The Librarians, Season 3, Episode 9: And the Fatal Seperation

This episode returns us to the lost city of Shangri-la; and people who watched the films that preceded this series will know Flynn severely damaged it in one of his adventures back then.

It has since been repaired by the Monkey King who now runs the place and the vast well of white magic there by merit of the special magic stick he has. Sadly this being with huge roots in Chinese mythology, is pretty much reduced to an old stereotype of the old Asian man who teaches martial arts and quotes fortune cookies and passes the trite sayings off as wisdom. It’s a depiction that was pretty done 20 years ago.

And who is the mentee to this old mentor? (C’mon, you have an elderly Asia martial arts expert who dispenses wisdom you KNOW his only reason for being is to be a mentor). That would be Jake who is now a complete master martial artist to the extent that the Monkey King declares he has nothing else to teach Jake except magic (which Jake, in common with the ongoing debate, vehemently rejects). After 2 months

2 months

2 months is literally all it took before the Monkey King declared he had nothing more to teach? 2 months is all it took to make Jake a master martial artist. 2 months is all it took for this immortal being to convey all of his technique and skill. 2 months is all it took the Monkey King to train Jake to be able to beat him

Wow, bad enough you turn him into a basic mentor character but most of those mentor characters remained better than their students with their lifetime of dedicated focus and everything.

At the Library we have Cassandra dealing with her new gift and Eve’s excellent advice and reassurance around it: Eve has spent a long time helping Ezekiel and Jake become the people she saw in her visions last season – but not Cassandra; she’s just too different from Eve’s experiences and knowledge. Cassandra is concerned that her gift is open to abuse and out of control since it now has a mind control element

While Jenkins has found an old room in the Library – it’s a room of candles, each candle representing a person connected to the library. If it’s lit, they’re still alive – and Charlene’s is still lit. Of course, have some hope! More ominously, Flynn’s is burned down to a stub.

Teen Wolf, Season 6, Episode 8: Blitzkrieg

Time for a Garrett/Hauptman history lesson. Turns out he’s a Lowenmensch – a wolf/lion man (I wonder if this is a mistake and what they meant was just lion man?) and a Nazi – yes as in World War 2 Nazi rather than the modern Alt Right kind – who wanted to enslave the Wild Hunt to turn into an army for Hitler

Honestly, in supernatural worlds, the Nazis never had tanks – just oodles and oodles of occultists trying to summon bad things.

It didn’t go well for him or his unit which were all massacred by the annoyed hunter

Except him who was wounded by the Hunt and got one of those green-infected nasty wounds. He didn’t give up on grabbing the Hunt and went looking for some scientists to help. Unfortunately for him those scientists were the Dread Doctors who promptly put him in one of their vats to do nefarious things with him. He spent several decades gently simmering in dread doctor goo, with a base of Wild Hunt Poison and a dash of general evil turning into something super powerful and deadly. Yes a marinating Nazi recipe, I was going to make a Paula Dean quip but there was no indication of butter being added at all

How does the gang learn all this? Because of the B team showing their usual common sense. After a brief moment where Mason mourns Cody and is shocked that he only has pics of Mason in his phone (Hayden: That means he loves you Me: That means the show didn’t develop him enough to have hobbies, friends, family or be anything other than Mason’s +1 who in turn is little more than Liam’s +1 but still points for showing mourning). Most of the Town has now been taken by the Hunters now and everyone is all despairy – but Theo claims to know all this about Garrett because the script says so. Y’know, for beings that barely spoke the Dread Doctors were damn chatty behind the scenes

He is willing to divulge all of this if the B team will destroy Kira’s sword so he can’t be trapped again. I think this is a shitty thing to do without speaking to Kira or Noshiko first. I also think it’s pointless – yay they won’t trap you under the floor any more – but I’m sure Malia will happily beat you to death. Is that better?

After these revelations the Wild Hunt shows up – Mason is quickly vanished. Followed by, after a long dramatic moment in which this show insists on trying to make me care about Liam and Hayden, Hayden is also taken. Liam runs off alone.

Chris and Melissa are still trying to track down Garrett – since they’ve been on the Pineal gland murders for a while. He finds them, sadly, and all enhanced he is more than a match for an Argent. He demands to be shown where Parrish is – since he wants a Hellhound – and then Melissa and Chris are also green gassed out of there. This show’s filling up that train station. So many have gone we just know they’re all going to be rescued – there’s just too many for them not to. It kind of detracts from the tension of it – because we know these losses aren’t going to have consequences

For reasons unknown, Parrish is now a servant of Garrett. Green gassy glows may be involved. Which sounds terrible when I write it out.

The Librarians, Season 3 Episode 8: And the Eternal Question

We see evidence of perhaps the most dangerous, most powerful, most evil dark magic we’ve ever seen on this show.

People excited over golf. Golf people! Human sacrifice must be involved!

Until the main golfer who is doing so well suddenly spontaneously combusts. He is also disqualified because he did something interesting in a golf match. Totally against the rules.

