Pete's assault on Julia and the strong sexual assault implications before backing down seem to come from nowhere. Then you realize that magic comes from pain and his actions resulted in Julia's 'party trick' becoming genuinely dangerous. It was likely he was trying to get Julia to demonstrate her powers by engaging a fight-or-flight response.
Penny's conscious reason for hating Quentin is because he can always hear Q's thoughts. Below the surface, though, he may also be jealous of Q's ability to connect and be vulnerable with others. Penny has an iron-clad wall of 2-feet-thick cement between himself and everyone except Kady. Being around such an open, trusting person as Q must be both terrifying and enviable to someone who keeps himself utterly closed off for his own survival.
Quentin's nightmare of the mental hospital says a lot about how he sees everyone.
Penny is an exotic, jerkish, annoyingly competent not-quite authority figure who always seems to cause problems for him.
Eliot is a sex-crazed hedonist inmate who will do anything for some drugs.
Alice is obsessed with something that seems crazy. Oh, and she's a nympho who jumps Quentin's bones every chance she gets (don't need to be Freud to figure out the symbolism of that).
Julia is exactly like she was before she found out about magic; happy and well-adjusted at Yale while engaged. Of course, since this is the real Julia, she probably chose to appear that way, and it doesn't say much about Quentin.
Dean Fogg is a well-meaning doctor who nevertheless isn't very helpful. Most importantly is probably the fact that Quentin used the psychologist from the first episode to fill the "evil doctor" role, when it would have been simpler to put the Dean into that role. The evil doctor even has his office.
In the first episode, Dean Fogg snaps at Quentin and yells "DO SOME GODDAMN MAGIC!" It seems extremely out of character for him, considering that he is always calm and composed in even the worst situations. But then we find out about the time loop; this is the fortieth time he has seen Quentin awkwardly play with his cards during the test, so he's sick of it.
When Zelda is making photocopies of Beast's book requested by Penny, she isn't exploiting a loophole, but fulfilling the rules in both letter and spirit: the point of existence of the Library is preserving and spreading knowledge, and while she cannot lend the book itself to Penny, since he's not vetted and granted the card yet, her job is still to help him find the answers. As long as the book in question isn't forbidden, she's required to do something like that.
The Beast being Martin Chatwin makes sense once you think about it. Of all the children, he was the one Fillory rejected after a while. Maybe, since time works differently in Fillory, the land sensed what he would become.
Ember says he knew about his circumstances and barred him entrance, seeing him as "defiled", which actually lead him to becoming the Beast. Apparently Ember just found the situation distasteful and didn't want Martin ruining the mood.
Hitlers Time Travel Exemption happens because Hitler was a battlemage. There are historical reports that Hitler was abused in his childhood by an insane father, then blamed a Jewish doctor for the death of his mother - and in this series, magic is fueled by pain. This means that any sadistic tyrant in history, tortured by both their monstrous past and The Chains of Commanding, could be an archmage; politically and magically powerful enough to destroy the lives of millions, broken enough to gleefully (or subconsciously) will it, and magically defended to prevent the only people capable of time travel from ever doing anything about it. If anything, over time (travel) natural selection would kill off any tyrant who wasn't a wizard and leave the supernatural fully in charge of human history.
Season 2
In season two, a point is made about Marina being all alone, with no one to help her. One wonders where her group of followers went, until you remember that Marina killed Kady's mother. That action probably caused everyone, even Pete, to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here on her. That would explain her apology to Julia at the rehab center and later helping her: She was lonely.
Julia is pretty close with Kady. After all, they have both betrayed people they care about (Quentin and Penny), both left Brakebills in bad ways due to their connections with the hedge witches and both were screwed over by Marina. Also, Kady is a mirror to Julia: She is what would have happened if Julia was unlucky enough to have no one to truly take care of her for most of her life (Kady was basically sold into slavery). Julia, on the other hand, is what would have happened if Kady was allowed to have a relatively normal life, even though Julia dealt with emotional neglect most of her life. Meanwhile, Julia and Margo hate each other for that very reason: Julia is Margo with a larger sense of entitlement and a tendency to make decisions that hurt others, and Margo is Julia without the massive trauma weighing her down and has the ability to consider her friends' welfare. However, they both have a tendency to go for extreme revenge: Julia helped Marina put Quentin in a coma after he refused to help get her into Brakebills, and Margo declared war on Loria for what amounted to a bad prank.
In the Underworld orientation video, the speaker is some apparently random old guy sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a fire, petting his big fluffy dog. That's Hades and Cerberus.
Why was Alice so excited about the bank robbery? Because she knew Quentin and co would almost certainly screw it up and she could leverage their lives for her freedom.
Season 3
That the Muntjac would side with Margo and Eliot over Tick is completely justified since Eliot is clearly enamoured with the ship from the moment he first steps aboard and Margo made it clear that she respects the Muntjac's bodily autonomy no matter the stakes, while Tick showed his aversion to the idea of self-aware naval assets early on.
In The Art of the Deal, why is it so significant that Penny eats the cupcake at the end of the episode? Because this is a loose reference to Persephone, who ate six sacred pomegranate seeds in the underworld and was then tied to it forever. Penny eating the cupcake is him deciding to stay in the underworld.
