her there was a complication and she’s lost her ‘shade’ (the Beast had told her about it in the first episode of the season) which is like her heart. HA! AS IF Julia even
has such a thing! For whatever reason, being shade-less makes her seem more chipper and carefree at the start of the episode, but we soon learn it’s just made her
more psycho than she already was when she ends up committing tree genocide by tricking a race of tree people (dryads) into taking a bomb from her. Why did she do this? Because one of them was
rude to her and Kady. So, naturally, in Julia’s mind this warranted MASS MURDER. But this shouldn’t come as a shock since totally unbalanced punishments for people who insult Julia is nothing new (just look at what she did to Quentin in Season 1 when he made some mean comment towards her). To top things off, it sounds like the trees are gonna wage war over this - so let’s all give Julia a round of applause for setting off a WAR. Kind of makes Margo’s almost doing something similar seem not so bad by comparison; as at least she averts that (it was because she mouthed off to the son of some royal or whatever). Obviously we’re meant to think Julia is 'badass' as she walks away from the burning tree people with that annoying smugly smirking face of hers, but it actually had the
opposite effect and illustrated just how irredeemable she is (not that the writers think so, obviously).
I forget the details of why (I think it might be because the golem of himself died), Eliot becomes gravely ill/is dying himself, so Margo has to make a deal with the fairies to fix him and/or the wellspring (which got FUBAR'd thanks to Ember taking a dump in it towards the beginning of the season because...he just felt like it? I swear, sometimes these writers just write the most random - in this case
literal - shit) and the only thing these creepy fairy folk are willing to accept in exchange for fixing things is the child that Eliot’s wife is pregnant with. Margo makes the deal while Eliot’s out of commission, and sure, it’s a shitty thing to do...but she’s still not even CLOSE to being at the same level as Julia when it comes to doing shitty things. When Margo referred to herself as a ‘c*nt’ because of what she’d done, all I could think was that, "No,
you're not, Margo.
Julia is.", as that’s the only word strong enough to describe her. There was one good moment in amongst all the crap and that was Eliot, Margo and the rest of the court busting into song (Les Misérables to be exact) when marching out in preparation of Eliot fighting the father of the brat Margo offended in hand-to-hand combat. It was a well-done musical sequence (I especially liked Margo mentioning to Eliot how she'd skipped over some lyrics that weren't relevant to their particular situation - reminded me of Willow's 'meta' line in the BtVS musical episode where she sang "I think this line is mostly filler."). Sadly, everything that follows is pretty boring and/or annoying. Eliot fights the guy (Leonard Roberts, who I always think of as Riley's friend from BtVS, but he was also in
Heroes and a bunch of other things I've watched) until he loses the magic from the sword (which was doing all the fighting for him, I guess), then he runs and hides in a tree until they bond over wanting to be with guys rather than their wives and apparently there’s a rule in Fillory that says Kings can have
both? So, now they're getting married. Yeah, it makes about as little sense as it sounds. Neffin!Alice is still bargaining for more time in Quentin’s body and offs some snake-girl at a sandpit (but she was evil, as far as I could tell, so it’s fine). During that one part of an episode I fell asleep during, I guess we learned Reynard has a son, and we now meet him - he’s adult and played by Christopher Gorham (who’ll always be Evil Henry from
Harper’s Island to me) and he’s a senator who doesn’t know about his powers but unintentionally unleashes them when he gets mad (he also learns he's unintentionally been mind-controlling people when he thought it was just natural charm or whatever).
Honestly, my memory regarding this point in the season is pretty vague since I was rather bored. Though I *do* recall yet another shitty thing Julia did in her long list of shitty things. There’s some protective barrier at Brakebills, Reynard storms the place and Julia shoves Quentin through the protective barrier so that he will release Neffin!Alice to kill Reynard (I think?). So, yeah, once again she’s basically sacrificing her ‘best friend’ just to achieve her own selfish goals. Quentin, naturally, won’t release Neffin!Alice and he looks done-diddly-done for, but then luckily for him (and no thanks to Julia) Reynard’s son shows up and he disappears with him instead of killing Quentin. Reynard ends up offing his son’s wife in his typical gruesome fashion (though thankfully we’re not subjected to actually
seeing the act itself...it’s just heavily implied by his description of her being ‘here and there’ and the ear in a box that he gifts his son). He wants his offspring to be evil like him, but he refuses to be and instead has Kady kill him. She FINALLY gets a clue that Julia sucks and tells her off/locks her up. Unfortunately, the school’s Dean (who became a regular castmember this season along with the actress who plays Kady) is like all the others who are Julia’s bitches and FREES her after she’s hardly spent anytime locked up, clearly playing favourites and singing her praises that makes me BARF.
