[Quentin tells the Tale of the Seven Keys. He tells of a knight fighting to get her father back. Margo interrupts him and Eliot tells her to let him continue. Quentin continues, telling of a door that swallowed the seven keys to open with the girl’s father in seven chains. Eliot interrupts him this time, questioning what happened to the keys. Margo says they’re fucked] CLARA: I figured that was a particularly good place to end that clip. Welcome back to Physical Kids Weekly. I’m CLARA. DANI: And I’m DANI. CLARA: And today we’re talking about episode 313 -- the season finale -- “Will You Play With Me?” DANI: We’re joined today by the author of The Magicians novels, Mr. LEV Grossman. Welcome, LEV! LEV: Thank you. Good to be here. You don’t have to do the mister, I feel like we’re past that. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: I kinda put it on there just to see how you’d respond. LEV: Forgive me. DANI: Sorry. CLARA: You know this has been a season about tricksters and gods, we just had to throw our own hat in the ring. [LAUGHTER] Before we get into the episode, we wanted to talk a little about what you’ve been working on since we spoke with you last August. I kinda can’t believe it’s been that long. When we talked with you then, you were working on a new novel, The Bright Sword. So I guess we’ll start there, how’s that going? LEV: That’s such a good question that I don’t know the answer to. I finished a draft of it in December and now, it’s April 1st, right? I swore an oath that I wouldn’t touch it for three months so I guess theoretically I should be back to work on it...today! [CLARA LAUGHS] CLARA: Sorry. LEV: I’m really proud of it. It’s REALLY long. The Magicians books are about 145 thousand words each and this one its pushing 250. By fantasy standards that’s not even that long. Patrick Rothfuss, 250 thousand, that’s nothing to him! He’ll bat that out in a morning. For me, it’s complicated and there’s a lot of pieces to manage and I thought, I just gotta step away from this for a while to get some perspective on it. So that is what I’ve done and I’ve spent the past three months since then working on other projects. I’m in a really frosty state right now because I’ve been working hard on a lot of creative projects for the last three years and none of them have quite made it to fruition. I wrote a screenplay based on a short story of mine that’s still making the rounds in Hollywood. I’ve written treatments for movies, which are still kind of in development. I wrote a middle grade novel, which is getting the same treatment as The Bright Sword even though it’s just a middle grade novel, it’s also become too complex for me to comprehend so I put that down. Then I am developing a TV show with some very established producers in Hollywood and I’m hoping that in the next month or two we’ll get a greenlight for that from a network but we haven't taken it to networks yet. We’re still refining it. So I’ve been working at a kind of a fever pitch with the result that absolutely nothing by me has been published or shown anywhere. So there’s a lot in the works but nothing’s done. DANI: You kinda stole the question right from this because we were just about to follow up with what else are you working on [LAUGHS] LEV: Yeah, it’s funny, I walk around and I’m always boring my family with details of these projects, with at least half a dozen, but nobody knows about them. Nothing’s been announced. Nothing kind of ready to show. Maybe they’ll all come into fruition at once and then everything will come flooding out. But it hasn’t happened yet. CLARA: I feel like that happens a lot, especially if you put a lot of things on the backburner. You’ll sit there marinating on them for ages and suddenly a burst of productivity will come out of the place. LEV: That’s the plan! I’m planning for a burst of productivity. Again, I’ve written a ton of words, like loads and loads, and multiple tv and screen treatments. I just am waiting for something to mature and it hasn’t quite happened yet. CLARA: Well, I think we’ll be excited to hear next time where things are. I thought it might be fun for us to start this episode out by talking about highlights from this season as a whole now that it’s over. For me (although DANI’s might be pretty similar; feel free to surprise me), the big ones were the Queliot adventure in “A Life in the Day,”. I really love that episode. I love that it was The Inner Light [translator's note: this is a Star Trek episode of which inspired 3x05], I loved so much about it. The Harriet sequence in “Six Short Stories,” is just amazing and groundbreaking, and not something I was expecting to see, which just goes to show how great The Magicians show is by surprising us even though people like DANI and I have read the books. And then of course the musical episode, the Bowie number in particular. And, at a higher LEVel, it’s been really gratifying to watch Margo, Fen, and Julia grow and step into their power this season. So those are my favorite highlights. DANI, what about you? What are your season highlights? DANI: I think it’s pretty much the same. I feel the same and seeing more of Todd was also very satisfying. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: It’s really funny, I was looking over the text you sent me about the finale when I was prepping this, and the last one I have from you, that’s always your critic– needs more Todd. DANI: I was just like, how’s he not there, at new Brakebills at least, like in the back. The last episode we saw him in was when he was a demon right? Like it wasn’t even actually him. CLARA: Yeah, it’s funny because I feel like it was either David or Henry who spoiled the magic of why people are in an episode, for me, a little bit, because there are actors that they have for four episodes, ones they have for seven, ones they have for the whole season. Todd has been in four episodes and that was his fourth, was the musical episode. So as soon as he said that I was like, ah we’re not getting Todd back, are we? DANI: Exactly. And then Felicia we only got for three. LEV: Right. CLARA: Oh yeah, that’s true. I feel like she’s such a superstar, she probably gets them to write her her own contracts. DANI: True. CLARA: So LEV, what about you? What are your highlights this season? LEV: That’s a good question. I’ve seen the episodes a lot longer ago probably than you guys have, so I’m thinking about them. In general, Josh has been a big highlight for me this season. DANI: Oh yes. LEV: I really feel like they handed a lot more to Trevor and the same thing they found out about Summer, which is that he has huge amounts of range, of gravitas. He’s comic, but he also runs really deep. And even starting with that first monologue in the very first episode of the season where he’s talking about how much he misses magic and how special it made him feel, it really captured a lot about what I like about the series. And it’s something I tried to do with Josh in the books, starting as comic and then finding more depth in him. That’s been really great to watch. I really liked Hyman. [LAUGHTER] I enjoyed our time with him, although it was brief. I loved having Felicia on the show. That was an amazing thing and super cool. Let’s see what else… the animations were great, that went along with the book, The Seven Keys. They just nailed a really cool style for that and it was something new for the show and I really dug it. I really dug the Bowie song too. That was good. I’m a real sucker for the musical episodes. John and Sera, whenever they present them, they’re always on tender hooks, like ‘are you sure this is going to be okay? I know it’s a little goofy’. But I just fall for it every time. I really love it. CLARA: One of the things you were talking about you liked was that Josh got to be a little more serious in this season and I think the musical episode for me was the best of that. I really like that he got to deliver his ‘constantly left behind and underestimated’ speech that you get in two places in the books, when he’s late for the Welters match, and later in Venice