Physical Kids Weekly - 101 transcript CLARA: Hey everyone, it’s Clara! DANI: And it’s Dani, CLARA: And we are here with the Physical Kids weekly podcast. Today we are talking about “The Magicians”: Season 1 Episode 1, the Pilot. Where we first get introduced to Quentin, Brakebills, and all things Fillory. Let’s get started with a clip. [Recap clip: opening clip in which Quentin is speaking to his therapist, at the same time this is intercut with scenes at a party in which Quentin talks about magic. His therapist asks him if he feels better, as he has expressed feeling lonely and useless. Quentin says (unconvincingly) that growing up is about becoming realistic and letting go of childhood dreams, which is what he is going to do.] CLARA: So what did you think about this episode Dani? DANI: The pilot is very hit-and-miss for me. There’s parts I really love about it, like the setup of Julia and Quentin’s friendship. His mention of mental illness, and I love meeting Eliot and everybody. It was very good about meeting everybody. CLARA: Yeah! DANI: There were just some problems. CLARA: Yeah, I feel the same way as you about setting up Quentin and Julia’s friendship well. I feel like you see the two of them and you go “Yes, diamonds forever, these two are going to be best friends!” DANI: I definitely think it’s better that they cut out James as being the person that Quentin goes to the interview with. CLARA: Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that! It’s weird how little James and Quentin seem to have any independent friendship in the TV show. DANI: I think it was important to do that because the way that Quentin just abandons James in the Book series makes him seem like a dick, whereas he was such an unimportant character in the books that they were like “What’s the point?” And instead they made him more important to Julia than to Quentin. CLARA: Yeah I definitely know what you mean. So what did you think about that first opening sequence? About starting Quentin in a mental hospital in New York? DANI: I liked it because I felt like Lev was always kind of hinting at more mental illness for Quentin. In the books he kind of shades it in a way, but you never really see him there. So actually seeing him have the problem and admitting his illness… I really liked it and I really liked his spiel about his depression because it was so real. It introduces you right away to how real the show and the books can be. CLARA: Yeah I think you’re right that in the books Lev makes it a little more implicit. It’s part of the fabric of who Quentin is, but it’s never really out there in the way it is in the TV show. And it’s one thing I think the show has done really well, is really tackle mental illness head on. Which is why one of the things I hate about this episode so much is still that line a little bit later on when Dean Fogg and Quentin are talking when Dean Fogg says “Oh hey you weren’t actually depressed, you just didn’t have magic, and now that you’re magic you don’t need drugs anymore, you’re fine.” DANI: I hated hearing it, but at the same time it makes that whole discovery of magic not curing anything and magic not being the answer so much better because it hits home, because you heard him basically say “oh you don’t need medicine” But Quentin’s like “yeah I do!” CLARA: What do you think it’s like for people who came to the series only through the show who haven't read the books? DANI: You need to be told things in a TV Show unfortunately, whereas it’s so much more of a conversation between the work when you’re reading it. CLARA: Yeah that’s a fair point. Alright so what else did you like in this episode? DANI: I loved all the immediate chemistry between everybody. But I especially love seeing drastic differences between Julia and Quentin. They definitely set them up to be lead protagonists together. They have such different journeys. You see what it would be like to get into Brakebills, and you see what it would be like to be turned away from Brakebills. And you also see that Julia’s very exceptional and very different because she remembers Brakebills and you’re not supposed to. CLARA: Oh yeah, I keep forgetting– she gets this who spiel in the show which she doesn't get in the books, where she’s told “hey you weren’t enough”. It must be so devastating! DANI: Yeah. It really is. But the only thing that was kind of weird is she cuts herself to remember it, which is a little weird and pointless. CLARA: Yeah, why do you think they did that? DANI: I don’t know why, I think they wanted to be like “This is a dark and gritty show”. CLARA: Yeah there’s definitely a lot of that in the first episode. There’s things I really thought worked in terms of tone. That opening montage when they are getting them to Brakebills, when Julia and Quentin are each following their own separate path and they end up in Brakebills through this magic for the very first time. I think that’s really cool and paced really well. But going back a second time, I’m struck again by how much Julia’s story is compressed, and how