Of course spontaneous combustion is definitely a Librarian thing. Kind of. Jenkins and Flynn are both clear they’ve never come across magical spontaneous combustion before. But, hey, there’s a first time for everything.

More investigating leads to the golfer’s wife who informs them that her husband was dying of cancer before he went to a spa and totally got better.

Uh-huh

Then they open some curtains and she burns to ash when exposed to sunlight.

Time to go visit this spa. There they the owner and her son Tomas and daughter Estrella who runs the place. It’s a beautiful, amazing place all organic and shiny and with special shiny rocks in the soil.

Mind Magic (World of the Lupi #12) by Eileen Wilks

Lily’s bond with Rule is as stretched and confused as it’s ever been – thanks to the lessons she is having in Mind Speech. This is the worst time for her to disappear when she cannot be found

But Lily vanishes following up on a favour she cannot deny – while at the same time a conspiracy strikes against the Shadow Unit. The whole apparatus designed to fight The Enemy, Ruben the head of the unit, Rule the head of two Lupi clans are all targeted in a devastating co-ordinated attack.

It’s the worst time for Lily to be out of touch as everything they’ve built begins to crumble.

Back to Lily as a protagonist! I always love this focus, because Lily Yu is an awesome protagonist and one of my favourites

And, of course, I love the world building. I love the massively creative world building. I love that such a lot of originality has gone into not only designing the world with this crash of magic into the technological world, the various magical societies from the Brownies to the Lupi who all have their own cultures and magic and language all really well done together. And then we have the dragons with their completely unique biology coupled with their own culture and traditions and opinions and beliefs. It’s excellent. It’s really original and well developed and nuanced.

And I love Lily. I do love lily. I love that she’s so sensible. I love that even when worried and angry and outraged and upset and emotional she’s still logical and capable and empathetic enough to see from a different point of view. I love how she can be angry with various supernatural beings while also acknowledging that from their point of view they’re a very different beings with vastly different values. She can acknowledge that, understand that, respect that – but not by being a complete door mat to them. The fact they have a dramatically different culture doesn’t mean they’re allowed to treat her in ways that she finds unacceptable because of it.

The Librarians, Season 3, Episode 7: And the Curse of Cindy

Hippies! We got hippies! Time to get the dragons!

A woman is trying to get her daughter out of the adoring cult of Cindy worshippers- only to become a Cindy worshipper herself. Yes, magic is afoot.

The Librarians naturally show up, gaining access to the compound by using Flynn’s patented “We’re the Librarians” charm to open up the doors

And, yes, it’s magic. Of course it’s magic. Jake is quite shocked by this which is a little naive but it further shows again how the debate about whether or not magic is safe to use is a bit less binary than they like to present it – with them constantly using magic every day in every mission.

They quickly realise that Cindy is using some kind of artefact or magic to make herself the target of obsession and run around chasing the traditional red herring. They also run across some Dosa elements, but they’ve also already fallen prey to Cindy’s obsession powers.

As do Jake and Flynn

A quick return to the Library for Jenkins to do some tests concludes they’re dealing with a love potion. Well, an Obsession potion which is what love potions really are without the good press. While he works on a cure for that (and the others take vids of Jake and Flynn for future embarrassment) they discover that the love potion is perfume based and discuss why Ezekiel is magically immune

Because he loves himself too much. Uh-huh.

Back into the fray, while we see lots of a woman making the potion for Cindy and Cindy repeatedly crying over a video of her in a reality television show – being voted off.

The Librarians, Season 3, Episode 6: And the Trial of the Triangle

This episode is several kinds of awesome – because it takes the whole separate storylines between Flynn and the other Librarians and mushes them together in a way that is finally drawing out the relationship between them and calling out the problems there

Namely Flynn. The Flynn the absent leader who doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of respect for his fellow librarians and has worked alone for so long that he far too often fails to take the others into account

The episode begins with Eve and the Librarians kidnapping Flynn so they can have an intervention. And this is so often clichéd and cheesey – and, yes, it’s Librarians so it’s going to be a bit of cheesey anyway because yes it is – but this is really well done and awesomely pulls out issues that have always been there and we’ve all been expected to just accept.

Ezekiel calls him out on expecting everyone to think and process just like him – to be his kind of Librarian. But an ongoing theme of Ezekiel’s story has been that he is also a Librarian, very different from the more academic Flynn and his fellows – but that doesn’t make Ezekiel a lesser Librarian.

While Cassandra calls him out on how intimidating he is, how much he insists on doing things his way. How he’s so very good at being a Librarian he has forgotten that other people can be good as well – how she’s left feeling she can’t offer a solution and they all have to wait around awkwardly until Flynn has an idea. He’s a gifted leader but he’s not the only gifted person there

And Jake calls him out for being such a poor friend – how he has raised so many barriers between him and the others that he feels like he’s constantly having to build a new relationship with Flynn.

Of course, Eve, who loves Flynn has a very palpable hit – how much Flynn’s self-destructive impulses is hurting them. His moods, his secrecy, his pride is so destructive. This is something they come back to awesomely (and cheesily) later.

