The Magicians Recap and Review: “Thirty-Nine Graves”

Thirty-Nine Graves recap: what happens in The Magicians season 1 episode 12

The Magicians new class, Quentin's group of students at Brakebills, has spent eleven episodes learning magic the hard way. By “Thirty-Nine Graves” the lessons stop and the quest starts. The Beast is coming, Fillory is the only place to fight him, and the fountain that leads there has to be found first. The episode was directed by Guy Norman Bee and written by Leah Fong and Henry Alonso Myers, and it drew 0.75 million viewers on its first airing.

The show itself needs a quick introduction for anyone arriving cold. Syfy's The Magicians was created by Sera Gamble and John McNamara and adapts Lev Grossman's trilogy of novels. Season 1 ran for thirteen episodes after a special preview on December 16, 2015, with its regular premiere on January 25, 2016. The series went on for five seasons and 65 episodes, ending on April 1, 2020.

Murphy's Law applies to every plan this group makes, and this episode is no exception. The squad only holds fragments of a plan to begin with. They also open the hour furious at each other after the previous week's events. Alice sleeps with Penny to get back at Quentin after a fight about his infidelity, which gives the hour a sour, messy mood before anyone has jumped through a portal.

Penny, played by Arjun Gupta, becomes the unlikely voice of reason. He tells everyone to put their feelings aside, because the Neitherlands and the fountain to Fillory come first. Penny cannot yet bring other people along when he travels, so the group goes through the button.

Trouble arrives at once. Quentin is pushed back through the fountain to Earth when Eve and her mercenaries show up, and he lands back at Brakebills. The rest of the group splits off from him, and the episode runs on three tracks from there.

In the Neitherlands: the library, Josh and the fountain

The rest of the team finds the Neitherlands library. The Librarian, played by Mageina Tova, greets them as though they are late, and she calls Margo “Janet” until Margo corrects her. The Librarian answers with a knowing “yes, this time.” In Lev Grossman's novels, Margo's counterpart is Janet, so the line plays as a wink at the books and as a clue about what is really going on.

Penny searches for books that will teach him to master traveling. The Librarian tells him that if he survives long enough, he will. She wears a sad look as she says it, as if she has read his book. Elsewhere Eliot finds Mike's book and burns it in a fit of anger, which gets the whole group banned from every library and sent back topside, just as mercenaries close in.

Then Josh Hoberman turns up. Played by Trevor Einhorn, Josh is one of the Physical Kids in the novels, along with Eliot, Margo, Alice and Quentin, and this is his first appearance on the show. He is the opposite of the Magicians new class that arrives in the pilot: he belongs to the senior class of 2016, which vanished from Brakebills two years earlier, as he explains. The class went to Fillory for spring break after Victoria, a traveler like Penny, invited them. The Beast found them and killed almost everyone. Victoria sent Josh to the Neitherlands and went back for the rest, and the Beast took her prisoner. To Josh it has been a few weeks. On Earth it has been two years.

Josh happens to know where the Fillory fountain is. The mercenaries are the problem, and Alice solves it with phosphomancy, bending light so the group stays hidden as long as they stay close to her. Eliot lags behind after eating Josh's psychedelic carrots, and Margo shoots the mercenary who gets to him. She brought a pistol, and it works. Everyone jumps into the Fillory fountain, though Penny nearly misses it because Eve stands in his way. He kills her with a wound to the chest and follows the others through just before the remaining mercenaries arrive.

On Earth: Dean Fogg, Jane Chatwin and a time loop

Meanwhile Quentin doses Dean Fogg's tea with truth serum and asks who Eliza really is. The answer is Jane Chatwin, who is also still quite dead. She has been using time magic to reset events, again and again, in the hope that the outcome changes. Quentin has given Fogg the serum 27 times, and the Dean is strong enough to know he is stuck in a loop without being able to do anything about it. In the loops Quentin has died 39 times, which is the episode's title. Jane is not there to reset things this time. This is the last attempt.

That reveal rewrites earlier scenes. It explains why the Librarian expected Penny and kept saying he was late, and why she knew the group was coming. It also explains a change in this round: Jane left Julia outside Brakebills, to see whether that made her a stronger magician. Quentin reunites with Julia and tells her the whole story.

Julia, Free Trader Beowulf and the way into Fillory

Julia has just summoned a goddess with Kady and Richard, who belong to Free Trader Beowulf. She has worked out that the purpose of magic is to fix things and help people. The pair first meet the goddess's servant, who asks for three offerings: flowers, honey and faith. Kady's faith needs some work, but the servant accepts and gives them the spell. Julia tells Quentin that she was promised a whole new kind of magic and thinks it is waiting in Fillory.

She and Quentin apologize for the damage they have done to each other, then solve the problem of getting in. Richard's group performs a spell that ties an object from the past to a particular date, and Julia realizes the same trick could carry them back to when Jane first entered Fillory. Richard's Brakebills alumni key gets her into the school. They find an old essay about a failed attempt at time travel, work out the timing, and use a portal in Margo's room to reach a pub in England. A park bench, a time spell, and a trip to 1942 follow. They trail young Jane to a telephone booth, where the portal opens, and step in after her.

By the end of the hour everyone is in Fillory, and the new chapter begins with Julia and Quentin crossing together, after all the damage between them. Next on the list are the god-killing blade and the Beast. The season finale, “Have You Brought Me Little Cakes?”, aired a week later on April 11, 2016.

Who is where at the end of the episode

The Magicians new class: review of Thirty-Nine Graves

This is the point where The Magicians stops being a school drama with a quest in the background and becomes a quest with a school in the background. It does so with a lot of plot, and the plot mostly works. The split structure lets the episode hold a stretch of comic action in the Neitherlands, a puzzle-box mystery on Earth and a reconciliation story for Julia.

Penny is the surprise. A character who spent early episodes as an irritant becomes the group's steadying presence, and the scene in which he sends everyone to work is the funniest in the hour. Josh is the other bright spot, a lovable, spacey survivor who also explains, without meaning to, how two years can pass on Earth while a few weeks pass for him.

The time-loop reveal is the boldest move. It risks making everything earlier feel like a rehearsal, and some viewers will find it too convenient that one character holds so many answers. The reward is that the Librarian's strange lines, Fogg's tiredness and the title now make sense together.

The weakest part is the Julia and Quentin time-travel mechanism. The spell is explained in a hurry, and the rules for how a past object carries two people back are thin. It works because the scene is about two people forgiving each other, not about the mechanics.

For The Magicians new class, the verdict is simple. This is one of the stronger hours of the first season, and it deserves a rewatch to catch the loop's earlier clues. Just keep the carrots out of the shot.

Sources

• The Magicians (American TV series), Wikipedia — cast, episode lists and air dates