Fun episode tonight. I particularly liked the teenager who thought that all colleges experience mysterious deaths and disappearances as a matter of course. (Clearly, she must have attended Sunnydale High at some point.)
Plus we got
Leverage's Beth Riesgraf as the Lady of the Lake (or one of them, I guess), in what I assume will be a recurring role. Which now makes two
Leverage regulars who've appeared in the show, since Christian Kane has been a lead in both.
I couldn't fully enjoy the Stumpy gag, because the gargoyle prop was so incredibly crude. The art department rather dropped the ball there. (By the way, it wasn't technically a gargoyle, because it wasn't a drainspout. "Gargoyle" comes from the Middle French word for "throat," which is also the root of "gargle." The proper term for an animal or creature statue that doesn't serve as a drainspout would be a "grotesque.")
I liked the running gag of the cheerleader who assumed that the weird disappearances and curses that plagued the university were normal at any college. And I like it that, conversely, they addressed the idea that hiding magic is an unviable strategy now that magic is active in the wider world. Hopefully that's the beginning of an arc. Too many shows cling to the secrecy trope to preserve the conceit that they're happening in the real world, but it too often traps the narrative within the limits of cliche or leads to illogical or self-defeating consequences. For instance, in the '88
War of the Worlds: The Series, the government-backed heroes deliberately endangered the public and made their own jobs much harder by not telling people that there were murderous (alien) terrorists in their midst who could be easily recognized by their decaying appearance and tendency to congregate in threes and make strange noises. When has the public ever been kept safe from an ongoing, active threat to their lives by not being told that it exists and they should be alert for it?
By the same token, if magic is an ongoing threat to people's lives, then keeping it secret is just going to get more people killed because they don't know what to watch out for and what to avoid. So if the Librarians don't go public at some point, they'll be responsible for a lot of civilian deaths they could've avoided. Heck, they already are.
Which is just one reason I'm so sick of the "secret conflict behind the scenes of our everyday world" trope. What's the point of pretending it's happening in the real world when it obviously isn't because we're watching it on TV?
You know I think I've finally nailed down what The Librarians are; a standard D&D adventuring party. You've got Ezekiel the halfling Thief, Cassandra the Sorceress, Stone the grumpy Dwarf fighter and Baird is the Knight protector. The only member in the group is lacking is a Cleric.
Isn't that Jenkins?
)