much of that story of the first book just gets smushed into this single episode. DANI: Yeah, they really jump forward. There’s a lot of continuity errors I noticed. They even explicitly say in the first episode “you won’t join your house” –or whatever– “ until next year. You won’t have your discipline”. And yet they do it in the third episode. They jump a year? I don’t understand. CLARA: Maybe they forgot to explicitly mention the part in the book where Alice and Quentin suddenly go up a year? DANI: That’s true! I always forget about that. And then they leave Penny behind and then he hates them. There’s weird things I feel like they don’t mention. It happens all the time in TV shows, because there’s a thousand different writers working on the same piece. Little things get plot-holed. CLARA: Yeah, in adaptations especially, there’s so much in finding that balance between doing your own thing and being true to the books. I feel like in the first episode they are trying to be really faithful to the books but also they go so quickly! I feel like where the show really starts to hit its stride is later when it starts to really diverge and do its own thing. DANI: I think it started to become really, really great when they did the mental hospital episode which is also very polarizing to people. Then you’re like “This is not the book I read”. CLARA: Yeah, that’s really true. So what did you think of Penny in this episode? DANI: Penny was pretty much Penny. Just with the inclusion of Kady who never existed. Or… kind of exists… spoiler… but we can’t really talk about it. CLARA: Oh yeah, Kady! “MIND-SLUT!” CLARA: Kady and Penny are so funny and seeing Penny in that first scene with Kady. Actually there were a couple things I really loved about that first scene of the classroom. One of the things I really loved was Penny is defending Alice from the very beginning. I think we see a lot more of this later in Penny and Alice’s relationship. But Kady makes this throw-away comment “oh she looks so serious” and Penny responds back with total sass: “Oh no, an artist is at work”. And I think that’s so cool because you don’t realize that that’s going to be the seed of an important relationship. DANI: Yeah, it’s funny because we made comments about how Penny is lightweight misogynistic. But when he cares about someone, he subtly makes it known. CLARA: Yeah, he’s a total loyalist. He picks his people and then they’re his forever. DANI: Is he a Hufflepuff? Secretly? I don’t think Arjun would be very happy about that. CLARA: I think he’s a Slytherin. DANI: I don’t know, I think he’s the true Gryffindor! He’s the only one who had the balls to do a lot of shit! CLARA: That’s true! And he’s the only one who has the balls to tell Quentin to shut up. Grow up. DANI: Yeah, they all could be dual-houses very easily. CLARA: Didn’t they do this at some point? Didn’t they say what houses they thought all of their characters were in? DANI: They did, and I disagreed with almost every single one of them. CLARA: I think I remember disagreeing too! DANI: The thing is when people are answering it, I feel like they’re lightweight answering about what house THEY would be in, as opposed to their actual character. CLARA: That being said, I do think Penny… I don’t know… I can see Gryffindor but I think he’s like a Slytherin-Gryffindor hybrid. DANI: I feel like the sorting hat would ask him to choose and he would choose Slytherin. CLARA: So he’s like Harry Potter, except for in reverse? DANI: exactly! CLARA: I can totally see that! Especially if you think Quentin is Harry-esque. I’ve always felt that Penny and Quentin are two sides of the same coin and they can't stand how alike they are. DANI: Yeah. Definitely. CLARA: I think there’s less of that in the show probably. DANI: There is less of that in the show. But Penny’s development in the show is necessary in the way that it was portrayed. You can’t tell his story and have him show up in the pilot episode and then not have him show up until 3 episodes before it ends. CLARA: Yeah absolutely! DANI: I thought that would have been fun if they did that with Julia in a way. I know the way they told it was necessary because people hate flashbacks, that’s what ruins shows. People are just over it. But it would have been interesting to see Quentin not knowing she was supposed to go to Brakebills and just suddenly finding that out later and her being super important at the end. CLARA: That’s something I like about the books: he thinks he sees her, but forgets about it the second… DANI: until she starts being weird and hanging out in his bushes?! Even though he makes off comments when they visit. He’s like “uhhh she seems different!” CLARA: Yeah what did you think of Julia’s story in general? DANI: I like both versions of course, but I love her journey in the show because she seems smarter about it I guess. She was so much younger in the book. CLARA: Yeah, she does seem less naive in the show than I think she did in the books. DANI: She seems very Ivy league. Very “I’m smarter than everybody”. Like