A special investigator, Eliza (Esmé Bianco), is called in to analyze and respond to the situation at hand. The college traces the incident back to the four students’ failed summoning, and the threat of expulsion hangs over their head because of it.
#Watch the magicians s01e02 series#
As an aside, I was pleased to see that: Rick Worthy’s the best actor in this whole series so far. There was a cliffhanger as to whether the Beast had killed Dean Fogg, but magical health care being what it is, we see him alive and kicking at the end of the episode. Dean Fogg (Rick Worthy), the highest-placed magician at the school, attempted to fight the Beast, and was defeated - then mutilated - in a matter of seconds.
![watch the magicians s01e02 watch the magicians s01e02](https://fs1.extraimage.org/2020/09/05/KMBI2-4.jpg)
The Beast, a pan-dimensional magical horror, was apparently summoned to Brakebills by the coterie of Quentin (Jason Ralph), Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Penny (Arjun Gupta), and Kady (Jade Tailor) as a side effect of their attempts to discover more about Quentin’s mysterious connection to the mystical otherworld of Fillory. This week’s episode begins in the aftermath of the Beast’s (Anthony Marble) rampage through Brakebills College. My three big issues with the first episode were addressed tidily here: the farcical sex-n’-violence angle was toned down, the episode had an internal continuity that I could follow, and the actors acted like believable human beings. If anything, this second episode seemed - apologetic? - about the weaknesses of “Unauthorized Magic”. But “The Source of Magic” was an intriguing look into the world of urban magic translated over from Lev Grossman’s book series.
![watch the magicians s01e02 watch the magicians s01e02](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/weEF83T0DU4/maxresdefault.jpg)
One suspects that the writers for the first episode felt that they had to condense 15 chapters of world-building into a single episode, and it suffered from a kind of stitched-togetherness that didn’t inspire viewer interest.
![watch the magicians s01e02 watch the magicians s01e02](https://occ-0-1722-1723.1.nflxso.net/dnm/api/v6/9pS1daC2n6UGc3dUogvWIPMR_OU/AAAABSxEhIVGrXiOPbr9Yt3FbgNidRQ85PQyRr1XrqJu5jTgLCiHZatVUmUzZ3wVcFUmtCqpgTmGKth8l8pg1nHnyJy_Qu3pMhwS2WOqn8kiKbmmFnIe.jpg)
“The Source of Magic” is quite a bit better than its predecessor, “Unauthorized Magic”. Now this is the episode that really feels like the beginning of a series.