Season 5, Episode 2
The Wrath of the Time Bees
Alice goes to extreme lengths to decipher a message Quentin left behind, Kady continues her search for the missing Library annex, and Margo and Eliot try to fix history in Fillory.Tropes That Appear In This Episode:
- Black Comedy: Eliot runs into Fen's ghost. It's sad, scary and funny all at once.
- Call-Back: Margo gets Josh to give the Clock Dwarf that ham sandwich he wanted.
- Came Back Wrong: Alice uses a golem, a small piece of Quentin's soul, and his diary in an attempt to make a doppelganger of him. It works, but she misses his age by more than a decade.
- Chekhov's Gun: In the previous episode, the Clock Dwarf offered to send Margo and Eliot another 300 years into the future, which they rejected. Here, Eliot has Josh use that to get himself to the present, along with Fen and most of the court.
- Desecrating the Dead: Alice took a bit of Quentin's soul from the Underworld in order to make her golem. Julia, shocked, notes that it might keep him from resting peacefully.
- Didn't Think This Through:
- Margo has Eliot send talking bees back in time to warn Josh and Fen of what's coming, recalling how Josh talked a lot about bees. The bees go back in time and he turns out to be deathly allergic, hence why he spoke of them so much.
- Fen listens to the time bees, but her decision to commit Fillory's army and resources to a massive manhunt for a man no one else has heard of is regarded as a tyrannical action that gets her overthrown and executed.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Josh put strong Magician-proof wards on the dungeon, little realizing that he or someone he cares about might want to escape themselves someday.
- Hypocrite: Julia calls Alice out for refusing to help perform a seance (with the goal of helping both of them move on from his death) and then going behind their backs and creating a golem of Quentin.
- In Spite of a Nail:
- Jane Chatwin notes that, in forty timelines, Quentin always ends up in Fillory regardless of the circumstances.
- Margo and Eliot make multiple attempts to prevent the rise of the Dark King by warning Josh in the past using time-travelling letters, but each time something goes wrong and he comes to power anyway.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: A banishment spell seems to drive the Takers away, but they return seconds after the "Mission Accomplished" banner is unfurled, attacking the castle and killing Fen and Josh.
- Kissing Cousins: Under a truth potion, the mercenary admits to having an infatuation for his cousin. And that it's worse than that because their mothers are identical twins, so genetically she's his half-sister.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia:
- Whoever stole the Library annex sends a mercenary after Kady to erase her memories. Kady ends up reflecting the spell he tries to use on her, which causes it to haphazardly wipe both their memories and leave obvious gaps that they catch on to.
- The mercenary himself is enchanted in such a way that he is never consciously aware of the jobs he takes, because he doesn't want to remember them to ease his own conscience.
- Ma'am Shock: Golem-Quentin meets a nice lady who looks just like his friend Julia...'s grandma. Annoyed, she tells him to go play with rocks.
- Manchurian Agent: The mercenary has a secondary personality triggered by a symbol of a top hat which allows him to attack his targets without ever being consciously aware of what he's doing. This is actually a voluntary decision on his part, as he doesn't want to be burdened by the guilt.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: While he was in charge, Josh decided to place wards on the dungeons just in case, which he lampshades was poor future-planning when he wound up in them and couldn't defeat his own wards. This also keeps Margo from escaping until Josh leaves the key in the cell for her to find after being informed of what will happen.
- Portal Slam: A side-effect of Fillory suddenly running on a much faster clock than Earth was that every means of escaping Fillory was cut off until the problem was corrected. The clock portal was disconnected, and even the messenger bunnies couldn't escape to get a message out.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Justified. Jane Chatwin has a perfume called Permanence which protects the wearer from changes in the timeline. This allows Margo and Eliot to make a mess of Fillorian history during the internal Time Skip without potentially erasing themselves, using a book on Fillorian history to track the consequences of their changes.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- Margo attempts to save Josh in the past if she can't completely reset Fillory. That plan falls through, but Eliot settles for bringing him and almost everyone else they know on Fillory to the future.
- Eliot writes a letter that might be able to save Quentin, but witnessing Margo's failures makes him hesitant to use it.
- Suicide Pill: The mercenary fries his own brain to keep Kady from having Penny probe his mind for information on his client, as his entire business is predicated on the fact that he never remembers his clients.
- Super Cell Reception: Fen's smartphone somehow has three bars on Fillory.
- Take a Third Option: After repeated failures to save Josh in the past, Margo decides that trying to fix the past is pointless. Instead, Eliot instructs Josh to have the Clock Dwarf send him forward 300 years, joined by Fen and most of her court.
- Truth Serum: Kady drugs the mercenary with one to see if he was responsible for her missing memories. He admits several embarrassing things, but denies any involvement because he can't remember doing so.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Julia is livid at Alice for creating a golem of Quentin using a piece of his soul, only to botch it and revive him as a 12-year-old. It gets worse when Alice reveals that she designed the spell to be conditioned on Quentin deciphering a strange piece of paper he left behind, which Quentin at this age can't do.
- Who Dunnit To Me: A non-lethal version. Kady and her one-night-stand realize that they woke up missing a chunk of their memories and try to figure out who was responsible.
- Write Back to the Future: Trapped in his own dungeon, Josh wrote a letter and hid it behind a brick, hoping that it would reach his friends somehow. Luckily, Margo ended up in the same cell 300 years later.
- You Can't Thwart Stage One: All of Eliot and Margo's attempts to save their friends in the past by preventing the Dark King from becoming a threat in the first place fail. So their court is brought forward in time instead, to create a resistance against his already-established rule in the present.
