After almost two seasons getting the short end of various enchanted sticks, Julia Wicker is suddenly having the best time of anyone in the gang on The Magicians.
Spoilers ahead for The Magicians Season 2, Episode 8: “Word as Bond”
After Julia finally had her demon baby removed from her body following last week’s bank heist, the “complications” Kady mentioned have turned out to be pretty awesome. Julia’s “shade” is gone, which means she basically doesn’t have hardcore dark side powers anymore. The upshot is that now Julia’s a super-fun character, and seemingly the happiest magician of all time. After freaking out Kady with her brand-new good mood, Julia heads to Fillory to and offers to assist Margo and the gang with their impending war. Once there, Julia acts like she’s the new Quentin: She loves talking about the Fillory books and loves helping out.
But, Julia has some kind of secret angle in all of this. Even though she offers to help Margo negotiate with the forest-dwelling dryads, her main goal involves obtaining hardcore magic that can make her totally invisible to gods like Reynard. So, instead of giving the forest-people a peace offering, she tricks them and blows them all up. Julia smiles while all this happens, and even though Margo starts to throw in her the dungeon, she doesn’t really seem to give a shit.
After the entire ensemble briefly reunited, the majority of the characters spend the rest of the episode doing their own things again. Kady and Penny are figuring out they love each other (duh), Eliot is being brought back to life (he’s fine), and Quentin is grappling with still having Alice’s ghost inside him (she’s still psycho.) The last of these plotlines continues to be interesting, as Alice is now doing all sorts of crazy shit in Quentin’s body that’s he’s not aware of, including stabbing a monster that is part-child and part-land-octopus, or something. The big change here is that the episode ends with Penny figuring out that Alice’s niffin is living inside of Quentin, which means that everybody will probably find out soon too.
It’s a good cliffhanger, but strangely, anything happening with Quentin and Alice isn’t near as satisfying as seeing Julia walk away from a giant magical forest she just destroyed. Because even though Julia was taken away by guards at the end of this episode, she had a smile on her face while it was happening.
The Magicians airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EST on Syfy.
