The Magicians S02E03 “The Divine Elimination” (Review, Spoilers)

Warning, this contains spoilers. Well that was quite an episode. Is she…is she really dead? Do magic deaths count? She’ll come back, won’t she? Hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself, but you’ve seen it. We can’t not talk about it. Alright, back to the episode before we get to the ending. Margo, Q, Alice, Penny and Eliot are still ready to kill The Beast (Martin Chatwin) but there’s a small problem, as if The Beast wasn’t a big enough problem on his own. The Beast has cursed the castle which has made the four rulers (not Penny, he’s not royal) all certain they need to kill the others. Meanwhile Julia is working with The Beast and Miranda to kill Reynard the Fox. What could possibly go wrong?

The Magicians is one of those programmes where a scene is never wasted. If you watch an episode again you get more from it. It throws in a line or a scene which is subtle enough to almost slip by but if you’re paying attention it really stands out, particularly if you know what happens. It’s like they’re giving you a signpost that doesn’t quite make sense until you get to the place and then suddenly it clicks.

The lonely Eliot has been on his own again and really misses his friends. He’s made a throne room and plans on some pomp and ceremony. Once he sits on a throne, he’s convinced Margo, Q and Alice plan on killing him. At first this seems like paranoia, but when they get cursed too they actually are trying to kill him. It’s up to the non-royal Penny to save the day as he attempts to stop the curse before it kills them by…killing them. It’s not as bad as it sounds. His theory is if he uses potassium chloride and then revives them with adrenaline they’ll technically have died so the curse will be lifted. True to form, The Magicians makes it funny. Margo injects Q and he dies. They all believe that if they inject the others they will be the one who survives and start chasing each other with syringes. Somehow the plan actually works and they’re ready to fight The Beast again.

The Beast is helping Miranda and Julia to destroy Reynard the Fox. The Beast sings “A hunting we will go, a hunting we will go, we’ll catch a fox and put him in a box, and then we’ll let him go” which causes Miranda extra doubt about the reliability of their agreement. That’s not the worst it gets for Miranda in this episode though. She summons Reynard who kills her cat and eats her finger, but that’s still not as bad as things will get.

In Fillory, now ready to kill The Beast, Penny jumps in and transports him to the enchanted forest. Julia tries to stop him and ends up in the forest too. This coincides with the exact moment they were going to kill Reynard, leaving Miranda alone with him and the knife. She comes off second best. So what about the plan to kill The Beast? That also doesn’t go to plan. Alice misses and only removes one of his arms, severely weakening him. His plans to revive himself at the magic well aren’t helped by Ember (the goat man) pooping in it. The powerful Alice should be able to kill him, surely. Well, possibly. She rips him open and he returns to being the moth man. The magic has taken control of her and the only way to stop her from killing them all is with Q’s Keiko Demon, but he unwittingly kills her.

I possibly said that a bit quickly. Alice is dead. It took me by surprise when it happened and it took a while to sink in. As a wounded Q tries to help her and Eliot and Margo attempt to comfort him the credits roll without music. At that point I accepted that they may have actually killed her. It was very well done in that it was big enough to allow the death of a main character but fast enough to take me by surprise. She sort of died, came back because it was just a trick, and then she properly died. Alice had started to become an interesting character. She was probably the archetypal brilliant nerd who became Q’s lover and then his burden. Now with something to do again, she’s gone, but will she be back?

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