Season 3, Episode 6
Do You Like Teeth?
Quentin faces his most formidable foe yet; Julia helps Alice with a dangerous endeavor.
Tropes That Appear In This Episode:
- Always Night: The Abyss in Fillory is perpetually night.
- Artifact of Doom: The Fourth Key has a tendency to drive its holders to suicide. Poppy and her crew mates tried to avoid it by passing the key among each other, but half of them still killed themselves because they couldn't resist it as effectively as the others. Benedict succumbs within minutes.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Benedict tries to stop Poppy from leaving with the key, the last shot is of her punching him in the face. Then he returns to the deck, calling himself a failure, only for Quentin to notice that Benedict is holding the key.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Incubi grow a new tail every spring, which unlike their genitalia is actually magical and useful for rituals.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The fairies reproduce by planting mushrooms which grow new fairies in pods beneath the soil.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Alice violently convulsing while Penny desperately tries to warn someone.
- Conversational Troping: Eliot thinks the fairies qualify as Big Bads because of their terraforming plot.
- Creator Cameo: Showrunner Sera Gamble voices the water dragon.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The magic transfer ritual of Marina's that Alice and Julia use tends to set everyone on fire. It's actually Dean Fogg's, and is normally forbidden magic, but he tells them how to fix it.
- Driven to Suicide: The fourth key creates a hallucination of the holder than embodies all their negative perceptions of themselves, the goal being to whittle away at their self-esteem and convince them to commit suicide. Passing the key to someone else gets rid of it. Poppy is (mostly) fine after weeks of holding it, but still takes the first opportunity to pass it to Quentin. He in turn manages to survive at least a few days with it. Benedict, on the other hand, succumbs immediately.
- Enemy Within: The abyss key creates a dark version of whoever holds that only them can see. It cannot do anything other than speak, but since it's made out of the person's negative perceptions of themselves, it can wear them down to the point they're Driven to Suicide.
- Foreshadowing: Benedict notes how he buries his insecurities by focusing on his map-making, which hints that the key will have an easier time getting to him than it does Quentin or Poppy.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Poppy gives Quentin the Fourth Key since she thinks he can handle it due being such a stable person without obvious psychological trauma. As Quentin lampshades, she merely caught him on a good day. Had she taken more time to get to know Quentin, she might have found out about his stay in a mental institution.
- Hostile Terraforming: The fairies are terraforming Fillory to grow an army.
- Kind Restraints: Quentin gets himself tied to the mast to prevent himself from suiciding or harming anyone else under the key's influence.
- Long Game: Twenty-five years ago, the incubus convinced Dean Fogg that his penis was magical. It took a while, but the prank finally paid off when Alice and Julia showed up asking for it.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When they're arguing about the key, Quentin casually admits to Poppy that the key can open doors to other places, causing her to steal it back so she can escape Fillory. This in turn leads to Benedict taking it from her and committing suicide by sea serpent. Now there's no telling where the key ended up, since dragons teleport the things they swallow to other places.
- No Matter How Much I Beg: When Quentin is suicidal, Benedict jokes that sailors used to tie people to the mast if they went crazy. Quentin thinks it's a fine idea, and orders him to leave him tied up until they reach port, no matter what. Unfortunately, this results in Benedict having to wrestle the Key off Poppy, and then committing suicide.
- Our Dragons Are Different: A sea serpent lives in the Abyss, chowing down on any sailors that happen to go overboard. Doing so with Benedict causes the fourth key to be relocated elsewhere, since dragons don't defecate like normal living creatures.
- Portal Door: It turns out all the keys have the property of opening doors to other places. Poppy doesn't get the chance to follow through since Benedict manages to take the key from her.
- Refusal of the Call: Julia successfully transfers her magic seed to Alice. She soon realizes that not only does she not have much of a life without magic, but her fear of Renard is still there. Furthermore, the seed seems to have reacted violently with Alice, and at the end of the episode she is convulsing and foaming at the mouth.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: On Hyman's suggestion, Penny decides to leave since he's tired of being an observer in his own story. Alice suggests that she could instead forge a new body for him, as was done for her.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Poppy doesn't care about modesty and starts taking off her wet clothes right in front of Quentin after she's rescued from the water, and he turns away in embarrassment.
- Shoulders-Up Nudity: When Poppy is changing out of her wet clothes, we only see her from the shoulders up, with a few Toplessness from the Back shots.
- Vagina Dentata: Margo claims this is the case with all women to try to scare Fomarr out of wanting to consummate their marriage. It doesn't deter him, but it proves a useful way to lie about him having sex with her while he was unconscious, using a fanged toad to make him think he was bitten in the act. Also functions as a minor Actor Allusion as Hale Appleman, who plays Elliot, also starred in Teeth as the first victim of the titular dentata.
