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butterfly
The Margo stuff, I’m… it just feels wrong to cut her out now when the axes are actually going to get used. Her deciding not to go help save Eliot and instead stare at fish!Josh was… certainly a choice that the writers made.
I feel… ehhh? I guess. About the Q and Alice scene. I feel like retreading this relationship ground is kinda sad and frustrating for both Q and Alice? And I’m not super-hyped about the idea of Eliot potentially being narratively-framed as the interloper into an established Q and Alice relationship (again, tbh, thinking back to the S1 threesome) due to various tropes and stereotypes that can be involved in that kind of thing? And having this conversation happen after Q was literally pushing Alice away less than a day ago (given that Kady and Zelda are still in the poison room when the kitchen convo happens) makes it seem a lot less like a solid emotional decision and more like Q grabbing onto literally the only support being offered to him which is… idk, I guess maybe we’re supposed to feel like Q was really inspired by seeing bb!horny-in-love!Alice in the past? Even though he didn’t act like that at all in 4x10?
I just have a lot of question marks about the way they chose to write that scene. I felt like there was dialogue missing or something. I guess it just felt more aspirational than romantic? If I heard right (Jason Ralph’s acting is great but he is so quiet sometimes) Q didn’t say he does trust Alice now, he says that he wants to trust her and that, essentially, he wants to give “us” another shot because he wants to keep her in his life. And, again, that just makes it sound more like he’s desperately trying not to lose yet more people rather than any kind of romantic declaration? Since he’s recently learned that Julia is gone as well as Eliot? And it just kinda makes me sad for him? And sad for Alice that he seems to be doing this out of a desire to stop losing people rather than because it actually seems like he wants a relationship with her again? Like, if this was supposed to be a sweeping romantic moment… it didn’t feel that way. It felt… sad.
And then he did get some emotional catharsis but it was… it was emotional catharsis that it feels like he’s been bottling up since S1, since learning the truth about Fillory and Plover. And it makes sense, since this episode and last episode seemed to all be about trying to re-examine the past, but it does mean that he still hasn’t has any emotional catharsis for the shit that’s happened to him recently, so I still don’t feel any relief for him. I guess it’s kinda like in 4x10 where he feels like he can actually take positive action now rather than just trying to delay the Monster until they have a plan – he created the flower, they can start to fix things now, so maybe things are looking up, possibly, kind of thing?
No Eliot, so we don’t get to see whether or not the writers plan on “being braver” yet. I will, again, state my wish that Eliot gets more than five seconds at the end of the last episode of the season, thanks! It would kinda suck if Christopher Plover got more screen-time this season than Eliot Waugh did, and I kinda feel like we might be at that point and I’m not cool with it!
We know at least one person is going down to the underworld to see Penny40 next week. Probably not Eliot, since he’s been MIA all season. Probably not Julia, because goddess!powers and whatnot. Margo is staring at fish!Josh, so probably not either of them. Could be Kady, since she hasn’t taken the cure for the poison room. Could be either Alice or Q, depending on how things go down with the Monster sibs. Outside chance that it’s Zelda, though I’m not sure that would have enough impact, narrative-wise, but maybe.
The season finales so far tend to work on the improv standard of “yes, and…” so my guess is that they will successfully stop the Monster sibs, but then something terrible will result from how they do it. I’ve seen speculation that Fillory might die which… is definitely a possibility. I guess we’ll see....
So, my brain keeps nibbling away at the Alice and Q scene from last episode, because it just felt so sad and unromantic and I want to try to unpack why it felt that way to me.
I think a large part of it is that ‘missing dialogue’ feeling that I got, a missing step feeling. And that missing step is that Q and Alice made no attempts at being friends before jumping headfirst back into a romantic relationship that burned them both pretty fucking badly the first time around. Q went from “eh, I guess you can stay if you’re helping” to “let’s be together again romantically” without much of a pause in between.
And, thinking on it more, I’m not sure Q thinks it’s possible for Alice to give him the emotional support he needs without a romantic connection? Because he tries to make friends with her aaaaaaalll the way back at the start of S1 and she flip-flops between not wanting him around at all and flirting with him, which you’d think would climax in the magic-induced sex (so to speak), but actually continues somewhat after that, and then their actual romantic relationship is, as described by niffin!Alice a “garbage fire” that hurts both of them in the end. But Q really really really needs emotional support right now, so skipping all the friendship and relationship-building steps would probably seem like a good idea, just skip to the end rather than doing the work of earning it. He’s not even sure if he can trust her again, but he’s going to dive back into their relationship anyway so that he has someone who is willing to make him feel like he’s not alone. Which… :-/
It does make me feel like the chances of Q or Alice dying next week went up, because usually tv shows skip actually earning the romantic reconciliation when they want to drive up a quick emotional investment for when they kill off one of the newly reconciled ~lovers~, but maybe the show is planning to subvert that trope, idk....
On the Margo stuff… I think a lot of my own confusion is that they gave us the set-up for Margo to be able to do both things. She can pop her eye out and have it watch Josh so that she can go do other things. And then she just… decided not to? That’s why her not going along with Penny felt so off. Because she didn’t have to choose between Eliot and Josh, but she did anyway, and chose Josh. I mean, plot-wise, it’s probably because the first face-off against the Monster sibs goes poorly and Margo needs to step in but, emotionally, man it just feels weird as fuck.
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And it sets up this weird dynamic where, after spending all season emotionally blasted by Eliot’s possession and possible death, both Q and Margo suddenly tangent off and spend their emotional energy on something else instead right before the ending. And it feels like it hurts the storylines they’ve spent most of the season creating by diffusing out the emotional power, so it’s just… confusing. Maybe it’ll make sense in the finale, but honestly, I’m pretty confused at the moment.
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Anyway, on a different note, someone in the magicians tag (I went back but haven’t been able to find the person again, I’m very sorry for not giving you credit for the mention!) mentioned that ‘no better to be safe than sorry’, which is the new title for the finale, is a lyric from A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.
Which, as a choice, is interesting, given that it’s literally a song about a love confession where the person confessing is very nervous and uncertain about the potential results but is willing to make the ‘unsafe’ but possibly more rewarding choice in love rather than sticking with the easy way out, but there’s also an element of it coming across as a time-limited offer (In a day or two, I’ll be gone)....
Okay, so another thing that I didn’t focus on too much during the episode but now I’m thinking about it about and going… “uh-oh” - is Zelda telling everyone that Q is the one who has to make the garden bloom and not telling them that the reason she believes that is because her mentor Everett told her that as part of his plan to get the magic for himself. And we see that Everett does go to the reservoir himself in the promo 4x13 and so, while I understand the point of asking “why did we deconstruct the idea of White Guy is the Chosen One if the white guy is just going to be the chosen one anyway?”, the person in the narrative who chose Q is Everett. Fate didn’t choose Quentin for this job - the dictator of the library chose Q for it. And I wonder/worry if Everett didn’t have additional reasons for that choice that he chose not to share with Zelda.
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You know, I liked what we did get from Q’s monologue to the plant and Jason Ralph was great, but, man, it really felt like half a speech. And I get that there’s the constraints of the scene-goal – the purpose is ‘express love of Fillory and make a flower bloom’ and not ‘dive into Q’s deepest pain’ – but after the show actually letting us get that kind of deep-dive for both Eliot in 4x05 and Margo in 4x10, it just felt like Q’s scene ended too soon. And maybe they’re planning on giving us the rest of that emotional exploration in 4x13! I hope they are! But, as it stands, though I felt for Q’s pain, I also felt like we were allowed to glimpse only part of his pain, and that most of it stayed tucked away inside his heart.