Flynn is, naturally, completely unwilling to confront this and instead focuses on the war they’re facing. And he’s not entirely wrong – friendship and even love have to take a back step to literally saving the world from ultimate evil. And he’s not wrong but he’s also throwing away assets as well as relationships.

His current focus is the Eye of Ra, a super magical item that can completely help them against Apep and that’s what he has been looking for. But, again, this emphasises how he hasn’t been helping himself by not telling anyone – not even Eve – about this.

We have one of those excellent moments of collaboration where every member of the team brings out their speciality to help fund out where the Eye is – it’s a typical zany Librarian’s storyline involving the Bermuda Triangle, Venezuelan aircraft and Lewis Carol because Librarians is fun like that. On the way we have a moment of Eve and Flynn in an airport having a loud argument as a destruction which quickly turns into a powerful, emotional fight about their relationship and what they want from each other as well as basically referring to themselves as mum and dad to the child Librarians. There’s a lot of back and forth about responsibilities, entanglements and what Eve wants from Flynn and what he wants from her but underlying is the declaration that they do both very much love each other.

I Did Not Give that Spider Superhuman Intelligence (Please Don't Tell My Parents #0.5) by Richard Roberts

Goodnight is being pulled back into superheroing, despite being officially retired.

But when pint-sized heroes Mish-Mosh and Psychopomp drop in her lap, along with an instant chance to save the day, how could she not form Team Tiny?! A superhero team wedded to Goodnight’s firm principle

Being a superhero should be fun! To Irene this is an awesome game. Lives are at stake, some terrible people need stopping – but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fun as well!

I love the quirky super hero world which we’ve seen through the lens of Penny Ack and her friends which has always been so much zany fun. And after three books of that, this book is perfect to delve a little behind all that

And lo we have this prequel which does this so perfectly

Going back several decades before Penny came on the scene we get to see the wonderful origin stories of several of the most compelling characters that loom large over the ongoing series. Not characters who are, perhaps, most involved in the books, but ones whose legends truly shape them by everyone knowing about them – like Mourning Dove. One of the good elements of the original three books is that there isn’t a lot of explanation of things that everyone knows- everyone knows about Mourning Dove so there isn’t really any need to explain her other than have her presence shadow the book. That’s well done. But it’s also awesome to see the origin behind that, the history and how she developed

And also how the city developed and how Goodnight’s visions of what super heroes and super villains should be and the whole wonderful underpinning of this series – that super heroing can be fun. That there should be rules, code of conduct, rules of engagement. That when super powerful beings clash there needs to be some rules or everyone suffers

And it wasn’t just abstract – there was a really excellent metaplot on the consequences of, for example, heroes and villains targeting revealed identities, homes, families: how it not only gives heroes and villains downtime but how someone’s family being targeted makes them more and more desperate and more and more dangerous. And dangerous + super powers = terrible consequences.

Teen Wolf, Season 6, Episode 7: Heartless

So we have Theo having guilt nightmares of woman ripping out his heart over and over – his sister Tara who he kind of/sort of killed.

It goes on for a long time and would be tiresome. But I kind of hate this character and that he’s not Kira, so bring on the heart ripping! More heart ripping! More!

The downside? In TVlandia someone feeling all guilty is normally the first step to putting them on a very fast moving redemption train which will quickly have everyone accepting him as a good guy.

At least that isn’t happening just yet, because Malia is happy to beat him blood and murder him – oh lots and lots of murdering – and Scott is quite a fan of putting him back in the ground

However Liam and Hayden have decided that they totally need him because he claims to know about the Wild Hunt with little reason for them to believe it. But we’re going with it anyway because this show is determined to drag us through this whole passing-the-torch meta with Scott setting up Liam as the new leader for a new cast. I guess I could get it when they initially floated the idea that they envisaged either spin off or the whole series to kind of transform and transition

But this is dead in the water – because Liam and Hayden are just so very very very very very boring and not even remotely compelling. This is the last season of Teen Wolf, there is no indication of a spin off and if there were, a spin off of Liam and Hayden would be about as popular as whatever trainwreck Sleepy Hollow is planning for this season.

This means we have this whole episode with Liam and Hayden putting forward ideas and being present and involved when really they could just be ripped from the plot line and their parts be passed to Scott and Lydia and us not having to deal with the writers trying to make Baby Wolf not only relevant but in charge. I’m finding the whole heir apparent thing annoying especially since his ideas are not exactly special – but they’re presented as such

Also “do you have a better idea” is NOT a reason to do an absolutely stupid thing guys, it really isn’t.

Anyway, rant aside this why we have Theo around while they design their Wild Hunter trap. Which is basically exactly the same as the trap they had before only with bigger equipment. Why is Theo here again?

Surprisingly, the trap works and they manage to capture themselves a wild hunter and then have absolutely no plan on what to do with him when captured. And only belatedly remember these things tend to run in packs so it’s only a matter of time before another guy shows up to rescue it. Oh, also, it doesn’t speak English

This is not a good plan