Welcome to another busy episode of The Librarians! Everyone is hanging out at the Annex even though it’s everyone’s day off. Cassie, Eve and Jenkins are doing various research projects, Jake is looking at art books, and Ezekiel is rather adorably hiding from the police. The clip book get’s so excited about some magical disaster or other that it does shiny things. Strange things are afoot at the Chicagoland STEM Fair! Cassie is thrilled beyond all measure and drags them off to see science, where she cheers along with the crowd and laughs at all the science jokes while Eve wishes she could take a nap.
At the science fair, a woman named Lucinda makes a speech explaining the many benefits of winning. Lucinda assumes that The Librarians are here to be judges. My fellow Arrow fans will be thrilled to recognize Bex Taylor-Klaus, who plays Sin on Arrow. I adore her in that show. But I digress. Here, her character is named Amy, and her mom is annoying.
(Sarah: OMGILOVEHERHAIR. Amy. Not her mom.)
Eve is a little overwhelmed by all these extremely high-level projects. She longs for the days of a good old baking soda volcano. And hey! There’s a volcano guy! His name is Leonard and he’s mortified by the suckiness of his project, but Eve gives him a pep talk, he sets it off, and there is a huge actual explosion with molten lava. Not the kind that comes from mixing baking soda with vinegar – the kind that comes from real volcanoes.
Eve interrogates Leonard by looking deep into his eyes. He’s as cooperative as can be but he has no idea what happened. He wasn’t supposed to be in the fair at all. He was fifth alternate – and the other five contenders all had to drop off for bizarre reasons.
Hey, Jenkins is also into science fairs! He says that Magic is bending the laws of reality. The group should look for a coven, and they will be recognizable because there will be three coven members – hey, just like that conveniently obvious group of three goth kids who are lighting candles and stuff in the hall. Clearly they are up to badness – but really, they are just trying to get Goth Boy a date with science girl Amy. This is so sweet that I could just fall over and die – but amy, who is clearly smitten with Goth Boy (who wouldn’t be?) says she has to focus on getting into a good college. Just as she’s making this speech, a science fair participant coughs up a whole bunch of flies, which startles Cassie into saying “Holy Shit!” Jeez. Cassie didn’t even swear when she was evil.
Jenkins explains the rule of three (what you do, or as some say what you send out into the world, comes back to you threefold). It looks like someone is trying to keep everybody else from winning the science fair competition. That’s a lot of badness – so the backlash would probably be fatal. Eve can’t believe that kids would go to such lengths to win a science fair, probably because she was yawning back when Lucinda was making her speech – a speech which included the words “full college scholarship.”
It’s up to Jake to interview Goth Boy, and this is a beautifully done scene. It took my breath away. Jake quotes Byron, so…I had to hyperventilate about that, and he explains about how Byron was one of the first Goths “technically he was a Romantic” and OH GOD I AM DYING and he follows up this dollop of fanservice by talking about how the personalities we affect in high school are really just costumes, and how wearing his costume for too long affected him. Christian Kane really brings his A game to this scene, being totally quiet and understated and yet full of insight, empathy, and emotion. If you only watch one scene of this show ever, watch that one.
Back to science fair – the rest of the team meets Amy’s mom. Amy’s mom points out that some people talk about Tiger Moms but she likes to think of herself as a Wolverine Mom. Amy could not be more wretched if an actual wolverine were chewing off her foot. My pre-teen daughter who watches the show with me made me pause it so that she could formally request that I never act like Amy’s mom, ever. So if my daughter doesn’t get into college, it’s because I vowed at this moment not to be a Wolverine mom.
The team was not actually there to evaluate the mom from Hell. They were there so that Ezekiel could steal Amy’s phone, which he does. It has a magic app.Zeke stole Amy’s phone and it has a magic app. The app is a game, so someone could be using it without knowing what he or she is doing. The team is baffled even though the Wolverine Mom might just as well be wearing a T-Shirt that says “I DID IT.”
Cassie talks to Amy and to my utter lack of shock the person who installed the app on Amy’s phone is her mom. She got the app for Amy, but Amy won’t use it because “it makes the inside of my head feel greasy.” A lot of other kids have the app and use it regularly.
Amy says that she doesn’t wish to be smarter – she wishes to be normal. She still wants to be smart, but, as Cassie says, “You didn’t want that to be all you were. You wanted another adjective”. Cassie talks about her high school experience, which was very much like Amy’s, Did all the actors have extra Wheaties this week? Because in this scene and the one immediately following in which she talks to Ezekiel, Cassie is not cutesy or twee. She is very honest and authentic. Her parents threw out her science fair trophies when she started getting hallucinations. “They thought it would be a painful reminder of who I used to be.”
Lauren stumbles accidentally into the Annex, meets Jenkins, I ship it INSTANTLY. My dreams are shattered so fast that I have shipping whiplash when Lauren promptly reveals that she is actually Morgan Le Fay. She and Jenkins are implied to be ex-lovers, proving that my shipping abilities aren’t totally out of whack – but right now they hate each other murderously. Morgan calls Jenkins “Galeus”, and announces that the backfire is about to begin. Eve shoots her. I love this so very, very much. Of course, it doesn’t work.
