Monday, July 3, 2017

Summer DVR Dump: The Librarians 3.05: “And the Tears of a Clown”

“Jenkins, please tell me I’m dreaming and I haven’t really grown a second head!”
- Eve

I have to admit, this episode kind of made me think of the episode of “Torchwood” with the creepy traveling Night Circus. We start with a young couple at a carnival in 1996. The girl tells the boy how to beat the game but then she runs off to talk to some other guy. We then jump to the present where we see a woman being loaded into an ambulance and a scruffy guy complaining about the carnival being on his land. The leader of the carnival somehow uses magic to brainwash the guy on the spot and draft him into the carnival. It also gave me somewhat Heroes season 4 vibes, too.

We then find Jenkins at said carnival looking for the team. He keeps getting followed by creepy clowns (I don’t have a phobia of clowns but they are just never not creepy to me). He runs into a young boy whom he uses to sneak away but the kid turns out to be helpful. We see the leader of the carnival conferring with the clowns and then drop a photo strip from one of the booths. Thanks to the kid, Jenkins manages to get a bunch more printed out. And then (after scaring the kid off) Jenkins sneaks into the mystery tent and finds Eve … with two heads!

Jenkins manages to break everyone out of their brainwashed mantra but they’ve all been transmogrified (Jake is super buff, Cassie is a mermaid and Ezekiel is charming a snake). Luckily, the gang manages to evade the insane clown posse and get back to the library (where the magic of the carnival can’t reach them so they’re back to normal). Back at the carnival, the leader sees a young woman and it turns out (I really should have assumed this from the start) she’s the young girl from 1996 ad the leader, Kirby, is the boy she spurned. He’s trying to recreate the magic of that night (or something). It’s nice to see Felicia Day on a show again though (at least one that I watch).

Jenkins concocts a little something to help the team remember what happened that led them to the carnival in the first place. We learn that after finding the woman who we saw being loaded into the ambulance, they went to the carnival to look around but were pretty quickly apprehended by the creepy clowns. After trying to decide what old artifact it could be and coming up empty, they realize that with magic back in the world now, artifacts could be created anywhere at any time. Jenkins explains that it doesn’t matter how it happened, rather the what of it. They also discover that Kirby was a crappy kid’s magician until six months ago when the carnival started up. Because the clowns will be looking for them, Cassie gets clown outfits for them to wear when they go back. The boys head off to Kirby’s trailer to try and find the artifact while the girls find Kirby hanging with the redhead named Charlotte. Eve points out that it is clear that she’s the right one (apparently, in sort of Sarah Connor fashion, he was going through all the Charlottes with the same last name as her until he found the right one). He wants to recreate their night but when it doesn’t go as he’d hoped (she doesn’t win the game) he gets mad. And then one of the clowns finds Ezekiel’s magic detector and he really starts losing it. He blathers on about the ascension and how everything will be as it should be by that night. Jake explains that Houdini surmised there could be alternate dimensions and he referred to it in a letter to Arthur Conan Doyle as the ascension. Well great, we’ve got an unstable guy who has magic he shouldn’t, hoping to trap a girl he knew in high school in an alternate dimension she can’t leave. What could possibly go wrong? Also, I have to admit the team looked pretty ridiculous in those clown costumes although Christian Kane was kind of rocking the eye makeup with his stubble and beard. He had kind of a sexy cowboy clown thing going for him. So, I guess not all clowns are creepy after all.

The team sneaks into the show that Kirby is giving Charlotte and try to take out the clowns so they can get to her but of course they get caught and we see that Jake’s theory that the wand he uses is the artifact is incorrect when Ezekiel snatches it from the guy’s hand. I want to say it’s the cape but we’ll see. When the team goes on about how real magicians have flare and are master of illusion and have showmanship, he throws a hissy fit and threatens to encase them all in wax so they won’t be mean to him. He rants about how he’s going to make Charlotte pay attention to him unlike their time at the carnival as kids. After jogging her memory, Charlotte manages to talk Kirby into giving her the flower on his lapel (so I was wrong in the end, too) and without it, he’s powerless. Ezekiel manages to trick him into jumping into the vat of wax and destroying the carnival. Everyone is walking around all confused when DOSA shows up (damn government goons. Leave the Librarians alone). But for the moment, at least, the artifact is safely housed in the library and Charlotte can go back to her life. Eve worries that if they don’t get a handle on magic soon they will have even more modern artifacts to house in their new wing. And she also worries that the war between good and evil will be far worse with more modern artifacts in play. Oh joy!

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