| The showrunners seem really confused as to what parts to keep and what parts to jettison.

Yes. Not that the show needs gratuitous sex scenes, like GoT, but getting to the network-approved halfway point is kind of the worst of both worlds. Laughably distracting, even aside from the levitating. (Julia can barely lift a coin, and they're hitting their heads on the ceiling on a first date like it's the Love to…

Yes, this exactly. At the current rate, when they get to the Rams, the kids will be like, "Meh. Dieties."

| …trying to keep up with the quality of shows the golden age of television produces.

So in the universe of the show, The Breakfast Club is a thing, but the Chronicles of Narnia are not? That seems a bit too convenient.

Also, in that scene: they're in an open public space on campus, the outdoor lights are on and all the lights in the nearby buildings, and they're casting big magic and making a hell of a racket — and no one else sees a thing? Or hears them? The place is warded a dozen ways from Sunday, and the fountain has just been…

| Then why do large parts of it look like the Google campus?

I was fuzzy on the implications of the end of that scene. Did Alice mean that if she couldn't save Charlie, she was hoping to get turned into a niffin? Consumed by magic?

I think the network trusts their audience, but it assumes/wants that audience to be 17. At 45, I'm way outside any conceivable demo that they care about — I get that. (No offense, seventeen year olds. At 17, I'd have thought this was the best show on tv, and in 1988 it would have been.) Unfortunately for me, the…

Yeah, you're probably right. But that said, it won't help potential viewers (who haven't read the books) that come here to check out the show and immediately get spoiled on the entire series by people like me.

Dean Fogg: We hope you won't need to self medicate here.
Cut to The Beast crushing his hands and ripping his eyes out.
Quentin: Where's my damn pills!?!

I think the AV Club both dropped the ball and missed an opportunity here.

I'm intrigued, on the telephony front, by the way the show seems to be quietly set in 2003. More than wondering why Brakebills charges for long distance calls, I was thinking, Why is there a pay phone in this show at all? Then the flip phones in the drawer at the Physical Kids' cottage were a pretty good prop, just…

| - Its weird calling them the Physical Kids when they are all over 25.

Yeah, I still can't wrap my head around Rupert Chatwin as a war veteran before he even enters Fillory. How does that make sense or help the show?

Reading this as Brienne saying it was pretty funny. Like Renly's totally fine but Quentin's a jerk. Wonder what other shows she's ambivalent about?

I'd set the over/under at a full 30 seconds.

I like your imagined version. It would be somewhat unsuitable for TV, but I'd even have liked it if when the focus switched to Julia's story, at the start of hypothetical season 2, it stayed there for a solid 3-4 episodes, perhaps with Quentin as the "guest star" where they overlapped, but all from her perspective.…

| I thought the scene was great in the show until Martin leans in and greets Quentin. (why does MARTIN know who he is?)

I agree with this, and/but I would totally watch Quentin Coldwater's Day Off.