Hermione if she hadn’t gotten into Hogwarts, but knew she was supposed to get into Hogwarts. CLARA: Oh yeah, I love that she was the one, as you said, who went with Quentin to the Yale interview, and she’s like “I’m going to protect you, i’m your guardian angel” and the second they get inside and see the dead guy she screams at the top of her lungs. DANI: Yeah, but she’s such a bad bitch at the same time. You don’t get to see it in the first episode. They make her Damsel-y in the pilot. I think she’s a very surprising character to a lot of people. Especially the scene at the end that everyone hates. CLARA: Oh yeah, with Pete? DANI: The off-rape comment that he makes. CLARA: Yeah, so let’s talk about that! I feel like in the books Lev got a lot of flack from people for a particular contentious scene in the book that involves sexual violence and Julia. But in the show they just upped the ante, and from the very beginning for not particularly good reason, they have random-side-character pretending to rape her to get her to show off her powers. What gives? DANI: And then not even a few episodes later, they have sex! CLARA: Wait, really? I didn’t remember that she had sex with Pete! Ugh! DANI: Yeah, she uses him to get spells out of him. The way that she is described to do in the books, that she uses and abuses guys in safehouses to get the things that she needs. CLARA: I think I put that out of my brain because Pete is so deeply undesirable. DANI: I think he’s a little more desirable and caring than… CLARA: Oh yeah, anyone in the book. DANI: It’s one of those things, if they had never included that line in the first episode, no one would hate him the way that they did. He actually was caring about her and trying to help her out. CLARA: Though I do think it’s weird that he acted super surprised when she was like “What the hell, are you going to rape me now?” and he goes “No I would never do that!” You just pretended that you were going to! DANI: It was very odd. He’s a very odd character. We don’t meet anyone else until the second episode. CLARA: Anyone else from Julia’s life or anyone else, Period? DANI: Yeah, Julia’s life. CLARA: What did you think about… at the same party with that scene with Pete, Julia confronts Quentin and shows him her little magic tricks. And he is such a jerk to her. DANI: I don’t get why he behaved that way, it’s weird, you’d think he would be excited for her. But at the same time in the show he knew she didn’t get in, and at the same time I think he wanted to be better than her at something. At least, in the show. CLARA: That’s definitely the impression I got in the show, and watching it this time I feel like I got that even more. When I saw it the first time I thought he was being generally childish. But when he’s on the phone with James and James is telling him about Julia breaking down, he starts almost smiling when he hears what’s going on with her. I hadn’t noticed that the first time around, it’s really upsetting. DANI: Yeah, it’s not very Quentin of him. There’s little moments in the show where he’s so out of character it’s almost painful. CLARA: I do think it’s really hard, and there’s some really good moments where he’s definitely in-character. When he goes to take the exam, he tries to take off his sweater and he can’t get it off for like 10 minutes! I love that DANI: That is so good because it’s in the background. You see Julia, you’re supposed to be focussing on her, but you see Quentin in the back. CLARA: Flailing! DANI: And Penny’s next to him like: “What the fuck, guy?” CLARA: Yeah, who is this person? And Penny is smooth as fuck. DANI: Penny’s so smooth but it’s so not Penny. CLARA: no, it’s such an act! DANI: I’ve become so accustomed to show-Penny that it’s hard to think about book-Penny. But I also HATE book-Penny. And I love Show-Penny so much. CLARA: Arjun does a really good job of making Penny redeemable. DANI: He does! And it’s funny, I still can’t believe his argument that they’re the same character. [Clip: PENNY: “Everything that you think is so boring, I replace it with Dubstep” QUENTIN: “What’s dubstep?”] CLARA: One of the things I noticed this time around that I hadn’t noticed the first time was when I saw that scene the first time I was like “What is Penny doing? Who is he even talking to?” And I thought he was having random psychic voices in his head but I realized this time that he’s answering Quentin’s questions! DANI: Yeah! He’s like: I can’t believe this guy right now. I love all the meta references in the first episode. It’s not going to hold up to an audience 20 years from now, but people our age just eat that shit up. The Harry Potter reference that Eliot makes, he says “Avada Kedavra”. I think my favorite one is so unnoticeable to most people where they don’t even realize it is where Kady says to Penny: “Yo Pacey, what’s your deal?” The Dawson’s Creek reference. CLARA: Yeah! I caught that this time, and I didn’t catch it the first time, it’s so great. I can’t believe they put a Dawson’s Creek reference. DANI: I think it’s