This was a terrible episode in what is amounting to a pretty crappy season.

No comments? Have we turned our backs on Happy Endings?

If they still have working generators, guns, and playground equipment, did the apocalypse happen less than a century ago?

Pete, James, whoever; I generally don't start retaining character names until the episode count reaches double digits.

I've also not read the books, but I think they did a decent job establishing The Beast will be the Big Bad in the opening scene of the pilot and then when he tore out the Dean's eyes later that episode. Quentin and the Scooby Gang may not yet be in the loop as to why the Beast concerned the Dean before they were even…

The Beast/Fillory/(3rd Year Class, probably) plot line looks like it's something that's going to take the entire season to come to the foreground, which is a pretty standard formula to follow in television writing. Joss Whedon would call it the C Plot, as I recall.

I think Lupin is saying:

He's a part-time Sky Writer; up to 20 letters on two lines, good rates too.

I would say the opposite. Seeing this trope in the fourth episode felt unearned, and the inclusion of Q's father drew a line under it. We don't know enough about the character's emotional connections to anyone but Julia, so to invoke his father as the object of pain and betrayal rang hollow. At no point did I believe…

It isn't the addition of Christian mythology I have a problem with, it's the demotion of all previously introduced mythology to something lesser than, or strictly defined by, an explicitly Judeo-Christian cosmology. Epic would have been introducing a world where both God/Jesus/Lucifer and Kali/Baldur/etc are more or…

Never. Adding Yahweh and angels torpedoed the show. The shark-jumping moment in my opinion was Hammer of the Gods (season 5, ep 19), in which non-Judeo Christian gods are retconned to be little more than people-eating monsters (and angels in disguise), who can be killed with wooden stakes and such.

Supernatural was a way better show in its first three seasons than The Magicians is now. Spn has been treading water for the better part of a decade now, having completely abandoned the format and premise that made it so great and endlessly revisiting bro angst while going through the motions of fighting…

It strikes me as odd that for a show set primarily at a magic school the only real scenes of anyone learning magic have been those hedge witches (what?), while Quentin et al mostly seem to be partying and sitting in lectures not learning magic.

So where does Brakebills fit in? Are they more of a community college?

Abercrombie and Martin

It's a genre steeped in destinies and righteous quests and prophecies that must be fulfilled, and family/clan/race honour to be defended/restored, not because anyone has any motivation but because there's a game of Good versus Evil afoot and it's all or nothing. And if you fuck up, magic can spare you the consequences.

Thank you.

Isn't that pretty much all fantasy? I think some writers are just better at hiding it.

Is it me or is this a recent development in TV/media reviews? A character can murder and torture episode after episode and it barely warrants a comment, but even threatening rape and the torches come out: the character, the writers, the show runner – all must burn forever in shame.

Why don't you look into the documentation behind it instead of denying it can happen? Involuntary physical responses, intoxication, and coercion work both ways.