when you get the lesser version. LEV: Yeah. CLARA: That was really fun and to have him deliver that to Alice as well was really an interesting move and showed the thoughtfulness of how the characters have changed in the show vs how they were in the books. DANI: I also like that at the end of the episode, Julia’s like, I tried to call you. And Josh’s like, yeah I’m a dick like that. Because he also realizes that he kinda leaves himself behind sometimes. CLARA: Yeah, there’s a bit of a double standard to be had. LEV: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s complicated. They push pretty far with his character, in terms of complexity and the writers really rose to the occasion and Josh really rose to the occasion too. CLARA: Yeah. LEV: I thought the Fray arc was really good. I thought Fen was really good. I don’t know whether to call the actors by their real names or their character names, so I’m just alternating. So Fen did really well. I sort of want to say that Eliot and Margo did really well, because they’re always so incredible. Basically every time they were on screen was a highlight for me. Olivia really went to some really dark places with Alice in a way that I found cool and convincing. I dunno, there was a lot of good stuff. It was a good season. CLARA: It was a really good season. Speaking of the Olivia stuff, that was one of the things I was saddest about in this episode was that I wish we’d gotten more time with Alice’s pain. LEV: Mhm. CLARA: There were bits of it that we got over the course of the season and we saw the various ways she’d responded to having been a Nifin and returning, but the things that led her to want to work for The Library, to be interested in controlling magic in a different way and having it kept from Magicians and especially from her. I wish we’d had a little more of that in the last few episodes to lead up to this. LEV: I agree. Culminating in her extremely drastic decision, to have her identity erased, it needs a lot of preparation to get too. I would have liked to see more. CLARA: I wouldn’t complain about more Olivia. DANI: Yeah. There’s so many [cast members] that sometimes it feels like you don’t get enough screentime with all of them. CLARA: Yeah. I’m going to give a shoutout to one other person who I didn’t put in before, and that’s Brittany. I love Fen’s development. I really loved seeing her develop into more of a real character instead of just a foil for Eliot, or a foil for Margo. Margo’s arc, I think, was the same thing. And Josh was the same thing. We were talking about [growing] from comic relief to more fully fleshed characters in this season. Margo sort of did that in season two, but she really expanded here. And Fen got to do that with the Fray storyline. Yeah, it was all great. LEV: They pick certain characters and double down on them to see if they can find more in them and I completely agree that it worked with Fen, who is a complete throwaway character in the books, and could have been a throwaway character in the show too, but obviously there’s so much more to her. The only problem is that they get these great players and then make them regulars, and then the cast is so large. Like you said, you get greedy for more time with these characters. CLARA and DANI: Yeah LEV: There just aren’t enough minutes in an episode. DANI: Really. CLARA: Gotta go to 24 episode seasons. LEV: Couldn’t agree more! Or a spinoff. DANI: Yeah, a spinoff would be good. CLARA: Yeah, we were talking about that. I’m a proponent of a spinoff were all of the female characters abandon all the men and create their own land where it’s just populated with them and the faeries go there and it’s all [LAUGHING], I’m proposing the Isle of Lesbos spinoff of The Magicians. There’s enough Greek Mythology. LEV: Yeah. DANI: True. I think I also have to shoutout Jason as Quentin. CLARA: Oh yeah. DANI: We haven’t mentioned Quentin at all LEV: We haven’t. DANI: And it’s Quentin’s show. He is really growing up and you can see it happen on the screen. His character is really becoming an adult now. LEV: Yeah, he’s another character I wanted to see more of. You can see it, Jason is so intelligent and sudden in the way he’s growing the character. I wanted him to have a big speech were you can see it all burst out and he certainly puts himself forward in the finale, in a very selfless and powerful way. I could watch him all day and I would like to see more strong writing for him next season. DANI: Yeah. CLARA: One of the things we were talking about before we saw the finale was thinking that there had to be a way to get back to the concept of heroic sacrifice, the hero pays the price, that we get at the end of the books. And I think there is this brilliant move, even if it’s a little subtle to have Quentin take that realization for himself instead of having it be something that’s handed to him by Ember. That really does help show that growth and to have it in the context of conversations and his relationships with Julia and Alice, I think was really powerful. LEV: Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s not forced on him like the way it is in the books. It comes out of him when he’s ready and that’s kinda a great thing. DANI: Even though that doesn’t happen in the books? It’s clearly a device at the end of the episode, like we still need all our characters to still be around next season. CLARA: Yes. DANI: Reboot! Soft reboot! CLARA: Okay, so let’s jump into the episode full force. I’m going to start with a recap for our listeners. It was really hard to write this recap because there’s just so many moving parts in this episode, but I’ll do my best. Julia graduates to full-on goddess status and leaves the questers just as they’re about to finish the quest. Alice searches for a way to reinvent herself -- literally -- meanwhile, the fairy queen sacrifices herself to protect her people. I told you this was getting convoluted. Just as the questers are about to restore magic, Alice destroys the keys. Julia remakes them, losing her power in the process. When Dean Fogg, Irene MacAllister, and the traveling librarian show up to place the siphon on the fountain and because Julia has used up all her powers, she can’t stop them. As the episode closes, Alice is trapped in the library and the rest of the questers are off living normal, non-magical lives...except they’re being followed by the monster from the castle. So -- DANI, what did you think of this episode? DANI: I have a lot of strong feelings about this episode. It has kinda grown [on me] over the last couple of days. I really liked it up until the last ten minutes and then I was like, well what the fuck is happening? The first time I watched it, I was not all that happy. The second time, I think I’ve grown to like it a lot more with time. I don’t know, I’m very conflicted with my feelings for it. I like a lot of pieces for it and all of this will be okay as long as Irene MacAllister gets the worst as possible fucking death. Or fate worse than death next season. LEV: I’m a little surprised she survived this season. I kinda thought she’d get clipped by now. I agree, I hope they’re working on something. CLARA: Yeah. DANI: She is… the absolute worst person we’ve seen on this show. And that’s worse than Reynard in my opinion. CLARA: Mostly the show has steered away from pure good and evil, but it’s really hard to find anything sympathetic about the MascAllisters storyline. They're just awful human beings. But who knows. The Fairy Queen was in this season and she turned out very sympathetic. Who knows. LEV: Very true. DANI: I was very sad about her sacrifice. Very sad. CLARA: Yes. I also found that interesting when I was rewatching. Oh, so this is the Aslan [TN: From the Chronicles of Narnia] scene that we’re getting for The Magicians. LEV: Oh yeah, good point. It’s kinda like the White Queen does that Aslan sacrifice. CLARA and DANI: Yeah. CLARA: I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this episode too. From a story perspective, I actually think that it’s pretty effective as it creates a lot of