At the end of season 3, some of the Physical Kids' new personas make way more sense than others, which seem to be kind of random. But then you remember that the Dean constructed them—so it's all based on how well he knows them, which is why Quentin's and Margo's are more intuitive than Kady's or Josh's. For example, why make Kady a drug dealer? Most of what he knows about her, probably, is that she's a hedgewitch, and to the Dean of Brakebills, the hedges basically are dealers. Chaplain Richard even explicitly compared the two to Julia.
Even witht he reveal that the identies were based on a graphic novel Fogg had, the identites given to the characters make sense:
Margo is made a Fashion Magazine editor which is a high position in a cutthroat business which fits her to a T while Kady is an undercover cop, a reverse from the first season where she was The Mole for Hedge Witches. A professional Uber driver is the perfect job for Josh who can be his own boss. Meanwhile Penny 23 is an underground DJ that is mentioned to bang groupies mirroring pre-Character Development Penny 40 not mentioning how "Hansel's" personality is way more calm mirroring how 23 is nicer than 40.
Kimber/Julia's entrance into Brakebills as Kim seems familiar at first, especially her meeting Todd. Turns out to be a meta version of how Quentin arrived at Brakebills, with Todd standing in for Eliot. For bonus points, Todd’s first name is Eliot, he just goes by his middle name because Eliot invoked One-Steve Limit.
The Monster spends most of his time with either Quentin or Margo, with Josh, Julia and Alice in only how they relate to the former two. Since he is inhabiting Eliot's body, it makes sense that he is focusing on the people closest to him. This also explains why he seems to be ignoring Kady and Penny.
Since Marina 40 was killed by Reynard, Kady never got her revenge on her for the death of her mother. With the appearance of Marina 23, however, Kady now has the chance to punish her for that act, which is exactly what she does.
Thanks to Escape From The Happy Place, there is now a better understanding of why Eliot and Quentin never really revisited what they went through in the timeline where they lived a life together: Quentin wanted to pursue things further but Eliot shut him down due to fear, even though he loves Quentin. It also explains why Eliot tried to kill the Monster in order to save Quentin.
The 4-1-1 has a past version of Alice tell a time-traveling Quentin that he is the best thing that has ever happened to her and that she doesn`t want to lose what they have. She later does a spell to erase what she knows but she may have retained some sense of what transpired — which may explain why she acted distant to Quentin back in the second half of season one, after they slept together.
Season 5
While it seems bizarre at first, Hades playing Untitled Goose Game actually makes perfect sense. What better game for a god to play than one where you screw with the lives of random people?
Considering his role as the Big Bad in season two, one has to wonder if Ember knew what would happen when he gave Julia back her memories involving her rape and the deaths of her friends at the hands of Reynard...
What if the creature that was supposed to stay in the castle possessed Eliot as revenge for shooting him in order to save Quentin?
Yes, possession was a revenge, though it didn't connect the dots about saving part.
In the first season, The Beast, at one point, possessed a man that was dating Eliot at the time. That means that at some point, Eliot may have been raped by the Beast!
Eliot and Mike did have sex. But at the time, Eliot had no idea that Mike was possessed, and was fully into it. Part of Eliot's breakdown after being forced to kill Mike may have been the realization that he was duped into sex with the Beast.
Eliot was shown to have strong enough feelings for Mike that he wanted to have him be a part of the Eliot+Margo dynamic. This is no small thing. And may partly explain why Eliot was so gun-shy about Quentin, since his last serious consideration for a romantic partnership ended so poorly.
It was gruesome enough, back in season one, when possessed-Mike killed a bunny. But then when later seasons roll around, the real horror kicks in: that was a Fillorian bunny, of the talking, self-aware kind, which just cranks the horror way up: did it know that was the Beast? Was it scared?
Marina-23 may have made a big mistake coming to the main universe. After all, Marina had a crapload of enemies before she died. What if one of them come after her?
She had them in every timeline, being such a bitch, and was able to defend herself, it takes immensely powerful Bad Luck Charm to catch her off-guard.
Margo revealing the truth about the spirits didn’t improve anything - it just changed who the victims were. Sure, their handy for laundry, but they were prepared to execute someone for cheating on his wife. Absolute power and all that, and given that the women can now ‘’kill’’ men just by getting angry, and they have no recourse or counter to it, the women are quite powerful. There’s also no indication anyone but the Foremost and his assistant knew the truth, in fact given that he said “If you intend to tell our people...” rather than “our women,” it’s likely only he and the female magician working with him knew.
The book and series are implied to be two of multiple timelines Jane produced in her efforts to kill The Beast. Many of the characters in the series were Race Lift-ed from their original Caucasian selves. This implies that Jane went so far as to somehow alter the ancestry of the main characters as one of the factors in forging a timeline where they pulled it off. Did she keep people from meeting? Did she kill people?
The de-powered Reynard is shown to have a bunch of feminist lit and similar books in his apartment. Now, how would a rapist get his victim to let down her guard? Perhaps by having a friendly conversation about books. Looks like the world might have been better off if Julia had popped a cap in him after all.
