Sami on The Magicians 1.2

The Magicians airs at 9pm on SyFy Monday nights.*

Episode two! Just as neat as episode one! This show hits the ground running and keeps going, and I hope it holds up!

This picks up right where last episode left off, right after The Beast plucked out the Dean's eyes and everyone noticed that Q and Co were able to do something about the paralysis spell that had trapped everyone else. Quentin knows that this happened because they tried to summon Alice's brother and somehow that let The Beast through, but he doesn't want the administration to know because that's forbidden and he doesn't want to be expelled. If he is, he'll get mind-wiped, and he can't handle going back to the ill-fitting mess he used to be. 

But he's not the only one hiding things. Penny has always heard voices, since he's a mind reader, but one of them has always been able to cut through all the noise, and taught him all he knows about magic. He's never met him, but he's his only friend--and he just found out that only friend is The Beast that everyone fears and hates and is evil. So he's determined to leave.

In Magical Fight Club, Julia shows up for her tour and falls into a test-trap. They lock her into a meat freezer with another initiate, and they have to figure their own way out. Julia refuses to give in and does what needs to be done--cutting into a human body that's being stored there--to be able to work the spell they need to not die of cold before they can find their way out. Turns out that other initiate was the one in charge, and she likes Julia's spunk.

Meanwhile, Quinn is a mess waiting to see what'll happen. He picks a fight with Penny and gets a spell he doesn't know how to use correctly tossed back at him--and breaks his arm super bad. And he learns that everyone has a dark past here--Elliot killed someone accidentally because he didn't know he was telekinetic until he was pushed too far, and pushed a bully in front of a car. He says that magic comes from pain--that you have to have bad stuff like that to do it.

And Quin is more and more convinced that Fillory, from the books, is a real place. They know that there are alternate worlds that they can sometimes interact with, and it seems too much to be a coincidence that there's that truth, plus these books full of kids who disappear through clocks written by a man who watched several neighbor kids go missing, and these dreams Quinn has been having that gave him the sigil he needed to do the spell that let the Beast in.

In the end, Q doesn't get his mind wiped, and he gets on probation instead of expulsion. The Specialist likes that he's doing his best and he wants to do magic so badly despite not being super great at it. And unbeknownst to him, she has a talk with the Dean--blind and broken-handed--that implies that she and he were part of something similar to this that happened before. And that's a really interesting way for the story to go--the administration of this magical school doesn't block or deny the kids, but wants them to succeed to do what they couldn't do themselves before. 

And there's moles in Breakbills trying to get info and supplies for the Fight Club!

Two episodes in, and this show has so much story in it, but doesn't feel crammed or rushed or shorthanding. It's giving everyone their moments, and it's implying more without having to explicitly state it all. In fact, no one is explicitly saying anything at all. They're letting all these kids figure stuff out for themselves, which is both exciting and potentially disastrous, and it's so interesting to see how it goes. There's so much going on, and it's going to be so cool seeing how it all goes together as the season unfolds.

I'm really enjoying how this show looks. Breakbills is lit so warm and glowy, and then the city is bland and grey, and the Magical Fight Club is all chilly and blue. Magic looks awesome here, all complex systems and precise hand-gestures. And The Beast! SO GOOD. A man made of moths in a suit who can walk through mirrors. Quinn and Co broke got the other students out and broke the mirror, and the school is redoing all the wards, but apparently Alice isn't meant to be there but hasn;t been magically ejected yet, and The Beast got in once, so who's to say he can't get in again? 

What did you think of episode two? What do you think happens next? Tell us in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

Tweets about #themagicians from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

• Sami on The Magicians 1.1

*Because apparently every damn thing needs to be in one hour on one day. But it also reruns later, after midnight, like most SyFy shows do.

Sami on Shadowhunters 1.1

Shadowhunters airs at 9pm on Freeform* Tuesday nights.

You remember when Stitchers started, and I said the first episode was too fast and talky and not super naturalistic, but was also cool and kind of addicting?** That's apparently just how this channel does pilots, because this one was like that.

It's also both like and not like the books, and there was so much complaining on the tweets that it was hard to get through all that to get to the tweets that were more positive. Because it IS different--but it's also a different thing. They didn't just randomly change stuff like they did for the movie, they created something inspired by the books but not the same as the books, and they were very clear about that from the beginning. So on it's own merits, here's how the pilot went.

