Season 2, Episode 10
The Girl Who Told Time
Eliot is going crazy trying to prepare for his wedding, while Quentin and Julia struggle to find a way to repair her soul. As Penny begins working for the Library, Kady continues searching for a way to kill Renard.
Tropes That Appear In This Episode:
- 0% Approval Rating: Despite Eliot teaching the locals farming, fixing the Wellspring, and securing an alliance with Loria, he still only has an approval rating of 26%. Of course, we have no baseline; it's quite possible that previous monarchs were worse.
- Alternate Self: Dean Fogg remembers Julia from the previous thirty-nine loops where she did gain entrance into Brakebills, and releases her from the anti-magic chamber because even without her shade, he trusts her to do the right thing and find a solution.
- Alternate Timeline: Using the Teslaflexion device, Quentin summons a version of Alice from one of the previous loops. She is the Sole Survivor of the battle with the Beast, and has become obsessed with repairing her Quentin's shredded soul so that he can move on to his proper rest.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Nate Silver is a magician. Eliot used one of his polling spells to get an accurate approval rating.
- Driven to Suicide: Howard the Librarian sacrifices his life rather than be compelled into opening the Poison Room.
- Higher Understanding Through Drugs: The edible josh gives Quentin allows him to see into other worlds, and gives him a vision of Julia's shade.
- Internal Reveal: Fen finds out the terms of Margo's deal with the fairies.
- Morality Chain: The only standard Julia can come up with for morality is, "Would Q look at me like I'm evil?"
- Namesake Gag: Dean Fogg claims that the Teslaflexion is named after its inventor, Fred Flexion, not Nikola Tesla. He's probably being sarcastic...
- No Man Should Have This Power: The Library seals forbidden, potentially world-ending knowledge in the "Poison Room", an entire realm filled with a magical toxin that causes horrible cancer if the exposure doesn't kill you outright. They are deeply disturbed that they have to do such a thing, but consider it the only alternative to destroying the books outright.
- The Reveal: Julia's Shade has been separated, rather than destroyed.
- Shallow News Site Satire: FuzzBeat, an obvious Buzzfeed riff (their logo is a pink and green version of the Buzzfeed logo; their mascot is a unicorn in a tutu). Penny scoffs at them running serious news and cat videos at the same time. However, it turns out the shallowness is intentional — in this universe, clickbait is coded information for Magicians disguised with illusion magic.
- The Sociopath: Deconstructed. After Fogg lets Julia out of the anti-magic chamber, she decides she wants to be a good person again, but has no idea how. She ends up sitting in her apartment, paralyzed with indecision, as she can't figure out if even the tiniest things are evil or not.Julia: I never once stopped to ask if I was doing the right thing, and now it's all I ask — "If I did this, would Q look at me like I'm evil?" I can't really feel any of it anymore. I'm doing it from memory.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Quentin's Teslaflexion visit to Alice-23 will be what inspires her to try and bring her Q back to life, accidentally creating a new Beast and making that bad timeline worse.
