The stage is being set for a trip to Fillory.
Full spoilers for "Remedial Battle Magic" continue below.
You can't say "Fillory" without "filler," right?
While some substantial plot developments happened in "Remedial Battle Magic," the third-to-last episode of The Magicians: Season 1, it was hard to avoid the feeling that this week's installment was mostly set up for the final hurrah of this season. It seems inevitable that this season won't end without a trip to Fillory and a confrontation with the Beast, so why not spend an episode showing our noble heroes figuring out how to potentially combat the show's Big Bad?
Fortunately, the set-up was still pretty solid. Some of the most fun of the episode was watching how Quentin, Alice, Penny, Margo and Eliot handled literally bottling up their emotions, and then drinking them back down. This put them on an emotional roller coaster and also finally caused some of them to come to terms with emotional issues they've been ignoring thus far. Sure, there's plenty still unsaid between Margo and Eliot, but now they've at least said something.
Penny had the roughest go of it as the Beast reemerged to torment him as a voice inside his head. Seems like the Beast is cracking down on Travelers (probably a direct response to Penny's trip to the Neitherlands) and was harassing them into suicide. (It was a very thoughtful note at the end to include a number to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, so plus one, Magicians.) This eventually was solved by putting a spiked patch on the base of his neck to prevent the Beast's voice from reaching him, though it seems inevitable that that will have some negative consequences before the end of the season.
By the end of the episode, Quentin, Margo and Eliot had only mastered the battle magic by using Kady's trick to bottle their emotions, while Alice and Penny were able to do that without them. How that led to Quentin, Margo and Eliot having a boozy threesome -- well, that's up to the audience to connect the dots. It can be inferred that the overwhelming feelings brought on by consuming their emotions caused a rift between Quentin, Margo and Eliot and the rest and brought them all together, but ultimately the threesome lacked set up and was rushed and too short. (Get your minds out of the gutter, pun pervs.)
Julia and Kady had slightly better luck with the Free Traders. Their journey to find a god had great payoff when the goddess who Julia connected with before reached out to her again. Julia now has a mission: to present three gifts to the goddess's disciple in order to reach her. Julia saying that she wants to do good really underlined how wonderful her evolution has been this season.
While Julia ends the episode in a good place, it's not looking so hot for Alice and Quentin. Despite her confessing how deep her love is for him earlier in "Remedial Battle Magic," the betrayal at finding him in bed with Margo and Eliot seemed to cut just as deep. Given everything else that happened in this episode, this moment didn't quite land, so hopefully the next episode will play catchup a bit better.
The Verdict
While "Remedial Battle Magic" was a solid episode of The Magicians, it was too stuffed with filler to rank among the season's best. There was a lot of set up for what's to come and a decent amount of emotional evolution. It's nice to see the core five training for their upcoming trip to Fillory -- though those training sequences underlined a bigger question: uhh, where were all the other students at Brakebills in this episode? They are at a school, after all.
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