S01.E01: Unauthorized Magic / S01.E02: The Source Of Magic

[Jordan27]

Episode 2 yikes....Quentin stop your whining.  That hair, the whining, the pain.  He seems like a person who is bi-polar or on drugs.

 

They really knocked us over the head with some really need this magic school or their life won't be fulfilled. 

 

And I got lost somewhere.  Is that one girl spying on the school for someone?  Some characters look a lot alike.

 

Plus, I have a problem with magic in TV shows.  It never has any boundaries.  No matter who is great at it, someone is always better.  And no matter what spell is permanent, they can always dig up an ancient book, manuscript that will override any magic.

 

And lastly, the school seems to make light of magic like they are teaching music lessons.  If I could do even a little magic in this world, I could do a lot of good or bad.  A lot of magic and I could be Superman or the Devil. 

 

That episode kind of lost me.  One more to see if I can stay with it.

[lynny]

I watched the first two and am taking a break before watching #3, but I'm pretty underwhelmed.

 

Which is disappointing because this show should poke all my happy buttons and I just find it convoluted and boring with unlikable lead characters.

 

I don't know if reading the books would make this better. Maybe it would make more sense if I did. But, watching those first two episodes I came out with the following:

 

1. What the hell is Filory? Is it real or not? It seems it's a real place? But who cares? Why do I care if it's real or not? In that vein, is he supposed to stay on the path or get off of it? I do not understand.

2. I assume the lead guy is some sort of important dude to save everyone from everything (with the help of the blonde) but he is so freaking bland and boring and purely unlikable that I just can not care. 

3. I had absolutely no idea that the moth guy was "the Beast". I didn't even know that there was "a Beast" until reading this forum. So that's the big bad? I did not get that at all.

 

So, I'm going to stick for an episode or two because this really, really should be my jam. But they've got to do something to make me actually care a single iota about any of these assholes.

[Ubiquitous]

I really like that magic has consequences here and that it can be extremely dark and dangerous. Sadly, I'm not expecting the dean to bounce back after having his eyeballs plucked out by headless guy. The students in the class being awake and able to see what was happening but unable to move was fittingly scary.

I thought they were frozen in time, save for the four who conducted the spell, and they were too scared to move. The Beast(?) found Quentin b/c he dropped that coin he had been spinning, remember?

[AudienceofOne]

Just settling in to watch this now (belated, I know). It was an ok pilot. I was drawn into the story quite a lot but the plot was far too fast; leaping from scene to scene trying to do too much without establishing the things it needed to. There were times when I was wondering where the characters were and what they were doing because it was like the pilot was missing several scenes. I would have liked to have seen more classes to establish what the school was teaching. I would have liked some more character development of the friends and the roommate. 

As a protagonist, Quentin was too passive for me. Like the act of being at the school was enough for him and he didn't actually need to do anything. And his actions leading up to and after these summoning spell were reactionary.  But, maybe that's his arc. 

On 2/10/2016 at 6:04 AM, lynny said:

1. What the hell is Filory? Is it real or not? It seems it's a real place? But who cares? Why do I care if it's real or not? In that vein, is he supposed to stay on the path or get off of it? I do not understand.

Now that you mention it, that annoyed me. Everyone's like "the GARDEN PATH" as though he and everyone should know what that means. What path? Because I doubt they sent him a magical dream to tell him to drop out of school and stop using magic.

[greenbean]

I didn't know this was a book adaption, or that the original characters were much younger. However, while watching I did think the characters read much younger than what they actually are, so that's interesting to me. I think this is one of the reasons why Quentin can be grating. He reads as a teenager, yet he's meant to be twenty-something.

In some ways it's better that they aged the characters up, but for some reason it doesn't entirely translate.

I do like what I've seen so far though, the show has potential. Especially after the ending when that man appeared. I hope the Dean survives.

[ursula]

I think characters like Quentin and Julia come across as immature. Alice comes across as slightly neurotic. Penny and Kady come across as jaded and street-wise, but not immature.

