S01.E05: Mendings, Major and Minor

[carrps]

And because it can't be said enough...CANCER PUPPY.......What a cute little bundle of fluff....and I LMAO when he killed the poor thing and all you heard was the "clunk" when it keeled over....To funny.....and really if the poor thing was 150 and riddled with disease I'm thinking Quentin did the pup a favor!

 

 

I thought we just heard the yelp off camera. Aw.

 

I agree about all the confusion. This world just seems so....shallow somehow. I bought the books after the first episode and planned on reading them after watching at least the first season. But now I think I need to start reading them right away!

[Terrafamilia]

I believe it's a capsule knot.  It's not a cape knot because there's no mini-cape behind the main body of the tie.

Thanks.

 

Has anyone else been checking out brakebillsu.com?

[JTMacc99]

I really enjoyed this one. Quentin and his dad versus Julia and her boyfriend was good stuff for me to chew on. I don't mind the Julia stuff. Maybe we are not supposed to like her.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

I heard a yelp and then a thump when Quentin killed Cancer Puppy.

[LeGrandElephant]

Mindwiping an entire relationship from James, besides being incredibly violating, also just seems too complicated to hold up. Weren't he and Julia together for years, or at least months, and planning their next life stages together? What did they replace all that time with? Did they also mind wipe their entire friends-of-friends network who might ask about her? Modify facebook profiles and pictures? Its one thing to erase a single out of place experience, like the Brakebills exam, but another to remove an entire intricate chunk of someone's life. If Brakebills can't even reliable erase Julia's memory of taking the exam, how can these supposedly much less-qualified magicians do a much more intricate mind-wipe spell with no flaws? And even assuming there are no flaws, couldn't Julia show James photos of them together and demonstrate some magic and explain what happened? 

[Izeinwinter]

You're assuming it was a flawless wipe, and Mariana didn't just leave his mind a tattered cobweb full of gaping chasms. Or perhaps it wasn't a memory wipe at all, but a straight up compulsion to pretend she's a stranger. 

[LeGrandElephant]

You're assuming it was a flawless wipe, and Mariana didn't just leave his mind a tattered cobweb full of gaping chasms. Or perhaps it wasn't a memory wipe at all, but a straight up compulsion to pretend she's a stranger.

Not assuming that - that all just falls under it not being ok and causing lots of ongoing problems. If they wiped that much time and left gaping chasms, didn't erase Julia from his friends memories too, etc, then James should be checking himself into a hospital to check for brain tumors and will probably never be ok. Doesn't really hold up under "protecting" him but definitely falls under ongoing fallout that doesn't hold up to logic.

Either they're implausibly good at erasing and replacing memories from whole networks of people, or they just caused a LOT more damage to James and his whole life than the show's narrative is admitting to, or most likely both. It just doesn't really make sense.

It's also frustrating from a storytelling point of view to have all of Julia's decisions taken away. Why not have a breakup with James be an organic consequence of her behavior? After all, she has been treating him badly and just cheated on him.

[Ubiquitous]

As it's been said before, for a place that uses memory erasure as often as they do, they don't seem to be very good at it.

When Mariana kicked Julia out of her magical group, why did she add more stars to her arm before teleporting her into the ally?

[Hanahope]

Quote

When Mariana kicked Julia out of her magical group, why did she add more stars to her arm before teleporting her into the ally?

She didn't add more stars, she made a red X over the blue stars, essentially 'cancelling' them, taking away Julia's levels.  They don't really explain it well in the shows, but the stars are like her 'ticket' to get into/visit other safehouses and show rank.  So what Marina did was bust Julia back down to level/rank zero and my impression is it could make her persona non grata in other safehouses.

[Blakeston]

On 5/4/2016 at 4:58 PM, Hanahope said:

She didn't add more stars, she made a red X over the blue stars, essentially 'cancelling' them, taking away Julia's levels.  They don't really explain it well in the shows, but the stars are like her 'ticket' to get into/visit other safehouses and show rank.  So what Marina did was bust Julia back down to level/rank zero and my impression is it could make her persona non grata in other safehouses.

Wow, they really did a crappy job of making it clear what Marina was doing. It looked like she was just adding the stars to Julia's arm.

Edited May 9, 2016 by Blakeston

[Hanahope]

Yeah, I didn't understand it as well until I read the book. But in rewatching the show, I could see the red X over the blue stars while Marina is saying how alone she felt after getting kicked from Brakebills, how she knows Julia felt alone too until she found Marina and now would feel even more alone, then she teleported Julia away. 

[AudienceofOne]

Meh. I think I could really enjoy the show but it's still skimming over the surface of this world And Quentin is so... I still want to say passive. 

[Camera One]

This episode was alright.  It was a little obvious that Quentin wasn't going to cure cancer, but I did like the scene with fixing the airplane.  Penny going to Fillory and finding that lost third-year traveller was intriguing.  I wish they'd get rid of the standalone subplot with Julia, though.