Clary is turning 18, and her mom keeps not just telling her what that means for her--namely, that through her whole life, she's been having her memories manipulated*** but now that she's adult, it's going to wear off, and that apparently also means that people who have been looking for her and her mom can find them. Jocelyn gives Clary a stele, but doesn't tell her what it is, what it means, or how to use it.

Meanwhile, Clary gets into a neat art program she wanted to get into, and hangs out with Simon and his band. But the art that got her in was mostly all those things she's not supposed to remember, and the band's gig happens to be near a Downworlder nightclub where she sees people no one else can see kill people who burst into flames and open up crazy jaws that aren't human. She tries to tell her mom what happened, and to her credit, Jocelyn tries to tell her, but they're attacked and she pushes Clary through a portal while she stays behind to stop the people following them. 

She manages to burn down their house, but doesn't stop herself from being captured, though she does put herself into a magical coma. They take her back to Valentine who has a hideout in Chernobyl of all places, and he actually seems to care about her and be mad that she's not conscious and whole as he told them to keep her. This scene was especially cool because 1) Jocelyn was a Shadowhunter and it's really neat seeing her fighting like one with my actual eyes, and 2) it would have been really easy to make Valentine a caricature like they did in the movie****, but they went just as evil but also much more human and a little more subtle than that.

Clary winds up at the precinct where Luke, her mom's sort of boyfriend, works as a cop, but her timing is not good and she sees him telling the people who were chasing her that she and her mom mean nothing to him. So she runs off. This scene was not so great, though, because the cuts were sudden and weird, and there was little context on Luke to know that he's bluffing--it just sounds like he's creepy and mean when he was nice one scene ago. Especially since he doesn't get beaten up or anything, he's just being cold. Also, there's no Jace at this point, so she has no context for anything that's happening, and when he saves her and she wakes up, there's a lot of weird exposition.

Inside the institute, he tries to tell her what's going on, but he's not nearly as suave as he thinks he is and they keep getting interrupted, and Clary comes off as a little dense and a little not-freaked-out-enough by finding a tattoo on her body that she didn't consent to. But they got it right that her main focus is finding her mom, and the start of falling for Jace is handled pretty well. Even better is the way Simon is always on the outside and trying to solve things in normal ways, but honestly trying to help, and how he has no chill for the crazy stuff happening around them. 

They're a little heavy-handed about putting Clary literally between Jace and Simon, but what evs. It's a pretty good set up for the story overall, and it's worth seeing more of.

The actors seem a little inexperienced and not quite settled into their characters, but they do a pretty good job of balancing the clash between normal life things and really weird things. The fight scene at the club was cheesy as hell, but later ones are better. The plot moves along way too fast, especially in the first half of the episode, and it really feels like it should have been a two-hour or two-part premier so that we could have more of the normal world, more of Jocelyn trying to tell her what's up, more of her having weird experiences before everything goes to crap, and more of the family interactions that were totally bulldozed over. As it is, we hardly know what's going on with her mom and Luke, with her and her school, with anything, before it all falls apart. And we don't get Jace investigating her and trying to figure her out before he rescues her, so his fascination with her looks less epic and more sudden.

The two biggest changes were Luke's job, and the Institute. Having Luke as a cop with a public job and a partner and crimes to solve will change things in unexpected ways. He's not keeping to himself or hiding in stacks of books, so he's already a more public and confident figure than he was in the books--and there's all these new characters we have to figure out. That's cool--we don't have a cheat sheet on them, so we have to actually watch them to see what happens. It's also strange, because so much of the rest seems a little cheat-sheeted.

The Institute is now sort of a supernatural CSI with fancy computers and displays and lots of other people, and that's strange. In the books, a lot of the problems the Institute has comes from how behind-the-times they are, refusing to update their tech and deal with the mortal world, and with how few their numbers are. That doesn't seem to be the case here. It does, however, separate them from, say, Sleepy Hollow and Supernatural, where they go after the baddies alone and with only their wits and some basic magic. It's more organized, which does suit a professional evil-chasing organization. We'll have to see how it goes.

The only other really big change so far seems to be Maureen. She was a younger fangirl of Simon's band in the books, all childlike and obsessive, and close enough to the edge that she goes crazy when weird things start happening to her later on. Here, she's as old as everyone else, and a part of the band's support system, doesn't seem all that obsessed with Simon himself, and does seem pretty self-confident and competent. We'll see how that changes things later on, but I guess it doesn't really matter that much now.

But they got Magnus Bane so right.

