The Magicians 311 – Twenty-Three

Grab your TARDIS and strap in! We’re one episode away from The Magicians season finale and this week we’re off to timeline Twenty-Three, where the beast is alive and well! He’s doing his thing picking off defenseless magicians … while wearing a mysterious key that gives him visions of the future. Could this be one of the remaining keys they need for the quest? They’ll have to defeat the beast again to find out, but the beast in 23 is a little different than last time. Whose face is hiding under the moths in timeline Twenty-Three?

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Familiar Faces

Q and the gang are stuck in hiding from Dick Tick Flickwick who usurped Fillory until they can get magic back and their thrones. They send Josh to talk to Julia about getting the next key from the fairy realm, but that will have to wait. He doesn’t have much time to deliver the message before he and Julia are caught in a Tesla Flexion and visited by … Josh. Timeline 23 Josh delivers a message of his own, Star Wars style.  Julia and Josh go through the Fillory clock where they find Josh 23, and another familiar face. Marina is still alive in this timeline, and still a bit of a bitch and never became friends with Julia in this timeline. Instead she and Dick Josh 23 drug our Josh and Julia planning to trade them for the beast to let them live.

Julia has a better idea. Why not use her god-level power to kill the beast like they did in timeline 40 (minus the whole niffin-ing out thing since Julia is super juiced after saving the fairies)? They retrieve the spell they need from a couple of very emotional Margo and Eliot ghosts before meeting another familiar face. Penny is ALSO alive in this timeline, and in love … with Julia???  This could make things awkward back home. So lets say he travels to timeline 40 and something happens to this version of him leaving his body intact. Could underworld Penny inhabit his body? Or will we have two Pennys from now on? Underworld Penny working for the librarians and perusing the fate Hades mentioned, AND this version of Penny helping out his friends and POSSIBLY perusing a romantic relationship with Julia? How well do you think Kady will handle this?

Kill the Beast

Julia launches the spell at the beast, but this beast is stronger than the last one. THIS BEAST IS QUENTIN with god-level power! Did not see that plot twist coming. Let’s dissect how this happened. When we met Alice 23 last season, she was obsessed with the underworld. The beast had killed Quentin 23 and Alice wanted to find his shade in the underworld so he could rest in peace. As Marina points out, we’re missing some pages of the story. So how did we go from the beast killing Q 23 to Q 23 being the beast? Only one person to ask.

Alice 23

Alice 23 is a cat lady now, except with messenger bunnies. And instead of being the lonely spinster with bunnies for friendly companions, she’s Captain Hops and the rest of the bunnies’ box-stacking bitch. Safe to say, post-niffin Alice 40 should count herself #blessed. When Quentin and Julia 40 used the Tesla Flexion to contact Alice 23 after Q 23 died, Q 40’s love for Alice inspired her to renew her efforts to save him. Alice 23 brought Quentin 23 back from the underworld without his shade, making him the beast. Then he killed Ember, got god power, pissing off the old gods like timeline 40 and they took magic away. In an effort to keep pesky magicians from bringing magic back and challenging him, he started killing them. Now that Alice is crippled with crushing guilt that she got pretty much all of the magicians wiped out along with magic itself, she went to visit a knife-maker in the past (Fen’s dad) to get a weapon to kill Beast Q. The problem is, this is the same knife they used in timeline 40 that requires god magic to touch it. Julia’s powers win again! Josh isn’t the only one with a time-travel headache.

The Sad Dread Pirate Roberts

Alice distracts Beast Quentin while Julia and the gang move in closer, sacrificing herself. Alice 23 is hopeful to the last that the Quentin she knew is still in there somewhere, but he slashes her open without a blink. His tone and body language do suggest that life as a shade-less beast imitation is not much fun. I’ll take Dread Pirate Roberts over this guy any day!  As Julia suggested, she uses Q against himself, loaning him her shade so he can feel the grief from all the damage he caused. She isn’t able to save him, but he has the decency to feel bad enough to kill himself. Before he dies, Quentin reveals an interesting tidbit about the key quest. The vision key showed him a glimpse of Julia unlocking a door to restore magic, but unleashing a monster instead. What could the monster be? Could Q be misinterpreting what he saw, or is this the mysterious person the shapeshifter demon mentioned who has been pulling the strings to this whole season? The real BIG BAD?

Final questions: What is the quickening that is going to happen to Josh? Quickening often describes when a baby first moves in the womb. Is Josh going to be a werewolf daddy?

Also I didn’t catch where Q said he got the key. I wonder if this is related to how Cassandra (the “Alice” who writes everyone’s books) is able to know everyone’s stories?

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