one of my favorite references on the show because it’s so funny. But most people in 20 years are not gonna know what they’re talking about. Well, with Netflix they might! CLARA: I also think it says a lot about Kady’s personality because I think the thing she and Penny have in common is they act so tough but deep down they are these big cinnamon rolls. I think that is a total indicator of that. She’s sassing him with Dawson’s Creek, which is effectively a soap opera. DANI: Yeah, the fact that she’s basically admitting that she likes Dawson’s Creek. CLARA: Yeah. DANI: I love Kady, I actually related to Kady a lot. At least she reminds me of how I was in high School. Kind of like: Tough exterior, but secretly broken. CLARA: I can totally see that! In the same way I can see why you identify with Peridot on Steven Universe. DANI: Yeah. Very much like Peridot. My three characters are so perfect, if you mesh them together it’s very much me. CLARA: So who haven’t we talked about? We haven’t talked about Eliot! DANI: Or Margo CLARA: Or Margo! Or Alice! DANI: Or Alice really! CLARA: Let’s start with Eliot. DANI: Yes. We should have led with Eliot! CLARA: We should have led with Eliot. I mean he really wants us to. I love that scene where Quentin comes into Brakebills for the first time. And Eliot is just there posing on this big marble. DANI: Alice in Wonderland reference! CLARA: Oh yeah! And I always really loved the way they set up that scene, because to me it’s a lot like the scene in Brideshead revisited where we come to the manor for the first time and you see the big open shot of this very British looking Estate. And Lev has said before he thinks a lot of the tone and characters in “The Magicians” and especially the relationship between Eliot and Quentin is– DANI: Oh yeah, their romantic friendship. CLARA: Yeah, it’s really inspired by Brideshead, so I love that they did this great Brideshead reference in the first time that we see Quentin meet Eliot. DANI: I love it. I kinda wish they mentioned the “not being allowed to smoke” thing, because I think that’s one of the funniest things in the book. And Eliot breaking rules. CLARA: Yeah, Eliot breaking rules and then Quentin trying to be cool for Eliot and then throwing up in the bushes. DANI: Yeah and then he smokes the shittiest smokes he can get. CLARA: Yeah he smokes Parliaments, right? DANI: Aren’t they Merits? CLARA: Oh yeah! They are Merits! But they’re pretty shitty! Okay, I got one more clip too: [Clip: ELIOT: Quentin Coldwater?! QUENTIN: … Uh-huh?] CLARA: I love how he’s so disdainful and he looks him up and down like he’s a giant piece of meat. Which, let’s face it, is what Eliot thinks he is. DANI: It actually took me a little bit to realize Eliot is into him. And then I realized “Oh that’s the only reason he would hang out with an underclassmen. That is the only other person there. They don’t explain that Eliot is the only one staying on campus because he refuses to go see his family. CLARA: I feel like that’s not even true in the show, in the show it doesn’t seem like Quentin is getting special treatment going straight into classes. I wondered if they had sped up the entire recruiting process, there’s that scene at the beginning with Jane Chatwin and Dean Fogg. Where Jane is saying it’s already starting, “the beast is going to get them, you need to help them prepare”. And Dean Fogg is saying he doesn’t even know where they are yet. I just wondered if maybe that’s what that was. Dean Fogg was like “alright we gotta get recruitment going. Get everyone in now.” DANI: Yeah they basically were like “Nah, we’re starting school the next day”. Something that does bug me from the get-go is how obvious the character of Jane is. There’s no reveal. Everyone you talk to, I’m like “You can figure out who this character is if you just think about it” and they’re like “Oh she’s that British girl, right?” And I’m like ”Yeah obviously, there’s only three people in the show with a British accent”. CLARA: I think also the fact that in the books they introduce her just as the medic. So she’s just this random throwaway character, and then later you find she’s a little bit related to what’s going on at Brakebills. But in the show, it’s the very first scene is: her and Dean Fogg. And what did you think about the changes being made to the Fillory story itself. DANI: What did they do, they cut out one of the siblings? CLARA: They cut out TWO of the siblings! DANI: – which is fine because… is it two– is it 5? I thought there were only 4 siblings. CLARA: There are 5 siblings originally, yeah. DANI: … fuck is there?! CLARA: There’s Helen, Jane, Fiona, Rupert and Martin. DANI: Oh you’re right, but they made it so she’s the only girl?! CLARA: Yeah, she’s the only girl. And they made it so Rupert is the oldest, which I didn’t catch last time. Rupert was the oldest. Wasn’t he the youngest? Or the youngest boy at least? In the books? DANI: Didn’t they say they were twins as well in the show too? CLARA: They said they were twins but then they said he was the oldest