I don't know if they'll really have the balls to do Julia's story the way it's written, as a series of episodic encounters, kind of a dark picaresque of the magical underground, in this case under-underground. They certainly aren't going to send Julia off on a season-long wander where she encounters a variety of…

It's been a while since I reread the books - I started from the beginning when book 3 was released - so I don't remember everything, exactly. It does seem like the show is leaning a lot harder on Quentin being predestined from the start, whereas all of Jane's machinations were revealed in a big info dump at the end of…

I have a feeling that Quentin's stagnant personal growth thing is going to be replaced by a dawning awakening of heroism and duty thing. The story the show seems to be telling, as opposed to the one from the books, is a whole destiny narrative. Quentin's special, he just doesn't know it yet! The Beast is coming for…

Maybe one of the points of this latest episode was to give Quentin a taste of what it must have felt like for Julia to be offered magic and then have it taken away. I don't think Julia and Mariana orchestrated the precise details of the dream/illusion/hallucination/whatever that had Quentin trapped, but it was a…

He was a total dick to her. He was trying to go for "tough love" but ended up with "asshole-ish condescension." I guess i just didn't buy the whole confrontation in episode 3; I don't know if it was because it all felt crazy rushed, or because the actors didn't quite sell it. The whole Quentin/Julia thing has felt a…

Yeah, I generally hate those episodes where they make you question the reality of the show. It usually feels like they've run out of ideas, and once they've done it, I can never really shake the feeling that they've implanted a sense of doubt about the stakes of the show. Anyway, as you said, this was a way better…

Yeah, it's almost like they knew they needed to readdress Julia's arc and decided to take her back to square one. Which is, by far, the best decision they've made with the character.

To be fair, that was a sexy puppet. Sexy like a water-dwelling Mae West that some guy wears like a sleeve, but still.

I think because it's a show that, at least for the time being, is set at a school for magic, it's natural to want to see some magical classwork. Grossman doesn't go into a lot of the classrooms, but he does spend a good amount of time talking about, you know, ancient/obscure languages and knuckle-cracking hand…

True, too much moping and aimlessness would be too much. What I'm missing isn't the ennui, it's the sense of place. Like, what do these characters do all day when they aren't confronting the Crisis of the Week? So far they have parties and backyard BBQs, two wholly pedestrian activities that don't really take…

Well, that only works if that's what they're planning on doing with the character. I feel like an author can get away with that kind of thing in print, but doing so on TV doesn't work. As of right now Margo is brown-haired young woman #4, and if I was a viewer who didn't know the books, I'd have no idea why she was…

I liked this most recent episode purely because it was fun TV and because some of the stuff they came up with was halfway clever (Quentin luring Penny into his mind via the Taylor Swift song was actually kind of genius.) But the relative quality of the episode didn't make me forget that most of what they're putting on…

I guess they figured that we'd only stick around for so much Welters, classroom antics, drinking in the Physical Kid's cottage, and sex. So they cut most of it entirely.

Yeah, this was a good one for Penny. He's been so, like, irrationally angry since the show started, and this episode finally started to give him some shading.

So, yeah, this was good (gooder? not, like… astonishing) for exactly the reasons noted in the review - it diverged enough from the book so that it didn't suffer by comparison. I did think it was a little early in the season/series to play the old "it's all a dream!" tactic, but they side-stepped disaster fairly…

So, Baby of Macon. What's the obstacle getting it released in the US? I mean, beyond it just being controversial. Considering I watched Gaspar Noe's Love on Netflix streaming over the weekend, in what seemed to be a unedited cut, I can't believe that its content is the only factor preventing it from being all…

Those people who pay money to watch Jaws while floating in a pool… they must be made of stone. I couldn't go in a hotel pool, which had crystal blue water, and wasn't any more than 7 feet deep at any point, without imagining a fin breaking the surface of the water.

The house I grew up in was extremely conducive to freaking myself out. It was built in 1798, and had all sorts of bizarre quirks, like a brick staircase that went up the inside of the huge chimney at the center of the house, weird wooden doors located halfway up walls, and a basement with a dirt floor that would have…

Mine are definitely horror movie related, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you anything specific that inspired them. Like, if I'm at the bottom of the stairs and the room behind me is dark, I get pretty easily convinced that I have to get up the stairs as fast as I can, lest whatever's creeping up behind me catches me.…

I would have it no other way.