First, I have to apologize for the delay in getting this writeen. Life has been busy for a while, so I haven't had a s much time to write.
I’ve spent many of my reviews talking about how each person on the LIT team is vitally important, not just to each other but to the team’s ability to solve each case in the best way possible. As far back as the pilot, I talked about how each individual was needed to stop the Brotherhood and prevent magic from going wild. So it really shouldn’t be surprising that the finale explores the idea of what the world would have been like if the LITs hadn’t come together. Everything has been leading us to this. And everyone is necessary. This episode shows us exactly how. So let’s dive in.
Eve and Flynn (and Alt!Flynn)
I may have mentioned this before, but in case I haven’t, I have a small confession: I’ve never actually seen any of the Librarian movies. I’m sure they're great, I’ve just never watched them. Because of this, I’ve never seen what Flynn was like when he had his Guardian around. One thing I loved about this episode is that we finally get to see what it would have been like if Eve and Flynn had been working together this whole time and it’s great. They make a great team and I love that. And while they both function well separately, it’s clear that they are in top form when working together.
Beyond that though, we also get to see what Flynn would have been like if he hadn’t become the Librarian. If he hadn’t become the Librarian, if he hadn’t met all of the LITs, then the world would have turned out quite differently. Having never seen the movies, I don’t know what Flynn was like before he became the Librarian, but based on this episode, I can make a few guesses. Mostly, I think he was scared, which sheds a whole new light on the team.
Throughout my reviews, I’ve mentioned that every single one of the LITs and Eve had been hiding from something or been disconnected from something before they came to the LIbrary. It turns out the Flynn was no different. Where Eve hid in her job, Cassie hid in obscurity, Ezekiel hid in arrogance and crime, and Jake hid by not being true to himself, Flynn hid by burying himself in research and learning. If he’d allowed himself to stay there, he would never have left his university, staying and getting more and more degrees but never really experiencing the world. In fact, alt!Flynn only left because his colleagues dared him to and as soon as things got a little rough he regretted the decision and tried to run away again. It’s only by being dragged through all the other alternate timelines and experiencing the adventures he could have had that he realizes what he missed out on. It’s only thanks to Eve that he realizes what he needs to do.
Just like Eve has a special relationship with Flynn, it turns out that she would have had a special relationship with each of the LITs had things been different. No matter what reality they would have wound up in, she would have had a special connection with the LITs. I’ll get into those special connection more below.
Our Eve, Prime!Eve, though is drawn to a particular LIbrarian, her Librarian. Even when he doesn’t remember who he (or she is) there’s a connection there. We saw it in the pilot and we see it again here. She and Flynn have a special connection that nothing can take away, even tears in the fabric of reality. And it’s this connection that drives Eve to sacrifice herself for Flynn. She loves him and so she is willing to give her life for him.
In the end though, it’s Eve’s love for Flynn that allows him to save her life. Back near the beginning of the episode, when Du Lac and Lmaia first show up, he says that a blood sacrifice is needed to make the portal work correctly. Then he proceeds to stab Lamia and use her blood. She protests, saying she loved him, and he tells her he knows as that was a requirement for the ritual to work. So at the end, it’s Eve’s love that allows Flynn to use her blood to access the Library again and get the Oil of Bathsheba to save her life. If she hadn’t loved him, they never would have been able to get back to the Library.
It’s also this blood, this love, that allows the Library to finally accept Eve as a part of itself. She starts off the episode complaining to Flynn that her desk keeps resetting itself to his preferences no matter how many times she tries to make it stop. Then, at the end of the episode, her blood is used to connect the annex back to the Library. WIth that sacrifice, with the power that came from that love, she was finally connected to the Library in a way she hadn’t been before. Because of that, the Library finally “accepted” her and her desk truly became hers.
Jake (and Alt!Jake)
I mentioned above that each of the alt!LITs has a unique relationship with their Eve, which we get a hint of during their various encounters with prime!Eve. The implication of this is that all Librarians have a special and unique relationship with their Guardians. THanks to all the reality hopping, we get to see shades of those different types of relationships.