According to the website, they're 22/23 so tweens. 

I'm rewatching, and I noticed that when the Beast attacks, apart from Quentin getting the lucky timepiece from the Dean, the two students who kick ass are women - Kady with her battle magic and Alice with whatever spell that shoves the Beast back into the mirror, while the men - Penny and Quentin just flounder around, looking like Sexy Lampstands. It was kind of awesome. 

[The Companion]

On 1/28/2016 at 11:36 AM, Izeinwinter said:

Q is depressive. I nearly yelled at my screen when the dean told him they hoped he wouldn't need his meds. That is not how neurochemistry works, ffs. If his point had been that they had better, magical ways to treat his dysfunction, that would be one thing, but he isn't miserable because of the circumstances of his life, the guy is a walking pile of privilege, after all, he's miserable because his brain is broken. That's a real problem, and it needs actual fixing, not just ignoring because the school is just that awesome or whatever. 

He is indeed very hard to like, but depression does that. 

Agreed that this line was a miss for me. I suppose the idea was that it was a misdiagnosis, but it felt a little off. Additionally, we certainly didn't see a substantial improvement in his exterior symptoms to indicate that his depression was gone. 

 

We are very late to the game. We wanted to watch initially, but failed to record the first episode. We kept seeing snippets before something else (Killjoys maybe?), but we didn't go back to it until we re-discovered it on Netflix. Overall, the first two episodes were fairly enjoyable. I have not read the books, so I am coming in blind. The characters seem a little shallow, but I am assuming part of that is the need to introduce so many things at once. There is definitely enough here to keep my interest.

[Camera One]

I borrowed the Season 1 DVD and this series was recommended to me (I haven't read the books or even heard of them until this show).  I actually watched the first four episodes on the same day, so I'm trying to remember which was which.

I was engaged by the first episode.  I really like fantasy/sci-fi shows, so the whole magical school/Narnia-esque premise was intriguing to me.  I found the first episode pretty fun to watch with the exception of the ending, since I'm not a fan of monster shows nor gore.  I also liked Quentin and his nerdiness so that made a big difference in making me care about what was going on.  I felt badly for Julia in the first episode when she didn't get into the school.  I was disappointed Quentin wasn't more sympathetic of her disappointment.  I would have thought he would have liked a friend at the school with him.  

The supporting characters I didn't really warm to until the second episode.  I found most of them annoying in the first episode.  I think Eliot and Margo supporting Quentin when he thought it might be expelled made me like them a lot more.  Penny still seemed unnecessarily mean and I didn't understand why Quentin was expelled and sent to a specialist while Alice wasn't.

In the second episode, I didn't like the whole meat locker stuff.  Overall, the swearing was unnecessary as was the constant smoking.  The picture quality wasn't that great and the whole show felt a little low-budget.  

However, I was engaged enough to continue watching right away after the first two episodes, and that's not usually the case with most new shows I try.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Camera One

[CigarDoug]

On 2/1/2016 at 8:41 PM, wayne67 said:

Wait Quentin is supposed to be lucky to be in a school where he's apparently a target for occult forces he doesn't understand and also quite likely to die in a school with the worst mortality rate ever ? 

 

I didn't know Male Privilege meant you got depression, strange foreboding dreams about garden paths and the oncoming threat of Moth Man and the Beast and probable death as a result of spell casting.

I think this mindset of Male Privilege, White Privilege, whatever, comes from projecting the modern world (or someone's perception of the modern world) onto a work of fiction. Voldemort is not Donald Trump or Barack Obama or anyone else. Tolkien was not being racist against Orcs. Works of Fantasy and Science Fiction are not supposed to be compared to our current political social justice situations on a one-to-one basis. They are unique universes with their own sets of rules. People need to stop trying to score political points when discussing alternate universes, discuss them IN CHARACTER, if you will. Weakness is still weakness, virtue is still virtue, there is still good and evil and people are still imperfect. But judge them within the rules of that universe, please.