drama. It sets up two new enemies and a situation that’s ripe for irony because half the characters have no idea what’s going on and we’re seeing Alice’s genesis to Cassandra by ignoring her when she knows things. But on a personal LEVel, I think this is what you’re getting at with the last few minutes, I really struggle with the fact that Julia gets refrigerated. For our listeners that might not be familiar with that term, it comes from comics and its a phenomenon where women are in refrigerators, where powerful women are either killed or otherwise depowered to further the plot. And the original was… was it Green Lantern? It was one of the green superheroes, his girlfriend was cut up and put into a refrigerator. That’s where that comes from. So that was a real struggle for me. I get that it would be hard to remove Julia from the main plotline again, and I get that it wouldn’t really work to set up all these enemies effectively if Julia were powered up, but after everything she’s been through, it really hard to see the one good thing she got out of it taken away from her. LEV: I mean yeah. She gave it away. She made the decision. CLARA: She did. LEV: But yeah [BIG SIGH] It does make you think, why does she have to pay the price again? CLARA: Yeah. LEV: Quentin slightly has a way of offering to pay the price and he puts himself out there, but he doesn’t necessarily end up paying it. CLARA: No, Eliot sees to that. So LEV, what are your thoughts? Anything we didn’t cover? What were your initial reactions? You had the scripts, right? LEV: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was great and I thought it set up the next season in a really great, super exciting way. There’s a lot packed in there. I think one of my first reactions was ‘how are we going to get through this without the really powerful emotional moments being rushed through’. Because suddenly you’ve got Calypso and Prometheus and Posiden and you’ve got The Monster. You’ve got the Fairy Queen. There’s just a ton of stuff that has to be resolved and there’s just a lot of story to get through in one episode. And I was surprised about how powerful some of the moments were even though it does happen at a breakneck speed. CLARA: Yeah, I agree. I think when I was sitting down to write that recap, I realized there’s so much packed into this, but the pacing throughout the episode felt spot on for me, for most of the episode. DANI: Yeah, it was done well. I really like the actress who played Calypso. She’s really pretty, she’s really talented. I’d seen her in quite a few episodes of other things. They did a good job with that but it makes me wonder, what is The Monster they unleashed. It’s not all the Titans like we thought it might be– CLARA: No, no, the Titans are involved because Promotheus is a Titan, as you pointed out. So is Aura. LEV: Mhm DANI: I don’t know what that Monster is and I’ve been trying for days to figure out if it’s based on a specific myth and I don’t know. I’m having problems because everything just keeps coming up when I search, like video games and like no, that’s not what I’m looking for. [LAUGHTER] LEV: I have a feeling that they have decided to offload that stuff for a deepdive in the coming season. CLARA: Yeah. LEV: But yeah, we don’t know very much about them. I wish they would come up with another way of showing that people were evil and/or possessed then having their eyes glow. There’s gotta be another way. CLARA: It might be more expensive though. DANI: This episode had hellfire in his eyes at the end of the episode. LEV: That is true. DANI: Yeah, I don’t know. I just wanna see Hades again soon. CLARA: Yes! If I don’t get Michael Luwoye back I’m gonna be really, really sad. I saw him in Hamilton and I went because I took my friend and she’s really into it and she’d just gotten her PHD and it was like, alright you are poor but I can do this and it’ll be great and fun. So I actually experienced Hamilton for the first time on stage and he was the Hamilton I saw, he just blew me away and when Arjun told us he was going to be in the episode and I found out he was playing Hades it was perfect. LEV: Yeah, yeah. CLARA: So why don’t we talk about the mythology a little bit. I mean there’s a ton to unpack in this episode, but that’s a good starting point because we’ve been talking about it all this season. There’s so much food for crackpot fan theories and mythology is something you play with in the books as well. So LEV, maybe I’ll just start by asking you, what have your impressions been about the show’s orientation toward mythology? Do you see it as similar or different from what you were doing? I dunno, anything that stands out to you. LEV: Oh it’s very different. I was very very reluctant to introduce elements from actual world mythology in the books and I did a little bit with Reynard, but I sort of gave it a hard twist. I definitely wouldn’t have put any Greek gods in there, whereas they feel that they like to rifle through the cabinet and just grab what they like, which is in the great CS Lewis tradition. He used to grab anything that wasn’t nailed down. So it’s kinda cool, they kinda do this American Gods-type thing of having the gods be on Earth and having them take on roles in a modern context, which is always fun to see. I can see them pushing that further in some ways. CLARA: It’s kinda a one-off, but Calypso as designer of super addictive games, that’s a really brilliant move– Things that draw people in and keep them there. DANI: That could be it. LEV: She’s a long way from… Alice said it and I still can’t pronounce it. That Island that she started out on. CLARA: Ogygia, whatever it is. LEV: Yeah, whatever it is. DANI: I love how Alice is just like, sitting there like, you guys are saying it wrong. Like she never says it CLARA: She says it under her breath. DANI: Yeah. LEV: They handled that really well. That was a real laugh out loud moment for me. DANI: Yeah CLARA: So yeah, DANI and I talked a lot going into this. My theory at least--I think we both agreed– that it had to do something with the Titans. My theory was that the castle was going to turn out to be Tartarus, which honestly, even though they don’t make it explicit, I think it’s still in that tradition enough that I’m going to call it a win. But I think it doesn’t seem like to me that they’ve set up like Titanomachy or the second war in the Olympians. It seems like it’s more complex than that, which is in the spirit of the show. They don’t take anything at face value, there’s always a twist. But it is really interesting to see that the Titans that we know, Prometheus and Aura, and whoever this creature is, the Titans only really did come back in the finale and only in a fairly limited capacity so far. I feel like I don’t know if that’s going to be more of a thing in season four, or if this demon thing is gonna be separate. We talked about Pandora last episode and that maybe this is a play on that myth, of letting out the evils and not being able to get them back in, LEV: Yeah, it’d be fun to see them do stuff. I don’t know the answers, in case anyone is wondering. CLARA: Oh good, we can be more informal. LEV: But it would be fun to see them push it further rather than just pulling at figures in mythology. It’d be fun to see them deploy it in a thorough way and dive into those conflicts and insert the magicians into it. I think that would be fun. CLARA: Yeah well I kinda like the idea of magic, or the backdoor to magic, being kept in the same place as all these evils because when we were looking up all the Pandora stuff, there were two versions of the myth: one where she’s given all these [things], the box, the jar, contains all of these gifts that the gods give to mortals and she lets out all these positive things and one where it contains all these evils, and that’s what ends up being released. The funny thing is that the one thing both of those have in common, which I think is really resonant with what little we know about this Monster, is hope. The one thing that--I can’t remember if it’s the one thing that they are or aren’t able