Major Spoilers Ahead
Death at a Funeral
After Kady spent 2 episodes chasing after magic balls and summoning demons, she was too late. Ding, dong Penny is dead!
Sh*t is right! But it turns out he is only mostly dead. His body died, but he astral projected out of there the second the demon (AKA Death for you Supernatural fans) started poking around in his gut to dig out the magic cancer. What do Kady and the gang do to start figuring out how to get him back? Not much! After Quentin gets over his fit of laughter at the news, they gather around with some shots of whiskey and fumble for nice words about the dearly departed. Nobody even cries! “Appreciate me!” poor Penny screams as he is forced to witness the lamest funeral ever, his own.
Kady’s downward spiral reaches the ultimate low when she runs off to shoot up, resulting in an overdose. Fine by me, as I find her character utterly useless … Thwarted! Julia gets a warning in the form of another weird-eyed, zombified person. This is the second time we have seen one of these encounters. My best guess is Persephone is still working to make up for what her son did to Julia. My second best guess is this is misdirection from the trickster, Reynard the fox, himself using her for his own benefit? Either way Julia reaches Kady in time and musters up enough magic to use her sparky, glowing hands to save her.
The Margolem in The Closet
Penny is going to have to act fast to make contact with the living world. Kady is informed that Penny’s soul did not report for duty at The Library. They are calling in a corpse eater (nod to Harry Potter death eaters?) to consume his body and release his soul from its tether to it. However, this would make Penny their slave, leaving Kady with a difficult choice. The problem is, Penny isn’t quite done with his body!
Penny bumps into an unlikely source of help in Hyman Cooper. It turns out Penny is not the first traveler whose body died while his mind was elsewhere. Although Hyman notoriously used his special powers for perverted indulgences, he’s picked up a few skills since being trapped on the astral plane. He teaches Penny to “be the Penny!” by shouting this phrase at him repeatedly until Penny inhabits an actual penny. If only he can use this new skill to jump into something that can help him communicate. He briefly takes over the Margolem, a life-sized Barbie version of Margo who we met last year, but he fails to control the mouth and only manages to get out a few moans. Quentin promptly bashes her head in, thinking something more sinister is happening.
Penny’s last flicker of hope is extinguished when Julia and Quentin don’t find the second key, which is said to reveal things that are hidden, before Kady and Alice send for the corpse eater. Penny jumps into a candle, burning his own body.
Feast or Fountain
Where did the first of the seven keys take Eliot and fam? We have our answer! It serves them up hot and fresh to the cannibals who have taken over The Neitherlands! When magic died, so did the magical objects needed to travel between worlds, leaving a few unfortunate souls to fend for themselves in The Neitherlands. Fresh fingerling librarian fricassee anyone?
It turns out the first key doesn’t conjure a shadow bat, it creates an illusion of your biggest fear. So when Eliot tries to call down the bat to scare away the cannibals, his homophobic father appears instead. Using his father as bait, essentially feeding dear old dad to cannibals (how’s that for daddy issues!), Eliot and fam are able to escape when the screaming starts. They topple through the doors of their Brakebills home. After a dramatic retelling of their ordeal, Eliot tests out the truth key. Unimpressed with it’s performance, he says hi to Penny, “WAIT!”
Now that Penny’s body is destroyed, how will our Magicians get him back into a more solid form?