Everyone just accepts this and clearly Julia’s learned
nothing, suffered *no* punishment for her actions and it’s just so ENRAGING seeing her be given chance after chance even after continually doing shitty things to people she claims are her ‘friends’.
Penny faces the consequences of having signed a contract to get magic back that said he’d have to serve in the magical library for a million years or something like that (the way he exclaims this when he’s reading it cracked me up). The main librarian chick who we’ve seen there from time to time since Season 1 is played by an actress most would recognise from the second Tobey Maguire Spider-Man film as the daughter of Peter’s landlord who had a crush on him (I mean *she* had a crush on Peter,
not the landlord). She’s quite memorable here as Zelda. Far less likeable is the irritating kid Penny gets stuck with as his ‘supervisor’. Thankfully, she seems doomed and seems to know it. I guess she dies as she predicted she would? I wasn’t really paying attention since she annoyed me. There was a ‘Poison Room’ where all the most dangerous books were kept and that was the one place where a book could be found to kill a god (which is what they need to do to make everything right in Fillory again). Once Penny and the brat broke in, it delivered on its name (THE POISON ROOM) and poisoned them. Penny’s in magic hospital and hasn’t much time left. Meanwhile, Julia has her MILLIONTH chance to off Reynard with a god-killing bullet she acquired at some point, but ONCE AGAIN hesitates and this gives that lady god she and her idiot coven thought they were praying to last season the chance to show up and ask her NOT to kill Reynard/her son - which Julia
agrees to - and they both vanish. If this really is Reynard’s ‘ending’, this has got to be THE MOST UNSATISFYING THING EVER. After watching an entire season of Julia fuck everyone over to kill him, we don’t even *get* that? DIAF, show!
Quentin did end up freeing Neffin!Alice in the end (though I’m glad he didn’t do it to serve Julia’s goals by being forced into it and made his
own choice to free her instead). She eventually returns and isn’t quite the Alice we knew, but isn’t as ‘bad’ as Neffin!Alice was either (there was this whole side-plot with them retrieving Julia’s ‘shade’ from the underworld, where it manifested as her child self, and they also ran into Alice’s child self...so they took her with them as well and this is what more or less brought ‘real’ Alice back, I think. I’m skimming over the details here). There was one part where Quentin talked to an Alice from one of the previous time loops where he’d died but she’d survived and this scene was really well-acted between Jason Ralph & Olivia Taylor Dudley (speaking of, she was fun as Neffin!Alice but it was good to get more or less the ‘real’ Alice back). Oh, I forgot...there was also a dragon (who, like everyone else in this show - except for maybe Zelda - dropped F-bombs). I’m skipping over a lot of stuff, but the season final began with Ember doing an amusing recap of the series thus far. Though I was glad when he eventually got offed near the end of the episode since I hadn’t really found him as amusing as the show had obviously *wanted* me to all season. And I was glad that Quentin got to be the one to end him - though, annoyingly, Julia helped by distracting him because OF COURSE
she got to be in on the action while Eliot and Margo didn’t. All poor Margo got to do was get Eliot’s wife and her baby back in exchange for one of her eyes. I’m glad she didn’t have it stabbed out or something like I was expecting when I first saw pictures of her with an eyepatch ages ago, long before I ever started my rewatch of this show. Her eye's just
not there anymore. I guess this is her ‘penance’ for the deal she’d made regarding Eliot’s wife and their child...but how come JULIA doesn’t have to do any penance for her many sins, huh?!
As if to rub it in, the episode ends with Ghoulia revealing to Quentin (who she claims is the *only* one she trusts - gee, what an 'F.U.' to all the others she screwed over and yet they
helped her when she needed it) that she still has magic (basically that of Jubilee’s powers from the X-Men...only lamer) after Alice and Quentin hooked up again (thanks to him winning her over with greasy bacon and sex) and he informed her he’d offed Ember, which she then read him the riot act for since killing gods has CONSEQUENCES and we see this is indeed true as literal
magic plumbers turn magic OFF like they’re turning off faucets (because the show has become so unimaginative at this point it just goes for the
literal). No more magic (except for JULIA, of course) is our big ‘cliff-hanger’ ending, but I can’t say I’m in any hurry to watch Season 3. I’m just not in the mood for sitting through more seasons of FUCKING JULIA.
UGH. Most of the other characters are varying degrees of likeable, but she just *ruins* the entire show for me and I can’t even skip over her scenes since the writers insist on making her an integral part of the story. It’s become so intolerable at this point that I think I’m just going to have to take a break from the show for a while. Instead I’ll watch one of my shows on DVD where I like ALL the characters and there’s no one who’s constantly making me want to STAB the screen.