to get back in, is hope in both versions of the story. So it has this both good and evil component and that Monster longing and needing to be loved and needing to be played with, I wouldn’t say that that’s hope, but Hades sort of alluded to humans needing to have hope for gods to be able to have control over them. I feel like they’ve played with parts of that and I agree with you, I’d love to see them dive into it more in season four. LEV: Yeah, I wonder how the gods will react to The Library hijacking magic in the way that they have. It seems hybristic. DANI: I don’t think they’ll be happy about it. Because they’re playing god. They’re literally playing god and that’s not gonna make the gods very happy. CLARA: So I wonder, I mean Hades is in The Library, so I kinda wonder… DANI: I don’t think he is. I think he just kinda showed up. CLARA: Okay. DANI: I just think he’s always watching. CLARA: You don’t think he’s an administrator? DANI: No, I don’t think so, but he might have a hand… Penny? CLARA: Yeah. I’m curious about that. So The Library seems like a good place to turn to next and I think one of the things I really want to talk about is the alliance between The Library, Dean Fogg, and Irene MacAllister. I think the Irene side of it is less opaque to me, because they clearly don’t have any problems with grinding up faeries for magic and I can see how Irene would see that as a que to make a deal with them to protect her. Although I still don’t know if she has any of her own motives, or if it’s just about being protected. DANI: Power. CLARA: Yeah. But I don’t, for the life of me, get why Dean Fogg is helping them. I don’t know, what do you think is going on, DANI? DANI: Me either! I was like, [GASP]. I was completely in shock when Dean Fogg rolls up and starts talking to The Library and I’m just like, they’ve pulled one over on me and I’m not happy about it! Cuz Dean Fogg… it’s like if Dumbledore turned on Harry Potter. I feel very hurt. I mean, he made deals for them of some sort, obviously, because he cares about these kids, but at what expense? LEV: I mean obviously Fogg has a sort of venial streak in him, but like Alice’s decision to renounce her identity, it was one of those things, one of those big, big 180s that I felt like I wanted to see more preparation for. I guess Fogg must have really believed that Irene was going to kill the kids, or that The Library was, or they were together, and the only way he could secure their survival was to intervene in this way and make this compromise, which I’m conflicted about. But it was painful to watch, definitely. DANI: I’m curious if he created a loophole. Like if those potions at some point will wear off and if he didn’t tell them that. CLARA: Okay so I was looking up… I think it was Aura either last night or this morning, that I found something in one of the myths. I don’t know if it was hers– oh it was Calypso actually. So there’s one myth around Calypso where she creates a potion that causes people to have some version of amnesia for one year and I kinda wondered if there was any inspiration from that or if that was pure plot device from other places. LEV: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that about Calypso. I would say there’s a lot I don’t know about Calypso. That’s interesting; that’d be worth following up on. CLARA: Yeah, one of the things I really liked about the show, going into the Greek mythology. In order to have coherent fan theories, I’ve had to research a lot more about Greek mythology than what I remembered from 11th grade world history. LEV: Right. DANI: Oh yeah, oh yeah. When I’ve studied Greek and Roman and even Egypian mythology later in life, I really got only the tiniest slice of this when I was younger. CLARA: So LEV, you said you don’t know what’s going on, which is great because it means I can ask you for your pure unfiltered fan theories. So what’s your read on The Library? It’s taking on a much bigger role than it did in the books. Where do you see that going? LEV: Oh I know it is! It really is! And that librarian, again she’s someone who I took as a walk-on-day player, but she’s taken on a maLEVolent gleam that I didn’t see in her initially. Yeah, it seems as though they’re stepping up to become some kind of Owellean vaguely fascist apparatus. Their attraction to control has blown up into a full fledged totalitarian grip. It doesn’t seem sustainable. I feel like they’re going to provoke a pretty strong counter reaction from the magical community and then we’ll see where they end up. I assume that they’re human, the librarians, they’re just exceptionally powerful old-school, Knowledge magicians. I don’t know. I hope they haven’t gotten completely over their heads, or maybe they have gotten in over their heads, I don’t know. DANI: So Alice is kinda in this state of in-between. She hasn’t forgotten herself just yet, and is that because she’s in the Neitherlands, so time is moving very slow? LEV: Oh I don’t think she took the potion. DANI: Oh you don’t think so? CLARA: I don’t either. LEV: I don’t. DANI: Because when she blasts a spell, she says, I’m not gonna remember this anyways. LEV: Right, I think she was still planning on taking the potion at that point but I don’t know if she ever got a chance too. I could be wrong. DANI: I thought she did immediately afterwards. CLARA: I don’t think so. LEV: I mean her subjective time seems to be passing for her and she’s all too aware of the consequences of her actions. DANI: Yeah. Also, they finally mentioned The Order. Dean Fogg finally mentions The Order. CLARA: So that was something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Two things: I don’t know if I think that all the librarians are human. I don’t know if the Head Librarian, who I’ve seen people calling Zelda, but I don’t remember ever seeing that name, maybe it’s just credited. DANI: Her name is Zelda. CLARA: So thinking about the whole Cassandra myth, I wondered...Alice had a whole deal with The Library with the librarian who is female, has a Z-name, broke that deal, there might be a way to cast that as a deal with a god that she broke, and that’s how she becomes Cassandra, and ends up in this position. Rather than– what I actually thought, and I think you probably did too, DANI– that she would take the potion and then she would transform into Cassandra. But I agree with LEV, I don’t think she did, and as I see it unfolding, I think it’s just her being driven crazy by the circumstance. DANI: Hmmm. Maybe. Although I like them doing that, I kinda hope that they don’t CLARA: Because poor Alice. DANI: I like the fact that Alice is in the end of the series as Alice. CLARA: Yeah, the other thing you mentioned was The Order and I’ve been thinking about that because we were talking about it when Penny had his conversation with Hades and ate the cupcake and joined the book club, but in the books, Penny joins the order and it feeds the part of him that needs power and control, and in the series, I can actually see him going the other way. I can see him joining The Order, but as an outside infiltrator who maybe helps the others deal with what’s going on with The Library. I could also just see him just joining up [with The Library]. Like magic hasn’t helped Kady, so maybe it’s better that she doesn’t have it. But one way you could deal with the unsustainability of this fascist regime is to have somebody on the inside who is working to put it down and Penny seems well positioned to be that person. DANI: I don’t think he’s going to be very happy with the events that have happened, when he finds out, if he has found out. LEV: Do you think they’re going to run both characters in parallel? Penny23 and Penny40? CLARA: I feel like they have too at some point. LEV: They have to meet each other at some point. DANI: That would be cool. I was cracking up when Penny ended up being a DJ in his double life. This makes so much sense. CLARA: [LAUGHING] It really does. LEV: Yeah, I don’t know if Jason has ever been a beleaguered graduate student, but he really plays a beleaguered graduate student to the