Showing posts with label prophecy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prophecy. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

The Librarians, Season 3, Episode 4: And the Self Fulfilling Prophecy



This episode is in one of my most hated formats – the broken time line. The characters are running around with random, poorly-explained amnesia with occasional flashes of memory to try and piece the story together

So Eve, and the Librarians were celebrating in Las Vegas and we have a nice touching scene where everyone is super kind to Eve because they all recognise she’s probably not feeling great since Flynn has deserted her. Again. Alas we don’t get to stay on this excellent scene of bonding to join his slighting weird story

And I think I could actually really like this whole plot of prophecy fencing and second guessing prophecy if it weren’t for the broken time line

Basically there’s this unstoppable magical assassin focusing on Eve. He also drops a prophecy cube – a kind of stored prophecy – which reveals that the assassin will kill Eve in the Library

Jenkins is firmly of the opinion she should stay in the Library and be safe because it’s the Library. In a glorious moment of self-mockery, Eve lists the 8 gajillion people who have easily infiltrated the secure Library. I always appreciate a lovely chunk of self-awareness.

Instead they follow up a random library mission to a school with lots of random luck, including the swim team passing several tests after ridiculous improvement, winning the lottery and the captain winning a trip to train in an Olympic pool in Greece – which then dumps Ezekiel, Jake and Evem, via school pool, into a strange world with odd amnesia. They’re joined by several people from the school, including the captain of the swim team, the headmaster (who has a little power play with Eve before Eve effortlessly takes control because she’s Eve) and the cleaning lady, Nina

And they have several swimming goggles which, revealed through flashbacks, are the key behind all the luck of the school swim team: they help you see a bit of the future

The gang uses these goggles to navigate past a series of traps with fun little moments – like knowing they can use a coin to find the trapped areas of the floor because they’ve seen a future of Ezekiel giving that coin to a museum – so it can’t be destroyed.

At the same time, at the Library, Cassandra and Jenkins return with a second prophecy cube and tell us the rules of prophecy (very important since Eve is prophesised to die). You can’t just run from prophecy – you either defeat it with a larger prophecy (the example given is an Oracle, who seeing that she would be murdered by one of her priestesses, made several other prophecies that each of her priestesses would be murdered by her wife – and promptly married and murdered each of them. Breaking the prophecy with more prophecy. So, yes same-sex relationship, no lots of murdering) or have someone outside the prophecy break it.