and he came back from the war, in the same sentence! DANI: So he must have been just 5 seconds older than Jane? CLARA: guess so! DANI: Maybe they meant to say he’s the oldest boy, so Martin’s the baby. CLARA: Yeah. I guess that would make sense. DANI: The Fillory stuff, there’s things I miss about Fillory and there’s things I feel like they added too. I would love to read a Fillory Series, I want to know everything! CLARA: Hear that Lev? Write us a Fillory series! DANI: YES! CLARA: So Alice, what do you think about Alice? DANI: Alice… she’s interesting in the first episode. She just kind of seems like a bitch. CLARA: She kind of does! DANI: Which is not very Alice. She’s very Meek and very shy and very sad. That’s not the Alice that you meet– she’s very fidgety and angry! CLARA: I think what’s true in both is that she’s very wounded, but she responds very differently to that pain in the show than she does in the books. DANI: I don’t like the inclusion of the storyline with her brother. CLARA: Oh. DANI: It doesn’t make sense to her as a character. She cared, she didn’t care enough to find out why it happened that much! I actually love it in the books, because Janice is like “Bitch this is what happened” and it was such a calculated move. CLARA: Yeah, and one of the things that I found really confusing was, in that scene where Margo and Eliot and Quentin are sitting there and they see her, and Margo says “Oh hey, come over make some friends”, and then she leaves. And later, Quentin is apologizing for his friends. And I get that Margo wasn’t being super sincere, but she wasn’t mean. DANI: She wasn’t mean, but I think when you’re made fun of the way Alice is made fun of, she just automatically reacted that way… CLARA: You think she was just really sensitive to it? DANI: Yeah! CLARA: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. One of the things that I found really striking watching this again was… Oh my god, little baby Summer! She seems so young and so green in the first episode. I feel like both the character of Margo and Summer really, really develop. Summer developed as an actress over the course of that first season SO MUCH! DANI: Oh yeah, I mean how long was it between the pilot and the second episode being shot? I always notice Quentin’s hair is all of a sudden MUCH longer in the second episode. CLARA: Oh yeah, I was noticing that too! I was like: Oh, boy didn’t get a haircut for a while. It was like he found magic and was afraid that magic would go away if he cut his hair! It just gets longer, and longer and longer. I wonder if it’s going to keep going in season two, and his hair will grow forever. DANI: There’s subtle changes like that. Julia’s hair is super curly in the first episode and then is looser in the next few. CLARA: Julia’s hair in the first episode is incredible. I want to learn how to do that! DANI: It is! CLARA: Are there any other stand out fashion choices or other visual things about the characters that struck you. DANI: I hate the way they dress Alice. I hate the way they dress her through the whole season. CLARA: It’s so Mary-Sue, especially in this episode. DANI: It’s so Mary-Sue, but her body-type is not made for that clothes. It’s like they’re trying to be like: She’s got a huge ass and huge tits and we’re showing it off. Which is cool, there’s no problem with that but that’s just not Alice. CLARA: But there’s better ways to show it off. If she was going to show it off, not with a super high-neck. It makes her look… bigger than she is? DANI: It’s so slutty English-schoolgirl. CLARA: yeah but it makes it look like she’s trying for that and failing, which is the opposite. DANI: Yeah, and I swear Quentin explicitly says that she dresses pretty comfortable in the books. CLARA: Yeah. I really love Margo’s outfits in this one. The vests, right? Everybody has a vest. Penny has a vest, Eliot has a vest, there are some great vests in this episode. DANI: It might mean New York fashion, I guess. I love the way Eliot dresses, it’s so… CLARA: He’s such a dandy DANI: It’s his character that he’s built. I also love that Quentin looks like he walked out of Urban Outfitters. His hipster apparel. CLARA: And you think someone who is such a nerd so deep into these supposedly obscure fantasy novels would not be a hipster. Would not be into hipster fashion. DANI: Oh no, I totally see it. CLARA: Oh? DANI: I actually see the hipster thing. I think it could just be my identifying with his character and putting that on him because I’m a hipster, but I’m also deep-seated nerd. But I also know guys who are like that too, who are that nerdy and who dress that way as well. With the vinyl collection. They just had to make him as nerdy and unacceptable as possible as a human. CLARA: oh, speaking of that, one of the things that struck me is at that party at the beginning and he’s watching the girl with the rainbow shorts and the unicorn t-shirt. And he looks at her and she looks back, and she looks totally and utterly disgusted with him when she sees him watching her. And Julia later is