Alt!Jake and Eve’s relationship is the first one we see. Alt!Jakes’ relationship with his Eve seems to be most similar to the one Prime!Eve has with Flynn. The thing that I find most interesting about their relationship is that at some point it developed into something romantic. Eve and I have the same opinion of this development (NOPE!), but clearly the potential is there. Eve and Jake get along very well, there is a connection there that is different from her connections to the other LITs. If things had been different, if Jake had been the only Librarian and Eve had been his Guardian, maybe it would have developed into something romantic. If that had happened though, things would have turned out much differently for our world.
Like their relationships with their Eves, each of the alt!LITs has a different tie back to a particular case that out LITs worked and solved. Alt!Jake’s case was actually the very first one. In his reality, because he didn’t have his team, he wasn’t able to stop Du Lac from allowing wild magic back into the world. Because of that, he is fighting a losing battle against the wild magic. The point that the whole team (and Flynn in particular) is needed is really hammered home when FLynn points out a clue about the trees they are standing amongst that helps alt!Jake save their lives and send them on to the next time line. Alt!Jake says he wouldn’t have noticed that detail, since he does art and history, not trees. Which is exactly why every single member of the team is vital to their success.
Ezekiel (and Atl!Ezekiel)
When Eve and Flynn transport to the next reality, they encounter a much more serious alt!Ezekiel and we learn a little bit about Ezekiel and Eve’s relationship and what it could have been like.
In this reality, alt!Eve’s relationship with Alt!Ezekiel is much more like that of a mother and son. Our Eve isn’t super comfortable with this, given that it makes her feel old, but I think it’s incredibly sweet. We don’t actually know much about Ezekiel’s past, who his parents are or how he wound up as a thief. When Cassie asked him about his high school experience, he never answered the question. But Ezekiel is pretty young. We don’t have an exact age for him, but given that he was called at the same time as Cassie, Jake, and Flynn, and alt!Ezekiel says he became the Librarian when he was a teen, I would guess Ezekiel is no older than mid 20s. He’s still a kid. So it’s not much of a stretch for me to think that he could see or come to see Eve as a sort of motherly figure.
Just like alt!Jake, alt!Ezekiel finds himself plagued with a problem caused by a case he couldn’t solve correctly without the rest of the LITs. His problem case was the house from Heart of Darkness. Without the rest of the team to solve the problem and confront Katie, alt!Ezekiel didn’t quite kill Katie correctly and now his whole world is possessed by ghosts. It’s only thanks to Flynn’s help that they manage to save the world and fully banish the evil ghosts. And once more, we see just how important the whole team is.
Cassandra (and Alt!Cassandra)
The last alternate reality Eve and Flynn find themselves in is alt!Cassie’s and it’s as different from the main reality as possible at this point. (Side note: isn’t it interesting how the realities got progressively more bizarre and further from true reality. Jake’s was pretty normal, while Ezekiel’s was full of ghosts. Cassie’s is more like the middle ages than any of the others.)
Alt!Cassie’s relationship with Eve is not really elaborated on, though we do get a few hints as to what it might be. She tells Eve directly that alt!Eve was not a mothering figure like she was with Alt!Ezekiel, but she doesn’t say much beyond that. It remains unclear if alt!Cassie and her Eve were lovers like with alt!Jake or something else. Whatever she was, alt!Eve was clearly more than just a Guardian to alt!Cassie.
Alt!Cassie’s world-ending problem is larger and more dire than either of the other two alt!LITs. Her issue comes from the Apple of Discord. Back in that episode, Flynn mentioned that if they didn’t stop the dragons, they would destroy something like 2/3s of the world. In alt!Cassie’s reality, that appears to be what happened, as dragons are awake and rampaging. The world has turned back to something much closer the age of Camelot than either of the other realities. It’s also the most openly magical of the realities. Alt!Cassie has fully embraced her penchant for magic and has become quite adept at it.
Once more though, we’re reminded why the team is needed when alt!Cassie wants to give up and simply move all her surviving people to another reality. Flynn reminds her that she’s a Librarian and she should be fighting, that she’s held out longer than any others. It’s thanks to him that she’s convinced to help Eve repair the tear and restore the world to the way it should be. Which brings us to the team as a whole.
The Team
I think one of my favorite things about this episode is how smoothly the team is working together. At the beginning of the series, they could barely stand each other. There was open animosity and distrust. Throughout the course of the season, we’ve seen them slowly gel as a team and learn to work with each others strengths while covering their weaknesses. So seeing them work so well together at the beginning of the episode was beautiful.
