Maybe part of the confusion here is that Marina's henchman is called Pete; James is Julia's boyfriend.

I see what you mean — I'd like more actual spells and casting, too. But I'll counter that in this episode we saw Penny teleport to Fillory (?), Quentin fix the model plane (and reveal magic to his Dad), Q practicing hand positions, and Q and Alice win the Welters match (with an apparently powerful or unusual) spell.…

Even just thinking about the challenge and complications makes me nervous. I guess it's a good reminder that I should give the show a comfortable margin of respect.

Ah, I see what you meant. Yes, her problem is compounding itself; that desperation to get magic reduces her ability to act rationally or to finesse other people.

I do like the idea of keeping the Julia story where it happens in the books' timeline. It seems like that would leave room to stretch out the Q plot, with details about discovering Brakebills and his relationships there and how mind blowing it was for him to find out magic is real. Also, studying, practicing spells,…

So, I'm curious: does your version of the first episode have to fulfill the requirements of a pilot? Or has it already been 'greenlit' for a full season? It seems to me that would make a difference in how far into the story the first episode has to go, and how much sizzle there has to be at the end. Yeah?

Cool. +1 for the show, for finding a way to show more of Quentin's worldview that didn't seem like a blatant exposition dump.

| It is funny, isn't it, how, for many of us, the faithfulness of the storyline reproduction was somehow both our first and our only measure of quality of the show?

I agree. The first book captured that undergraduate sense of just kind of hanging out between classes and sorting yourself out; living from one semester to the next while grinding through coursework and theorizing about a bunch of shit that was way beyond your pay grade. There wasn't a bigger world to consider or a…

Seems to me that it's going somewhere. Maybe not quickly, but the show is back on track with her book story now (Book 2). They just forwarded some of her overall downward trajectory to the beginning of the story.

Yes, it seems like Julia is the only one who's shown any exhilaration with it, and that was when she was being conned by Marina into casting a different spell than what she'd intended.

It would help if we at least got to see Q humming Shake It Off to himself over breakfast or something. I mean, you can't get that song stuck in your head and stay depressed all the time.

Yeah, I thought that by moving her story up to the start and getting her to the safe house so quickly that the show was just going to edit the sad parts of Julia's story. But it looks like they might even steer into it, which would be interesting and possibly really good.

Yes, but from the perspective of her character, what are her other choices? Brakebills is clearly out. She's not going to be getting one of those hotly contested internships. She got burned by the best gang in NY, and the second best is a bunch of newbs. Spells on the Internet burn your apartment down. Should she take…

I liked that, too. I don't remember it from the books — anyone know if it's there, or new to the show?

I think the CGI has been pretty variable like this throughout the first four episodes. Like in episode three, the hazy equations floating in the air as the wards were deactivated were terrific. But Jane Chatwin slowly getting erased in Quentin's dream world, and his little fireworks spell, looked ridiculous.

The A.V. Club
"Sturm", not "stürm".

The show hit on this nicely in Quentin's first conversation (?) with Dean Fogg, too, when he asked if they train magicians to then go take over the world. Fogg said something nicely ambiguous, like, "if that's your thing, then go for it"

Or reboot Cheers, with the bar as the local hangout where magician podiatrists go after a day of spelling away toenail fungus.

Yes, I agree that it's clear now that the show is a loose (or very loose) adaptation. But, at least for me, it took a few episodes to see that it was going in that direction — episode 3 sealed it, but I wasn't sure before then.