[CigarDoug]

On 2/5/2016 at 2:35 AM, paramitch said:

 

No, wait, I feel like this is backtracking quite a bit. Quentin isn't an example of male privilege because he passed and Julia didn't.

 

Quentin is an example of male privilege because he was:

 

• Literally invited in (the "college advisor meeting" with the guy who died was supposed to invite him to Brakebills)
• Given a gift (by Eliza) that led him directly to the magical portal
• Allowed to enter a sunlit Brakebills where he is greeted by Eliot by name (complete with a printed card)
• Eliot then (1) assures Quentin he's not crazy, (2) tells him about the upcoming test, and (3) personally escorts him to the testing room

 

Compare that with Julia, who:

 

• Unexpectedly ends up in a Brakebills hallway after a creepy elevator ride at night
• Is not greeted, spoken to, or given any information or instruction
• Literally wanders into the testing hall like your worst nightmare from high school, completely in shock and unprepared
• Is not allowed to ask even one question when she tries as testing starts
• And is treated with fairly visible contempt by the advisor who fails her (and again by Quentin later on, not once but twice)

 

Or compare that with Alice who:

 

• Wasn't invited even as a magical prodigy in a family of magicians
• Stole her parents' 'magical key cards' to Brakebills (and had to figure out a new enchantment) -- she wasn't "given" a key
• Then she literally broke into Brakebills -- forcing her way in -- only then was she allowed to study there.

 

I definitely don't think these are accidental and do think that Grossman and the show are exploring a certain amount of irony and privilege in Quentin's situation. That's where the gender bias comes in. I definitely think it's deliberate.

No, Quentin is an example of how ONE PERSON was given preferential treatment. They were specifically looking for Quentin. Not a white male. Not a male. Quentin.

If you insist on comparing the real world to this fantasy one, show me examples of how every single white male is led by the hand into Brakebills. But we only see two in the show, and told about another (I haven't read the books, there may be more examples there). So to assign "privilege" of sex or skin color based on two examples is sketchy, to say the least.

By the way, the Dean of the school is black, his roommate is Indian (I don't know precisely) and most of the professors, doctors, and other protagonists are women. Just saying.

[AudienceofOne]

8 hours ago, CigarDoug said:

No, Quentin is an example of how ONE PERSON was given preferential treatment. They were specifically looking for Quentin. Not a white male. Not a male. Quentin.

So...

Spoiler

The framing of a great white (male) saviour within the fiction that this show is critiquing is... what this show is critiquing. So, I'm afraid you're kind of not right about this. I'm not saying you're wrong, since this is, as you say, a television show and is therefore open to interpretation. However, this whole segment of Quentin being chosen and Julia and Alice not chosen is entirely about white male privilege. Since the destructive laziness and entitlement of privilege is one of the main things this show is about. Quentin's realisation that being the white male hero does not in fact make him the actual hero is this season's punchline - and an epic one at that. It deliberately subverts the thematic framing of the white male saviour in these stories.

So...

[CigarDoug]

On 11/29/2018 at 4:48 PM, AudienceofOne said:

So...

  Hide contents

The framing of a great white (male) saviour within the fiction that this show is critiquing is... what this show is critiquing. So, I'm afraid you're kind of not right about this. I'm not saying you're wrong, since this is, as you say, a television show and is therefore open to interpretation. However, this whole segment of Quentin being chosen and Julia and Alice not chosen is entirely about white male privilege. Since the destructive laziness and entitlement of privilege is one of the main things this show is about. Quentin's realisation that being the white male hero does not in fact make him the actual hero is this season's punchline - and an epic one at that. It deliberately subverts the thematic framing of the white male saviour in these stories.

So...

I haven't read the books, so I only know what I have seen in the first few episodes. If you are saying that's relevant to the story, that's fine, and I will look for that. I was worried this was a case of people forcing modern day issues and modern day attitudes into a fantasy world where they aren't relevant or comparable. I also saw when I finished this thread that it was already discussed at some length already, so I don't see a need to keep harping on it. Thanks.