How can the team possibly contain the backlash so that the high school isn’t propelled into the sun or something? Cassie has a plan! It’s plan involving many fast words and Cassie talking very fast and I’m much too lazy to write it all out. Basically the team has to stand around holding table legs in the air.
While the team is working this out, Zeke chats with a contestant who emotionally informs him that sea otters are going to take over the planet. This causes my daughter to collapse on the floor and roll around in gales of laughter. I must say that this episode is quite a mother-daughter bonding experience.
While Amy gets everyone into the center of the thing where they need to be because of Cassie’s reasons, Eve uses the app to fight Morgan. Alas she is presented with the age old dilemma – kill the baddie, or save the kids? She chooses to save the kids. The team does science/magic things that involve special effects and as they are doing this Eve and Morgan finds themselves together in an in-between space of time (“between the tick and the tock”). Morgan tells Eve that doom is coming and gives her a message for Jenkins and skedaddles.
Back at the science fair, cuteness abounds. Amy is disqualified so the winner is Leonard Cole which, I’m sorry, is totes adorbs, although speaking as someone who is only a few years away from paying college tuition, I can’t help but feel a moment of pity for Amy’s despicable mother who had a full scholarship in her grasp. I suspect Amy will be fine since she’s won so many other trophies that she could probably put herself through college by melting them down and selling the scrap metal. Ezekiel steals the trophy for Cassie, telling her it’s for “mathemagics.”
“I stole it, but you definitely earned it,” he says, “focus on that.”
But all is not cute at the Annex. Jenkins is furious with Eve. For the first time in hundreds of years someone had a chance to kill Morgan, and Eve didn’t do it, and now Morgan will go on to hurt other people. Eve tells Jenkins that Morgan said that the world was going to end, and she passes on the message. It was in Latin, and Jenkins translates: “Do not fear the villain. Fear the Hero.” And on this mysterious and gloomy note, we end our episode.
Reviews!
Carrie:
I wasn’t dazzled by this episode as a whole, but I thought it contained some of the best individual moments of the series. It deepened the Jenkins mystery and gave the team’s actions a greater sense of stakes. I liked the mood change from the mostly light majority to the whammy at the end, with Jenkins furious that Eve did not essentially murder Morgan. And I loved the interactions between Ezekiel and Cassie, and the team and the kids. As I mentioned in the recap, the Cassie/Amy, Jake/Goth Boy stuff was superlative. The idea of the app was both cute and very clever since it played into the clues we had, but also twisted the result just a bit – the problems aren’t caused by one person using magic but by many. Overall – a very lightweight episode, but one that had some moments of real emotional impact.
RHG:
Someone put forth the the Jenkins is Merlin theory at some point- I think that has some merit given this episode. A “galeus” is a kind of catshark, but that might not be the right spelling and it’s possible, I suppose I’m putting too much thought into this? IDK, but given that I cut some teeth on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, I feel a lot of sympathy for Morgan Le Fay, and hate the vile sorceress reading of her.
But it was an interesting twist.
The real delight of this episode was Cassie being so excited about science! ALL THE SCIENCE! ALL OF IT ALL THE TIME even when everyone else is exhausted by her. I liked the glimpse of pre-tumor Cassie, even as it made her sad. And I am impressed and how she can manage doing high speed science dialogue.
Sarah:
I thought Jenkins was totally out of line for yelling at Eve for not killing a eons-old baddie. Cowboy up and take care of your own problems, there, phone dude.
But in addition to standing up to Jenkins, I loved that Eve had loosened up, specifically in the way in which she worked with the others instead of barking at them, and also her hair.
Look, I’m feeling shallow and this episode was all about hair for me. I loved Amy, and I was impressed by the actress who played her because she was able to convey so much meaning in a handful of different variations of “sullen” and “completely mortified.”
Most of all, I loved her hair cut. I loved it. See? Shallow. Loved it.
I think she called Jenkins Galeas with an “a” not a “u.” Which makes a bit more sense.
Does anyone else love Morgan Le Fe and hate the vile sorceress version of her from being introduced to her in the Magic Treehouse books? (She has a magic tree-house full of books, she’s not evil.)
Yup. You are exactly right — how could anyone with a magic tree house full of books be evil??
I loved this episode. From the science fairs to the romantic Goth kids to the use of science to save the kiddies. All the actors hit their notes and were so great. I loved Cassie and her super excitement for all things science, and of course, Jake and his expert handling of the Goth boy. We could see do much of their characters in these moments. I laughed when Eve and Jake ran up to stop the Goth kids only to find them in the midst of a romantic proposal of sorts. Oops. Not the coven we were looking for.
And I have to say The Librarians being mistaken for the “county librarians and science judges” made me laugh. Uh, where are your judging documents and score sheets. Never mind. Just go be librarians, uh, that is LIBRARIANS.
Their was sort of an analogy almost with the Jake/Goth boy and Cass/Amy, as far as relationship wise, both almost couples have issues blocking them from having a relationship. Also th little Cassandra and Ezekiel moment at the end had me squealing. It was adorbs. I odn’t know who Cass will end up with.