This past weekend I rewatched Season 3's Fillory (mostly) episodes. This season, I've been bothered by the direction the relationship between Eliot and Fen is being taken. In S3, there were some powerful, vulnerable and honest moments between these two people who shared a child together. IMHO, for all the fierce moments of loyalty we're shown between Margo and Eliot, it's the soft vulnerability between Fen and Eliot that pulls out something different in him. When he's staring up at her hanging there, and her tone switches to such resignation that she was least trusting or expecting him to rescue her, it was heartbreaking. That she didn't even know if he was alive after his monster possession, but that she knew if he survived how he would anesthetize himself with drugs and booze, and his admittance that she knew him probably too well was really raw.
Given that somehow Fen is able to meet Eliot on an emotional plane and he meets that with a kind of softness, it's just downright maddening to then watch him be so condescending, dismissive and manipulative to her. She's treated (or written) as some kind of ditz to be rudely dismissed (and in fairness, ALL the "earth humans" minus Julie have seemed to do that to her). In S3, Eliot confesses to her that he's been a shitty husband and that she deserved so much better. He's not raised to any kind level with the woman who bore his child, and with whom he shares that kind of loss.
Processing grief drags with it layers of past grief. If this season is, in part, Eliot accepting and growing, then I really hope the loss of his child and the less abusive treatment of her mother is a part of his journey.