like: “She was all over you!” DANI: I want to see it from her point of view, was she actually and he was just interpreting that she’s not into him? I don’t know. CLARA: That’s a really good point. That could just be how Quentin is perceiving it DANI: Quentin has a very unreliable narration throughout the books. I remember Kat, she pointed it out in a tumblr post she made, she says: “every time Quentin is talking, he is very self-loathing so you get this portrait of hate when it comes to him, so it’s very easy not to like him.” Any other point of view talking about Quentin is very fond of him. CLARA: That’s true, if you saw a show about Quentin from Eliot’s point of view, you would love him. DANI: Yeah, without a doubt! CLARA: Or from Alice’s, for that matter, she really adores him. Until he does awful things. DANI: Until he does a lot of drugs. CLARA: Alright, so, before we wrap up, there’s one more scene I want to talk about which is the scene at the end with the beast. DANI: I love that scene, that scene gives me chills. CLARA: Yeah, me too. DANI: Every time I show it to somebody, everytime I show the first episode to people, they don’t expect that ending and I love it. CLARA: Yeah, I think too, this for me was the best translation from Book to screen, especially the way they actually designed the beast to look. Because in the book it was that twig over the mouth, and you can see how that totally wouldn’t work in a TV show. It wouldn’t have that true horror feeling the way that it does in the books. DANI: Yeah, and people are afraid of bugs. The moths are so beautiful but Creepy. CLARA: Yeah! The moths are so creepy! Yeah, and you can’t see his face at all. You keep seeing this shadow of a face, little bits and pieces, but you can never make out the whole thing at once. I think that really contributes to how creepy the scene is. DANI: Also I love the beast theme music. CLARA: Oh yeah. Oh I really should have gotten that as a clip– next time! Yeah, it’s super creepy. DANI: It is. I swear to god that I heard that theme from the Beast in something else. There was this thing that played at work over and over again, it played the X-Men: Apocalypse trailer, and I swear it has that. I know because I’ve heard and seen the Beast theme at least a couple hundred times now. CLARA: I wonder if it’s the same composer? DANI: It might have been, they might have sampled it. Or even straight up used it because they could have paid for it. CLARA: I think that scene is really creepy and weird and even though you get to it so much faster than in the books, it’s kind of a beautiful place to end things on. DANI: Yeah it really is. And did you know Kady wasn’t actually supposed to survive. CLARA: Right, Amanda Orloff, the character that has the same name, sort of, in the books, she’s the one who dies in the scene. But also, one of the things that I found so interesting, in the books it’s explicitly Quentin’s fault, he causes that. DANI: Oh yeah! CLARA: In the show, they’re all messing around with magic and it’s implied that Alice and Quentin and Penny and Kady doing what they did, gave the beast an opportunity to come in. But it’s not direct in the same way. It’s also not… in the books Quentin is basically being a little Pissant, right? He’s ticked off that he’s being called out in class and he tries to piss off his teacher. And he ends up getting his– DANI: But they never confirm that that’s what did it either. CLARA: Really?! DANI: They never do, they never find out an actual reason, he just automatically thinks it’s because he did that. No one’s really sure as to why. But in the show, I’m thinking: Why did they show Quentin that symbol that led Alice to do that? How did that happen? CLARA: Oh yeah, and why did Jane do that if she wants them to be more prepared? DANI: so Did Jane intentionally set that up? CLARA: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. Because she’s saying it’s all happening too fast and they need to be more prepared. So it makes me feel like it must be part of her grand plan. DANI: To get them to know that there’s a threat out there maybe? CLARA: Yeah, maybe. If she thinks he’s getting too comfortable… DANI: Something that I like that they added though, is Penny’s weird relationship to the Beast. CLARA: What do you mean? DANI: How he says that the Beast is this voice that’s always been in his head, that it’s someone that he knows on a personal level so he feels very betrayed. CLARA: Oh I don’t think I realized that. Is that in the second episode when they start talking about the consequences? DANI: They talk about it more definitely in the second episode but they mention that it’s a voice he’s always known. It’s almost a father figure to him. I liked that they added that in. I don’t know if everybody else noticed that either. That’s why he wants to dip, that’s why he says “I want to leave Brakebills”. He’s freaking out about it, having an existential crisis. CLARA: Okay, before we rate the episode, do you have any final comments? Anything else you wanted to talk about? DANI: I want to say that even from the opening scene, it just felt so perfect. That song that they used is probably one of my favourite songs, but it’s so hipster so I already knew that the soundtrack (from the get-go) for the whole show is going to be great. CLARA: They sure know how to choose them. DANI: Yeah! They really do! CLARA: Okay, so, give me a number out of 10. Rate the episode. DANI: I want to say it’s an 8 out of 10. The only thing that really brings it down, just: Julia’s cutting herself to remember things; Dean Fogg’s comment about medication; and the squeaky rape comment at the end. Those are the only things, otherwise it would be perfect to me. CLARA: I found it harder to rate this. When I saw it the first time, I really didn’t like it. There were a couple parts I enjoyed. I really liked that montage coming into Brakebills for the first time, and I really liked the Beast scene. But I found it so distracting how much of the book they were cramming into that first episode. This time it did better but I think I’m going to go with a 6.5 out of 10. It’s hard for me to get over all the things that bothered me the first time around. DANI: That’s true. As a Book-fan I’d probably be more close to your rating, but as somebody just rating a TV Show Pilot episode, I would say an 8 out of 10. CLARA: Yeah, and I think if I’d been rating it the first time I would have been like “ugh, 4 out of 10, 3 out of 10. Get me out of here”. I do think that having had more time away from it, and feeling more attached to the show now as something in its own right, being able to see it as something that isn’t just an adaptation of the books makes it more likeable, but yeah it was a struggle for me even so. Okay so who do you think had the standout performance? DANI: I definitely think it’s Jason Ralph as Quentin, because he really introduced us to what Quentin is. CLARA: Yeah I’m with you. Even the first time watching it when I was like “I’m not into this” I couldn’t help but love his performance. I think he did such a great job. And I think really does a great job of both being just a fantastic character in his own right and also doing that balance of: Here’s a character that people already know and love, and how can I make him my own? DANI: There’s a funny thing about it is, he was so excited to play the character because he knew people online actually hated Quentin. So he was really excited to play a character that people hate, and make it someone they could potentially not hate. CLARA: Yeah, so you’ve said you’ve been seeing a lot of people getting into it from the Netflix thing and they’re still not into Quentin. DANI: yeah, there are people who’ve watched the entire series already (because it’s Netflix) and still hate Quentin or just are always complaining about Quentin, and I’m like: I don’t get it! CLARA: It’s so crazy to me because I think… we’ve talked about this before: I really like Quentin but I can understand why people might not like Book-Quentin, because you’re in his head so much, and if you are somebody who is depressed and you see that, in a lot of ways what you’re seeing is the same voice of your own depression and that can be really hard to handle. So at the same time that I think he’s a great character, I understand why people reading the first book and not reading the other ones might not like him. But in the show though, I think he’s just likeable. He’s so sympathetic, and even though he does things like be a total asshole to Julia when she doesn’t get in, I feel like it’s much harder to dislike him in the show when you’re not constantly in his head. DANI: Yeah, definitely. A lot of complaints I saw are that he’s boring. That they pretty much only like female characters to begin with. A lot of not feeling sympathy for him. They also trash-talk his mental illness and it’s really upsetting because when you go on places like Tumblr, these are people who are always talking about being Mental-Illness friendly, but yet they can never actually apply that to their lives. CLARA: Yeah, I do think a lot of that is probably a version of self-hate. People say and believe that it’s important to treat mental illness like physical illness, but they have trouble doing that especially when they experience it. But I struggle to see why people have so much hatred for Quentin in the show especially. I think Jason does a really fantastic job of making him sympathetic. DANI: Yeah, if I had never read the books and watched it, I still would have loved Quentin because I just love the honesty that is there. He also doesn’t follow gender-norms– CLARA: No! Which is beautiful! DANI: And that’s something which I really love about his character. CLARA: I can’t wait til we get to talk about episode 2 because I think there’s a lot of stuff there, for Quentin’s character, and especially the way that he subverts gender. Well, I think that’s a wrap, so thank you for joining us today. We will see you after the 25th, after the first episode of Season 2. Alright, Bye! Say Bye Dani! DANI: Bye! CLARA: Bye! CLARA: Mind-Slut.