hills! DANI: Yeah, Hale was really creepy as Possessed!Eliot. He did a very good job. LEV: You can imagine them stroking their chins, hmmm who should The Monster possess… CLARA: And Alice is locked in The Library, so. [DOGS BARKING] DANI: Sorry if you hear dogs barking. Some of the people who live in this building have the most annoying fucking dogs on the planet. Like literally they’ll go for like ten minutes at a time going [DANI MAKES BARKING SOUNDS]. Sometimes it sounds like these dogs are being abused, but they’re not. It’s just those kinds of small dogs that go off for awhile. CLARA: As the owner of a small, yappy dog, I can confirm it is annoying to the owners as well. DANI: I know, I know I have one. Anyways… CLARA: Okay, so we started talking about Penny!Prime, and I think that was where we were headed next anyway. DANI, do you have any theories about him? When do you think we’re going to see him next and what kind of role do you think he’s going to play? DANI: I have a feeling it’s going to be a couple of episodes until they bring him back. They really like to do the big Penny episodes a couple episodes in so eventually he’ll just show up and meet the other Penny. I’m trying to think...how long are they going to do the whole ‘them-not- remembering-themselves for? Like is it gonna be for awhile? LEV: Oh I love it. I hope they really draw that out and really one-by-one make them remember. For some reason I find that to be appealing, maybe because I periodically forget who I am, but I thought what a good set up! I hope they milk that. A note on Penny40 by the way, I don’t think Penny40’s coming back. CLARA: Really? DANI: You don’t? LEV: Again, not working on any information, I think that he’s done. I think he’s out. He ate the cupcake and that’s the end. CLARA: But that’s… You think we’re never gonna see him again? Not even to like… LEV: It seems so… One of the things I liked about this season– and I really liked that timeline crossover episode. Quentin as The Beast is a great reveal and I really feel like that this writers’ room really likes to dare each other to do things. Like Penny’s trapped in his astral form, what’s the one thing we have to be sure of? Well he can’t die. We have to bring him back. And then somebody in the room will say, I dunno let’s just kill him, let’s have him stay dead. And I feel like they’re playing that game: what if they have him stay dead, forever, and never come back. And I have a feeling somebody made that dare and somebody else took it, and we’re just gonna live with Penny23. CLARA: Well he can stay dead and still– LEV: Well I don’t think they’ll be able to completely resist having a faceoff between the two Pennys but I think he might make a cameo every now and again, but I think that he might have also walked into the sunset and now Penny23 is our Penny. Which Penny is Penny!Prime? CLARA: Penny!Prime is Penny40. LEV: Alright so what’s Penny23? CLARA: He’s 23rd timeline Penny. LEV: Right, okay. Well, I dunno. I think Penny23 might be our Penny now. I dunno. I missed the call from Arjun last week. Maybe he was gonna tell me. [LAUGHTER] That’s my theory. CLARA: Ughh, I hope your theory isn’t right. DANI: I would be eternally sad for Kady, like I’m already eternally sad for Kady at this point. It would just go further. CLARA: Kady’s already eternally sad to begin with. DANI: She’s been through the fucking ringer. Like no wonder she’s a drug addict in this other life too. LEV: I feel bummed that she gets a whole other magical identity and she turns out to be a druggie in that one too. Like can she ever catch a break and not be dealing and/or taking drugs? I dunno. DANI: What was Julia supposed to be? LEV and CLARA: An architect. LEV: I see the Calypso connection there. She seemed to be designing the Soho Arts Center or something. I can’t remember what they called it. She seemed to be doing a great job. She seemed to be successful. Maybe they should leave her there. [LAUGHTER] DANI: I loved the fact that obviously Margo became Janet. Like, yes. [LEV LAUGHS] LEV: Yeah. I found that satisfying. DANI: I have a feeling there’s gonna be like this hint of recognition between new Quentin and Eliot, even though he was like no, you don’t know me, you can just see it in his face. Like [it says], no I recognize you… CLARA: Well there was that moment– DANI: And the same with Josh and Janet. CLARA: Yeah. One other book nerd thing that I really liked, I loved that when Julia goes into the goddess realm, her guide Iris, who is perfectly suited to that role in Greek mythology, but also is her guide in Free Traders when she goes to the Moore. I just really enjoyed that. It was a nice little touch. LEV: Yeah. DANI: True. Also that actress who plays Iris looks so much like a young Evan Rachel Wood. I was just stunned by her. CLARA: Alright, we should get to fashion soon. Some other things I just want to call out: I really liked Fen as High King. I love that Margo selected her to be the one in power. It’s not like there were a ton of alternatives once you take all the questers away, but I really enjoyed her in that role and the brief conversation that she has with the Fairy Queen, who’s trying to help her lead or whatever. LEV: Yeah, yeah. DANI: I’m curious to see if Fen’s going to find– I mean at some point she’s obviously going to be like, I don’t think they’re coming back, and then try to find them. CLARA: Yeah, well I wonder about that. There’s also shades when during the quest Quentin and Julia end up on Earth, from the books, and they come back and it’s seven months later in Fillory and Eliot has come into himself as High King. I can kinda see that as a thing that happens to Fen, that she starts off as this timid, doing this because she feels like she has to, but not feeling like she deserves it. But by the time everyone figures out who they are and comes back, she’s in control of the situation and is ready to give Margo a run for her money. DANI: Yeah. LEV: That would be great to see. It would be fun if Margo had to wrestle control back from her. That’s a match up where I’m not quite sure who would win. CLARA: Yeah, I think they’re so different, those two characters. They come at power from such a different angle and with different ideals for it. It’s tough to know how Fillory will take those two things, who Fillory would favor given those options, if Fen has time to come into herself. LEV: Yeah, yeah. She’s not a Child of Earth, but otherwise, she’s kinda got everything else. CLARA: Yeah DANI: They kinda wanted a Fillorian so they got one. LEV: Yeah. CLARA: Well she’s at this point just as invested. Even Margo’s sort of the one to broker that conversation with the talking animals and gain their respect, Fen has a vested interest in keeping those same policies. She was also there for everything that happened with the faeries with Julia. So I think she’s well positioned to be the true Fillorian leader who learned from all these encounters with the Children of Earth and can lead Fillory and be of Fillory at the same time. LEV: Yeah. It would be interesting to see her develop another love interest besides Eliot– CLARA: Todd. DANI: TODD. LEV: Todd, yeah. I feel like she’s spent enough time toting around after Eliot like a sad puppy. I think it’s time for her to come into her own sexually as well as everything else. CLARA: We talked to her early this season and she was saying in the Orgy scene in Central Park, early on, that she went up to Sera and said, why didn’t I get to be in the orgy? And Sera said, you got the opportunity and turned it down last season! She was like, sniffles. It would be good to see her. DANI: I’m wondering… this better be our opportunity for Todd to somehow end up in Fillory. CLARA: Yes! High King Todd. Actually High Queen Todd. DANI: High Queen Todd. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: They do seem really well matched though. I don’t know, maybe she’ll develop a Fillorian love interest too. Alright, anything else you guys want to talk about with this episode? It’s the finale, it’s a big one. LEV: I just have a question to throw out there, which is: Given that magic was restored shortly afterwards, was The Fairy Queen’s sacrifice in vain? DANI: I think so. CLARA: I think that’s a really good question and I think the way that it plays with the morality of the show and the approach to fate would be really interesting if it turns out to be in vain. But, I still think that whatever she did with that deal is going to protect the faeries and I think that I can see her being right. I mean I hope she’s right that Irene MacAllister is going to live to regret making it. DANI: I’m assuming she’s going to break the deal at some point and that’s going to be bad. CLARA: I think the idea is that there’s nothing physically or magically you could do to break it. But I dunno. DANI: I mean that she’ll probably end up killing another faery. CLARA: That’s what I mean. Is she going to be able to physically kill another faery at this point? It’ll be interesting to see. DANI: It seems like you have the capability to break the deal and it would probably just have really bad consequences. LEV: Yes, I agree with that. CLARA: It can be like Kingsman style. Her head will explode when she kills a faery. DANI: That would be lovely. CLARA: I saw Kingsmen 2 on the plane. LEV: I have not seen Kingmen 2. No spoilers. CLARA: It’s a good plane movie, that’s all I’ll say. DANI: It was pretty good actually. It was pretty good. LEV: You watch a lot of movies on that Sydney flight. I feel like there’s a whole body of movies I’ve only seen semi-conscious, in a drugged state somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. CLARA: Oh DANI, the other one I saw was Coco. I figured you’d like to know that. LEV: Was it good? DANI: Coco’s amazing. CLARA: It’s good. It’s great. And DANI has been talking about it all season. LEV: I can’t tell whether to show it to my kids or if it’s too creepy. Is it creepy? DANI: It’s not creepy at all. LEV: But everyone’s a skeleton in it. Or doesn’t it only happen in Hades? CLARA: No. Well it’s– LEV: I might have a warped idea about what Coco’s about. DANI: It’s just about The Day of the Dead and kinda like seeing family. It’s just about family. LEV: But there’s actual dead people in it, right? CLARA: Yeah, but they’re not creepy at all. DANI: They’re like cute-y. I dunno, it’s hard to explain, they just kind of make it very Disney. CLARA: How old are your kids? LEV: Seven and Five. CLARA: So maybe the younger one might find it a little hard, but I think seven is plenty old for that. LEV: Yeah. DANI: My younger cousins who are like five and six are obsessed with it, so they’re pretty okay with it. But they’re also Latin American, so. LEV: So my parents took me to see Young Frankenstein when I was a little kid because it was a comedy and I was so horrified and traumatized by seeing it, so I have this same fear of doing this to my kids. DANI: Oh my mom overly traumatized me as a child. She would stop me from watching the most randomest things, but if she wanted to watch it, I would watch it with her. I would watch the most obscene horror movies as a child and literally had insomnia since I was like six because I couldn’t sleep because I was terrified of everything. CLARA: My parents tried to stop me from watching those things, but my stepdad was a film professor and I remember when I was seven or eight, they were watching the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and they were like, you don’t want to see this, and I insisted on watching it and I was forever scarred. Then the very next day, my mom made orka and said, look it’s the pod people! And I still, to this day, cannot eat okra. It’s not that I’m afraid of it, it’s that it’s people and I don’t want it. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Back to the finale though, any other things? Other than is the Fairy Queen’s sacrifice in vain? Do you think her sacrifice is in vain? LEV: Kind of. Yeah. Although it’s an irony that the show doesn’t explicitly confront, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m missing something. DANI: I love how they just showed up last second and fucked everything up. Like [the questers] restore magic and than suddenly [the bad guys] appear. They just can’t have nice things. LEV: Irene is really riding the line. The Library doesn’t need her, right? Why is she even there? DANI: Alice? We’re talking about Alice, right? Why is she there? LEV: No, Irene. DANI: Irene? Pff, probably because she was the only one who could cut up the faeries, who knew how. LEV: I guess she was applying the faery code. Still, now that the water’s back on, it’s time to cut her loose. DANI: Yeah. CLARA: Any other observations about this episode? Any questions for season four? LEV: Lemme think. CLARA: DANI, your thinking faces are epic DANI: I’m curious if we’ll end up with The Good Place style, everybody remembering things by getting back together. Like unity. CLARA: Yeah, I think the keys are gone for good now that they’ve been used on the fountain. DANI: Yeah, I think so. LEV: You think Julia and Penny23 are gonna get together? Or Kady and Penny23? DANI: Hmmmm… CLARA: I hope Kady and Penny23 don’t. LEV: Penny23, he’s just an erratic loose cannon and I feel like he’s gonna end up somewhere. Maybe Julia. If anyone can resist his blandishments, it’s Julia. CLARA: So I’m trying to remember… Do you remember who, when we talked to Arjun at the beginning of the season, do you remember… like I think we asked him– DANI: Who he ships– CLARA: Who he ships Penny with. Do you remember what he said? DANI: He said, Alice, He said Alice. CLARA: He also said something about either Margo, or Julia, or both. DANI: Well I know he said something about wanting to hook up with Margo at some point. I don’t think he full on ships it. He might have said Julia, I just remember Alice. He said he feels that’s the most interesting relationship that he has. CLARA: Yeah. LEV: They definitely do have an instinct and understanding of each other. CLARA: I feel like I can see Penny23 and Margo getting together. I could see him and Julia, but I dunno. I just don’t want Julia… I really liked the hookups and murders chat from what was it? Two episodes ago? DANI: I wanted a picture of that… LEV: Yeah. CLARA: I mean Julia is off in her own corner. I like that. I like that she...I don’t know. I like her short of being a goddess and being beyond earthly things at this point. I dunno. I think if she did end up with somebody I would want it to be Josh. DANI: I would love that. I think her and Josh actually have a lot of chemistry together. LEV: Really? DANI: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] LEV: Huh. DANI: At least on the show, you know. They’re little moments together and Julia was like the only one who ever gave him a call. That was a kinda nice touch. CLARA: Well I feel like show!Julia… I mean Julia in the books and the show is very serious especially by the time she gets to this point where she’s goddess’d out. And it’s nice for her to have someone who’s gonna make her laugh and make everything not be so intense. DANI: The end of the season brought back my feelings for Julia and Kady. CLARA: What is that ship called again? DANI: Umm… I can’t remember. CLARA: Wickoff. DANI: Yeah, Wickoff. CLARA: It’s been awhile since we had to think about it. LEV: Alright, yeah, that’s good. I definitely wanna hear Julia sing some more. It was kinda a revelation when she sang in the Bowie song. She’s got this amazing contralto voice. CLARA: I would love to see her do a solo. I think that would be great. And I still want Todd to sing “I Just Can’t Wait to be King”. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Incredible. Maybe we can get a webisode. CLARA: That would be great. Next time we have Adam on the show, we’ll just make him sing it. Like alright, just go for it. DANI and LEV: Yup. CLARA: Well alright. Should we move to fashion? Any other bits? DANI: Yeah, probably. Oh no no, I did want to mention: I always love when they have that speech between Julia and Quentin. They [have a] deep love for each other. I’m so happy they’ve never tried to make them a romantic pairing or anything. CLARA: Agreed. LEV: Yeah. CLARA: I agree with you. I love those scenes because they really seem to understand and respect that relationship on a pretty deep LEVel. DANI: Yeah, plus Quentin, his full on smile with their nerdy laughter moments over her godly name. LEV: Yeah, the characters seem to understand their relationship really well too. They aren’t confused about what they are to each other. It’s nice. CLARA and DANI: Yeah. CLARA: But yeah, there’s a lot of those. That would be a good supercut to put together. Just the great Quentin and Julia scenes, like under the maps in the first season. LEV: Yeah, under the table. Yeah. CLARA: There weren’t as many of them in the second season, but even when they were fraught, like even then they’re warning each other about what’s going when she’s going after Reynard and he’s going after The Beast. And then there’s a lot of them this season, like a lot of those little moments with mostly Quentin supporting Julia as she’s coming into herself. Those are very emotional moments for me, just seeing him grow up through realizing what it means to be a good friend to her and Alice. LEV: Yeah. CLARA: Okay, fashion! So I’m gonna start with this one, which I’m going to throw to you, DANI. Julia goes through a bit of a fashion transformation in this episode, which is probably worth talking about. It’s very different from what she’s worn before. DANI, what did you think of her outfit and did you have any ideas about what that was supposed to signify? Well she’s a goddess now, but I don’t know why they choose that particular approach. DANI: I’m not entirely sure. I thought it was kinda ugly a little, the goddess outfit. I liked the brown umbrella she had. CLARA: The parasol. LEV: The parasol, yeah. DANI: Yeah. But nah, I thought her little jacket was kinda ugly. It was a little too much. CLARA: It looked a little like a straightjacket for me. DANI: Yeah. I liked her hair though. CLARA: Yeah. DANI: Her eyeshadow was a little too intense too. It was too sparkly. I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything like that. It was a little weird. But I also liked her little professional outfit at the end of the episode as not!Julia. CLARA: Yes, I loved that outfit. I think one of the things I felt about that was after seeing in the last episode, Margo after coming into her own power, taking off some of those extra layers of armor. Like wearing more subtle makeup, no longer having giant shoulder pads and leather and whatever else. Going into this episode and seeing Julia become a goddess and suddenly having more layers of things that make her look different from her normal, authentic self, was a little strange. But at the same time she’s a goddess so she’s a different class of being so I get why you’d want to set that apart. I actually thought the parasols were kinda weird. They felt very Mary Poppins to me. I also was really curious– do you have any ideas what the stuff falling around them was? Is that just like, pure magic filtering around? DANI: Probably. Just like magic snowflakes. CLARA: Yeah, they’re just like the dandruff of the gods. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Gross. CLARA: That would be a very Greek thing. DANI: I think it was more like, we’ve filmed in the forest before, we need to make it look different. Let’s distract them. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: So Julia’s outfit was one of my fashion notes. The other was Fen’s pantsuits as High King of Fillory. I didn’t really think they were that attractive, especially the first one where she’s in that beige one. I felt like she was maybe trying to channel Margo and the way she dresses a little bit as she’s trying to be High Queen but she’s toning it down exactly one color. But I do like that she’s continuing to take these sartorial moments that she got while she was on Earth, like wearing pants, and wearing slightly more masculine– not more masculine, but slightly more power suit-y items. She’s taking elements of what she wore on Earth and incorporating them into her Fillorian wardrobe and I like that that’s continuing even after she’s back in a position where she’s a royal where she has to wear full on Fillorian garb and ditch the jeans. DANI: Yeah, I think she was trying to take that Earth style and kinda make it a little Fillorian, trying to be like Margo, but not too much. CLARA: Yeah. Were there any fashion things you had beyond that? I feel like I didn’t notice much from the questers at all. DANI: Margo looks incredible as Janet, like when she becomes Janet. Like her bangs. She looked really good. CLARA: Yeah. DANI: Also possessed Eliot looked really good too. He’s wearing all black and like a peacoat. CLARA: He makes a very attractive tragic figure. LEV: Mhmm. DANI: Hale looks so good though. He’s possessed but he looks amazing. [LAUGHTER] I could not stop laughing at Quentin as O’Brian. Like what kind of name is that? What kind of first name is that? CLARA: It’s Brian, wasn’t it? Just Brian. DANI: I thought it was O’Brian. I heard him say O’Brian. CLARA: I think it was Brian. DANI: Yeah, I don’t know. He looked weird though, like the beanie that barely fit his head. LEV: It was almost too real. DANI: Yeah. But he got to cut his hair finally. CLARA: Did you notice that he walked past some Greek art exhibit poster and a bunch of books that were mythological? DANI: Yeah, I did. LEV: Wow that’s funny. That got by me. CLARA: Yeah I thought that was a nice touch. DANI: Yeah. I loved seeing the flashbacks of Calypso and Prometheus and their togas and everything. I kinda wish we could dress like that again because that just looks so comfortable. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Yeah, why isn’t that what Julia gets to wear when she becomes a goddess? Why does she have to wear a straightjacket basically? DANI: Yeah, that thing does not look comfortable. CLARA: LEV, I know you’re not generally that big on the fashion, but was there anything you noticed? LEV: I feel bad, I just really don’t bring much to the fashion segment. Can I remember anything that anyone wore in the episode at all? They must have been wearing clothes or I would have noticed that. Umm.. I don’t know. Penny looked good as a DJ, I thought. CLARA: Yeah, that’s true. LEV: The beanie looked really spot on with Jason--O’Brian. I’m only going to think of him as O'Brian now, graduate student. Yeah, I don’t know. I thought Fen looked good as High King. Now that you rubbished the pantsuits I feel like I have to go back and reexamine that position, but I thought they looked fine. I feel like they must have been playing with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the First for inspiration for that. CLARA: I can see that. LEV: I don’t know. I think that’s all I got. Sorry my kids are screaming in the background, I don’t know if you can hear them. CLARA: It’s okay. Dogs, kids. LEV: Dogs, kids, yeah. It’s all the same. CLARA: I think we got to a train at one point too, so we’re good. [LAUGHS] DANI: I’m sure there’s a cat meow in every single podcast. My Dobby at some point. CLARA: Sometimes by Stella or Brittany. DANI: Yeah, that’s true. They did meow for us. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Alright, I guess that’s MVP time. So this was a pretty ensemble episode and that made it really hard to choose an MVP. But if you put a gun to my head and made me pick somebody, I would narrow it down to Stella or Olivia, and I’d probably go with Olivia. I think especially given she didn’t get as much time to develop [her story], she brought great emotion to the performance and made it interesting and compelling to watch. So that’s me. What about you, DANI? DANI: I’m like completely going left field and giving it to Hale. CLARA: Oh, that’s solid. LEV: Left field. DANI: Cuz possessed Eliot was great, but also the choices he made. You could just see his love for Quentin when he makes that choice to save him. LEV: It was actually a complicated moment and I feel like I should have called it out sooner, when he shoots The Monster. And I remember reading it on the page and thinking, yeah of course he shoots The Monster, great. But when you see it done, it’s YEAH! He loves Quentin, he seriously disagrees with what Quentin is doing, it’s actually kinda shocking. CLARA: Yeah. LEV: When that gun goes off. DANI: It is because that is a lot of character growth for Eliot to do something completely stupid, but also out of love, like pure love. LEV: And also a lot of anger. You can really hear that in his voice. Like stop fucking up your life, stop dying basically. CLARA: You don’t have to be a martyr, basically. LEV: Yeah. The guy who plays The Monster, although he doesn’t have much to do, was sort of strangely affecting, I thought. CLARA: Very creepy. LEV: Yeah, very creepy. DANI: The “Will you play with me?” thing was very creepy. LEV: I feel like he must have said that in the mirror thirty times in different ways before he got it. “Will you play with me?” CLARA: Was that his entire audition? “Will you play with me?” LEV: That might. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Yeah, right. CLARA: So is that your MVP LEV or is there someone else you wanted to throw in? LEV: I want to throw something at Jason. I think he doesn’t have a lot of fun stuff to do in this episode and he has to carry a lot of the emotional baggage of it. It’s a really difficult scene with saying goodbye to Stella, saying goodbye to Olivia. CLARA: He says goodbye to a lot of people. LEV: Yeah. A lot of goodbyes. And then putting himself forward to basically throw his life away. He really sounds it. You feel like, wow that character who I’ve hated on many occasions has grown up enough to do that. I think he did really well with the tough part. CLARA and DANI: Good choice. CLARA: That’s going to bring us to ratings. I think this was a solid, well-constructed episode, but there were some ways that didn’t feel like a finale for me. There’s plenty of fodder for a hiatus full of crackpot fan theories, so I think we will have to have another fan theory special. It leaves plenty of threads unresolved, but something about it just didn’t quite feel...final to me. It felt like it’s setting up a very long arc and one where it doesn’t feel to me like any of the unresolved threads are going to be resolved in an episode or two, next time. Yeah, I don’t know. Does that make any sense? DANI: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t resolved from this season, or the first season, or the second season. Like the candy witch, still hasn’t appeared. LEV: Right! That vial of blood. That thing is going to come down on Quentin hard at some point. DANI: Yeah. CLARA: And even when we’re talking about Penny, we don’t even know what’s going on with Penny40 and haven’t for several episodes and that’s a weird place to be unresolved, I think because it’s been unresolved for several episodes and we haven’t seen it progress. So yeah, I ended up giving this a 9 out of 10. I think this is a really good episode. I was compelled, I followed it, but it wasn’t what I expected, in both good ways and frustrating ways. So yeah, 9 out of 10. DANI: Yeah, I felt the same way. I give it a 9 out of ten. It’s not quite the perfect finale and it left us with a million more questions. I mean all finales are supposed to leave you with questions obviously, but there’s a lot. I’m excited though for the future. CLARA: It’s so funny because I’ve been talking to people and they’ve been like, oh my god I can’t believe it’s about to be over. And I had this weird feeling start, like two episodes ago where I’m kinda excited for the hiatus because then we don’t know anything. It’s pure speculation. DANI: We’ve really been set on a path where we have no idea where they’re going. Like as book readers we have zero idea what they’re going to be doing with season four. CLARA: Yeah, and it’s exciting to be in that position for basically the first time in the series. LEV: They did that thing where they did with the second season finale where the last five minutes is basically a trailer for the next season, which I’m hyped actually. It’s fun. CLARA: Yeah, we got to see creepy Eliot, so. LEV: Yeah. In the early draft of that script, he says what he says and then Quentin spins around and this huge destructive tornado of blackness starts whirling down the street and buildings are falling over. And I don’t know if they cut that for budgetary reasons, or if they just thought it was overkill, but I thought it worked well with the subtle approach. CLARA: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. DANI: I kinda like that the creature just wants revenge. Like it’s ready to unleash some… negativity. [LAUGHTER] LEV: Yeah. It’s in a really angry place. CLARA: Yeah. I also really like how they characterize him as this being of pure want and pure ego almost, [who] just needs pure love and validation and attention all the time. There’s something really satisfying about that, as a monster. LEV: Yeah, shoutout to the person who played the knight, because she had a lot of exposition to deliver and I thought she did that pretty effectively. CLARA: LEV, do you wanna throw out a rating? LEV: I’m going to give it an 8 out of 10. I feel like now I’m lowballing it. I just like to keep a lot of headroom for really exceptional episodes to come. CLARA: That’s smart. We screw up on that every year. LEV: I enjoyed it. I thought it was really powerful. CLARA: Alright, DANI, any final thoughts this season before we leave? DANI: Ummm, more Queliot. CLARA: More Queliot and more Todd DANI: More Todd. LEV: Needs more Queliot. CLARA: Yeah, this is us being the creatures of pure want and need. You gave the fans a cookie of Queliot and we will only want more milk. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Yes. CLARA: We’ve been joking for the last 24 hours, I flew to Australia yesterday so I crossed the International Dateline and my brain is slightly jumbled and me and my coworkers who were on the flight together were all yesterday just shouting out dateline thoughts when someone said anything, just totally random in the bar, which didn’t make sense. So that was a dateline metaphor there. [LAUGHTER] Give a mouse a cookie, give a fan a Queliot. Anyway, LEV, final takeaways? LEV: I am psyched. I feel like the show is getting better and I feel like it’s a forward trajectory so excelsior! I’m really excited to see where they do things and how they make things in season four. I sort of watch the show as a fan at this point, rather than as the hypercritical author of the source material. So it’s almost more fun for me as they leave the events of the books behind completely. So I’m psyched to find out what’s gonna happen next. CLARA: We’ve been talking about that too, about how it’s really satisfying. We both loved the books, obviously, but there’s something really satisfying about seeing it take on new life on the show, and seeing it do it’s own thing, and not being able to predict what’s going to happen next. It’s fun to feel like we’re fans of this separately now. That the show is its own beast. LEV: It’s fun for me too. CLARA: Well on that note, I think that we are done with season three of The Magicians. Can’t believe we’re saying that. LEV: That’s a wrap, yeah. CLARA: Yeah, LEV, thank you for being here, and listeners, thank you for joining us for Season 3. DANI and I are going to be taking a month off to recuperate now that the season is over, get some sleep, badly needed sleep. But we’ll be back in May to help you through the hiatus with interviews, fan theory and shipping specials, and we’ll try to come up with some other stuff for you. It won’t be weekly, but we’ll get you some stuff to keep you until January. Meanwhile, if you like what we’re doing here and want to help us out, head over to iTunes or Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. Those positive reviews help raise our ranking in search results, so it’s easier for other fans to find us. And finally, remember that you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook @physicalkidspod. See you soon! Bye! DANI and LEV: Bye.