Season 2, Episode 8
Word as Bond
After the exorcism, Julia's shade is destroyed and she is still on the run from Reynard. Penny, Kady, and Quentin look for Reynard's lost demigod son, but Quentin keeps getting distracted trying to deal with Alice. Meanwhile, Eliot is in a coma because his mind is stuck in his dead golem, so Margo has to prepare for war by herself.
Tropes That Appear In This Episode:
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Angst? What Angst?: No one was quite sure what Julia would be like with her Shade gone, but they didn't expect her to be outright perky. - Break His Heart to Save Him: Kady spends the entire episode trying to convince Penny that she's not worth his time, but he refuses to have any of it.Penny: I love you. Deal.
- Cutting the Knot:
- The One-Way Forest only allows passage for the Lorian army while blocking the Fillorian army. Julia solves this issue by tricking the dryad into bringing a firebomb into the forest, burning the whole thing down. Subverted as this causes a lot more problems than it solves, since the trees were the last of their kind and were well-respected.
- Penny and Kady catch on to Quentin's unusual efforts to shield his mind, so Kady gets around his wards by knocking him out.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Margo runs into problems again because as the High Queen, she is considered less important than the High King. The One Way Forest sees merely talking to her as an insult, and there are many things in the kingdom that she simply doesn't have authority over.
- Eldritch Abomination: The ancient niffin Alice spends the episode looking for. He was a priest who learned magic and stretched too far, but he discovered a way to escape the boxing spell. He has spent much of the time since exploring the cosmos, learning things about magic that normal people can't even dream of.
- The Extremist Was Right: In the last episode one of the Korean exorcists advocated killing both Julia and the fetus within her as opposed to risking an exorcism ritual. In this episode, thanks to said ritual accidentally eliminating her Shade, Julia renders an entire species of endangered sapient beings extinct without a second thought.
- Grand Theft Me: Quentin agrees to give Alice his body for half an hour every night at midnight. She uses it to research the one niffin who has found ways to escape bindings.
- Heroic RRoD: A human body can't contain a niffin for long. By the end of the episode, Quentin is starting to get nosebleeds from the strain. If he dies while Alice is still trapped in the tattoo, she'll die too.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: Julia reasons that Reynard would have killed her by now if he wanted to, so she leaves the safety of Brakebills. Not five seconds after that, he shows up.
- Internal Reveal: Penny learns more or less what's going on with Quentin and Alice at the end of the episode.
- Kick the Dog: Alice spends most of the episode doing this to Quentin, but takes it to even higher levels when he admits to his helplessness with Julia, Elliot and Fillory: she responds by calling him a failure.
- Loophole Abuse:
- Alice is bound to be unable to kill people, but baby-eating monsters don't count. Quentin freaks out when he wakes up to see what appears to be a little girl with a knife in her chest, but Alice points out that technically killing the thing was a good deed. It's also not technically dead; she just killed the lure and the rest of it will be pretty pissed when it realizes what happened.
- Alice can't do any magic rituals, so she sets one up so that everything is in place and it will activate when Quentin opens the door despite her protests.
- Julia tries this. She bombs the One Way Forest, then tells Margo to blame her for everything and exile her—she didn't want to stay in Fillory anyway. Margo realizes this won't placate anyone, and throws her in the dungeon until she figures out what to do with her.
- Magically-Binding Contract:
- Alice and Quentin enter into one where Alice gets the body for half an hour a day but can't kill anyone or cast magic.
- The Librarian offers Penny one, complete and utter magical and physical service for a period of no less than one million years in exchange for fixing his hands and a few other minor perks. Penny initially declines, but decides to go through with it because at least the Librarians tell you the deal up front. That's better than most magicians.
- A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Kady knocks out Quentin so Penny can read his mind and get some answers. This results in Alice nearly choking him to death inside Quentin's mind.
- Multitasked Conversation: Quentin negotiates with Alice for a way to see into the past, in exchange for some more time in his body. Penny and Kady are around and he apparently has to speak out loud to communicate with her, so he tries to do it indirectly. It doesn't work very well.
- No-Sell: Kady has collected a bunch of information on spells ancient Magicans used to try and protect their communities from the depredations of Zeus and his old god buddies. Unfortunately, the one thing these god-killing spells had in common was that they failed. This gives Julia the idea for the two of them to invent their own.
- Portal Door: Julia enchants a doorframe to make a single-use portal.
- Pragmatic Villainy: The monster in the sandbox wants a live baby for meat in exchange for information. Alice doesn't have time for that, so she just threatens it instead.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Alice gets in contact with another niffin that figured out how to avoid being trapped in a niffin box, which is knowledge she wants to avoid suffering that fate. The niffin tells her off for being too weak to even escape Quentin's body and refuses to help her.
- Reverse Psychology: Alice desperately tries to keep Quentin from figuring out what she was doing with his body... which leads to him activating the ritual she had set up and couldn't finish herself.
- Robinson/Goldberg Contraption: Alice sets one up which does a niffin-summoning ritual.
- The Sociopath: With her shade gone, Julia is a sociopath on the same level as Martin. She is happy at all times, completely fearless, and astonishingly selfish. She blackmails the Lorian illusionist into giving her a magic artifact, but then keeps her word to let him go—and turns around and bombs the One Way Forest (even though she knows it will cause a civil war) because it was just the easiest solution she could see.
- Zero-Approval Gambit: Julia figures that Eliot and Margo can absolve themselves of blame for burning the grove by claiming that she's an insane rogue agent and exiling her. Margo's less short-sighted than she is at the moment, though, and realizes it won't help.