As we moved into the episode proper and Flynn revealed that he thought he’d found a way to bring the Library back, we quickly discover that everything that the team did throughout the season tied in to saving the Library. I mentioned before that I’m a sucker for continuity, so realizing that several of the cases they’d worked had led directly to obtaining the objects they needed to bring the Library back made me practically squeal with joy. Without each of them, they couldn’t succeed. And without all of them together again, they still can’t succeed. They have to splice the threads together. Alt!Cassie uses all three alt!LITs as the focus for her spell. They are the only thing that is common between all the realities, so of course they must be the focus. In the end, they become what is literally holding the thread of fate and time together. And they are more than willing to sacrifice themselves so that Eve can set reality right. In a beautiful callback to the pilot, they quote the speech Flynn gave them when they became LITs.
At the end of the episode, the LITs become full fledged Librarians, and we see just how much they’ve come to see each other as family. They each try to think about going back to life they was it was before the Library with varying amounts of success. Ezekiel claims the Library is still too “judgy” and Jake claims to want to see his family, so they are going to leave. Only Cassie says she’ll try a case, since she had nothing before the Library and she isn’t speaking to her family. The looks on the boys faces as she opens the book and gets her case is one of pure and utter longing. No matter what they say, they aren’t ready to go home. For a moment, it looks like she’ll go off by herself, but the boys can’t let her, so they run to catch up and our favorite three Librarians head off to have some fun in Peru together.
Jenkins
I don’t usually spend much time talking about Jenkins in my reviews. That isn’t because I don’t like him. It’s mostly because his arc was so subtle that it was hard to see the whole thing until we got to the end. And in the end, we learned that Jenkins may have been guiding everything. Every single case they went on had some effect on the final problem of getting the library back, on keeping the Brotherhood at bay and making sure our world didn’t get destroyed. But four inparticular tied especially into getting the Library back (City of LIghts, Fables, Rule of Three, and Santa). Now, of those four cases, three of them can be chocked up to coincidence, but, as Eve points, out, one did not come from the clippings book. What’s more, it may have been the most important case of all of them.
If Jenkins hadn’t sent them to rescue Santa, Eve never would have split across all of the world distributing the Gift of hope. If that hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have been able to retain her memories of everything that happened in the different realities. If she hadn’t been able to remember everything, she and Flynn never would have been able to save the world and the Library. I think we can safely surmise that Jenkins has been working at saving the Library this whole time. What’s more, he has a much wider view of what’s going on than anyone first thought. I cannot wait to see where that leads in season two.
Other Random Goodness
~”Next time, mummy memo.”
~”Jenkins you’re a genius!” “One is aware, sir.”
~Even when Flynn isn’t the Librarian, he babbles. It’s clearly a personality trait and not tied to being the Librarian.
~”NATO! Western Spy!” “Oh crap!” It’s really the delivery of the line that sells it.
~”If I met myself would I EXPLODE?!”
~”What? No. No, that’s mathematically . . . improbable.” “Actually that’s not true-.” “Uh, that’s not helping.”
~”Protip: always handcuff people to the chair, not just in the chair.”
~The LITs quoting Flynn’s speech from the pilot.
~The whole ending scene with the LITs was perfection.
~”You know, I’ve been meaning to check out Machu Picchu.” “I didn’t know you were into wrestling.” “That’s not what . . . You don’t know what Machu Picchu is? How do you call yourself a Librarian.” “I’m just as much one as you. I got a book!” “That’s a pity book.”
~”I don’t remember what happened while history and fate were . . . wahwahwah.” Jenkins is the best. I love him so much because of these little things. I don’t think anyone other than John Larroquette could deliver such silly lines with such gravitas and make them be hilarious yet plausible at the same time.
Well, that’s it for my reviews of the first season of the Librarians. I am so excited that we’re getting a second season. Once it starts, I may be forced to do reviews as the new episodes air (something I never, ever do).
In the mean time, I’m going to take a break from reviewing for a week or two. My life has been insanely busy since Easter due to getting ready to go to Guatemala again this year. Because of that, I have a lot less time to write. But I still want to do reviews, so I’m thinking in a couple weeks I’ll start up again with a new series. I may not be able to get a review up every week, but I’m going to do my best.
Next week, I’ll announce what series I’ll be reviewing. I can tell you I’m pretty super excited about it.
Until then.