It was fun, in between the strange bits where people talk too much or sound off, and it'll be super interesting to see how the story develops--how close will it be to the books? How different will it go? What will the changes wash out like as the story unfolds? Will it just suddenly click and turn from okay to awesome in the second or third episode like Stitchers did? It's good enough to stick around and see!

What did you guys think about Shadowhunters? Share in the comments or come talk to us on Twitter!

 Tweets about #shadowhunters from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

*Used to be ABCFamily, but they're rebranding to be grittier and such.
**You probably don't because that was on my old page at Examiner and not here, and that's not mine anymore. But I did say something like that.
***Obligatory reminder that I really hate the "I didn't tell you vital pieces of information because I wanted to keep you safe" trope.
****I love me some Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but I think he was given a lunatic mess of that character and even he couldn't make it better.

Outlander s1e1 liveblog roundup!

As you may or may not know, I frequently liveblog shows over on my tumblr--here's what I thought about Outlander this week:*

(from Starz)

• Lord and Lady I love the Skye Boat Song.
• Dear Scotland, this show is so dangerous for me to watch because it makes me miss you so.
• Claire is such a good ideal of how to be a woman, so far.
• From a purely writerly point of view? I love how carefully and delicately they handle all the layers of framing—the 40s now, the 40s then, the 20s or 30s in Egypt, the 1700s, all of it. So delicate and artful. I want to read this script and pick it apart.
• And a show with a VoiceOver that works? Fabulous.
• I feel like I need to have soft 40s hair.
• Damn, Mrs B&B reminded me that I forgot to get a box of oolong…
• I love the Druid ceremony.
• "the reverend’s housekeeper is a witch!"
• It’s been, like, fifteen years since I read that book, but I feel like every single person the camera lingers on will be important.**
• This show had me at drum-and-pipe chase scenes.***
• I love the tangle that is Frank—she wants to reconnect, but he asks hard questions, then he doesn’t go back to the stones with her because of research and she winds up trapped in the past with a guy who looks just like him—and is the reason Frank wasn’t with her to begin with.
• I’ve missed random conversational Gaelic.****
• "there seemed to be some question as to whether the lady was or was not a hoor."
• Oh, and another frame—the VoiceOver is probably from the future, after what we’re seeing has happened!
• So did they just basically teach us that ‘sure’ is a Gaelic loan-word?
• I wonder how much prep these dudes had for riding and dismounting in classic-style kilts without just ripping the whole thing off by accident?
• Just adore how the big tough dudes have NO IDEA what she’s talking about when she goes nurse-y on them, but they also don’t stop her.
• How many people do you think just rushed out and bought the whole Outlander series?

And because I actually watched the preview, too, here's what I had to say about that:

• Outlander! It has the Skye Boat Song as the theme!
• It’s a period piece inside a period piece!
• You guys. I want to move back to Scotland and it’s only ten minutes in.
• Ohmy, Mrs Randall!
• Note to self: oolong is best for reading the leaves.
• Jesus H Roosevelt Christ
• Boobs! That’s how you know it’s premium cable.
• Guys, I’m starting to be a huge fan of Bear McCreary’s scores.*****
• Gaelic!
• Or something like it.
• Yes! Shot down that rape bs right off!******
• There’s the rain I know.
• Yes, mam, cursy lady in the 1700s!
• Verdict: I love it!

You guys? This is how you do a historical with a strong female lead--she's smart, sassy, resourceful, classy, knows and controls her own mind and body, and she's not once useless and simpering. Meanwhile, the world is spot on 1940s, then fabulously grimy 1700s, and there's even a second or three of scandalous 20s/30s in Egypt and it's great. 

What did you think?

NOTES:

*I'm going to have to be more on top of these roundups as we get into Pilot Season!

**Like that girl on the hill, and the guy looking through her window in the rain, and so on and so forth.

***Well, really, I automatically like things with pipes-and-drums at all, so...

****We had four channels when I lived in Scotland, and one of them was in Gaelic; sometimes we'd watch cartoons and see if we could figure out what they were saying because we'd seen the English ones already. And my p4 teacher's mother only spoke Gaelic, and she herself had to learn English to be a teacher.

*****Black Sails, Walking Dead, this. I want him to do the score of all my favorite shows from now on--and if I have any say in any shows made from my stuff? Him.

******It's a dumb plot that's becoming too prevalent, and they were just like "nope, not gonna have it" and kept going, and it was great.