Ha! Bye James!

Honestly, I forget. There's a good subreddit at r/brakebills, where I bet we could get then answer without having to page through the books.

Yes, from my memory of the books, one of the ways Quentin stops seeming like such an insufferable asshole is that he works very hard to maximize what innate magical talent he started with. I think if they continue to not show that, it'll be harder to make him a protagonist we can root for.

Maybe if you offer Lev a cameo he'll sign off on it.

Quentin will call her "a fox", then turn a do a big stage wink to the camera.

It's the place for people who write alternate episodes for their own personal edification.

Alternately, to the point of this episode, there's probably a master's thesis to be had in exploring the Magicians trilogy from the conceit that Quentin really is hallucinating the entire thing.

| I have this suspicion that they throw all those little easter eggs about the characters into the show because we won't be getting them on the show.

medium.com, my friend. Go for it.

Yes, identical. Except also, presumably, in the show universe there's not a guy named Lev Grossman, who wrote a trilogy called The Magicians?

This will probably sound like fawning b.s., but I wish I could watch the version in your head, instead.

It's probably too early to say this, but so far it feels to me like this was written with no idea if there would even be a second season. So I won't be surprised if the season endings and beginnings don't match the books at all.

This episode indicates that they'll go far into stuff that isn't really in the books, so maybe we'll get lucky and they'll lean hard into the time stuff? Maybe even enough to justify The Beast knowing Quentin from the beginning?

Yeah, that's cool. I can imagine that they're going for the aspects of that that are cool, too. The problem, I guess, is that showing a intentionally bad/fuzzy copy without making us watch a bad/fuzzy copy is difficult.

Marina seems to me more like the Medium Bad; just bad enough to pull the show along for a while, like you said, but who the good guys can crush when it's time for them to get a win.

Yeah, those two would dovetail nicely. I expect Marina is going to continue as a regular character for a while.

That said, once the show decided to make the choice dream world/reality, I think the execution of it was mostly good. I liked how it had the absurdity of dream logic. I liked the real world bleeding through around the edges. I liked how there were elements from Brakebills mixed with what we saw of the mental hospital…

Yeah. Maybe it's just one too many layers of "this is almost as good as the thing it's imitating" stacked on top of each other?

I think there's a subtle but potentially important difference between Quentin being Jane's chosen one, and being some sort of divinely appointed Chosen One. The show seems to be leaning pretty hard towards the latter.

Quentin's dream seems a little more forgivable as a necessary device to get Julia's character to a spot where they need her, but only a little. It seems like with the freedom to invent anything from scratch to do that job, they could have come up with something a little better.