Recap: Magus (2/7/12)

So what did you think? Now that the first 2 episodes are under our belt are you still excited for the rest of the season? I am, but I can definitely see where some people would be disappointed. That being said, let’s dive into the first 2 episodes and recap a bit.

The first episode, “Magus”, opens with some clips of Emmet Cole’s wildlife show “The Undiscovered Country”. The show appears to be wildly popular because of the family aspect of it, not just Emmet himself. It ran for an astounding 22 years before being taken off the air due to Emmet Cole disappearing. After 6 months of looking the search was finally called off and Lincoln and his mother were supposed to move on, but then the beacon started sending out a signal.

Tess confronts Lincoln, as he’s drowning his sorrows in a local bar, with a full camera crew plus producer. She explains to him that his father’s beacon has been reactivated and they want to film an episode as they head down to the Amazon to find him. Lincoln obviously is having none of this as he is just starting to get over the loss of his father. He eventually agrees when he finds out that the production company will fund the whole expedition as long as Tess and Lincoln both go and agree to be filmed. We then spend a couple days, minutes literally, meeting a few of the ships crew, but nothing terribly substantial. I was actually pretty surprised at how fast everything was happening, it seems like as soon as we hit the water we’re finding the beacon.

The beacon signal leads the crew to nowhere, essentially. Just a calm part of the river with nothing around them and no sign of the Magus anywhere. A couple of the guys jump in the water (shoes and all) to see if they can find the beacon under the surface. It turns out the beacon was attached to a sort of dive cage that was submerged in the water… no sign of Emmet Cole. At this point Lincoln just wants to head home and forget about it, but Tess believes that he’s still out there somewhere and wants to keep searching, but how will they know where to search?

And that introduces us to Lena, who seemed suspicious from the very beginning. She randomly shows up in a helicopter to some little remote village where the crew is eating and giving medical attention to children. Lena is the daughter of one of Emmet’s camera men and her and Lincoln grew up together on The Magus. She has devised some sort of theory based on the tidal patterns of the river as to where the boat could be. She has 6 different places where she thinks they’ll find The Magus, and magically on the first try, they find it in The Boiuna, a part of the Amazon that is said to be extremely dangerous. Obviously this is where Emmet was headed in his journey to find the “magic” in the world… and found it he did.

As soon as the crew enters the ship there is a noise from down below. They trace the banging to the safe room in the bottom of the ship and assume that Emmet and some of the crew must be inside… until they discover that it’s welded shut from the outside. Obviously there is something inside that someone didn’t want to let lose, but of course the guys decide to cut it open and see what they find. They end up finding nothing until Lincoln sees a blanket covering something in the bed. He removes the blanket and finds what looks like a rock, but turns out to be a hollowed out piece of wood that apparently contained some sort of spirit creature… although it looked just like the smoke monster from LOST.

The creature explodes out of the thing that was containing it, cuts Lena’s leg and takes off into the jungle. Apparently Jahel, the daughter of one of the crew members, knows a lot about this kind of stuff and explains that the spirit needs blood to be more powerful and since it cut Lena, it will now hunt them all. So they head topside to get in their rafts and abandon the ship only to discover that their rafts have been torn to pieces. At first I thought that Lena was responsible for the rafts because she was hiding something, but I think that it actually was the spirit. That’s not to say she still wasn’t hiding something as she reveals a hidden stash of Emmet’s tapes that she was told to destroy if anything were to happen to him.

The tapes contain footage of Emmet walking on water and creating fire out of his bare hands… he found the magic he was looking for. There’s something about the Boiuna that breaks down the laws of physics and weird things happen… which is basically where the show is taking us. So with no other options they decide to fix the engine and fire up The Magus and use it to get them out of the Boiuna and away from the smoke monster spirit.

In the end they end up fixing the boat, getting about 20 yards until the smoke monster destroys the engine again. This leaves Lincoln with little choice but to try and re-capture the spirit in the spirit log that his father did. And kind of anti-climatically he does just that, but not before Tess tries to convince the spirit that it’s actually a former crew member that died and was buried out there. She tries to get the spirit to answer the question of whether Emmet is alive or dead asking it to yell out twice if he’s alive or once if he’s dead. So before the spirit is captured it cuts Tess in the leg… twice! Which she takes to mean that Emmet is alive, however I took it to mean that the spirit was still hungry for blood and attacked her… I don’t know, the end seemed a little off to me.

I thought it was a good start to the show. It definitely was not as scary as some of the commercials and articles made it out to be, but I definitely think there’s something here. I was a little disappointed that there was a “smoke monster” when the producers have come out and said that they don’t want to be compared to LOST… it’s kind of hard when you have a very similar monster roaming the jungle. I do like how each episode has it’s own storyline revolving around the magic of the Boiuna and then focuses on the overall storyline of trying to find Emmet Cole, but there was just something about the flow of things that didn’t sit right with me. I don’t know if it was the fact that the spirit was resolved in a matter of minutes or if it was just the fact that Jahel knows way too much about the stuff that’s happening. I’m sure I’ll get over it though, the first season is only 8 episodes long so there’s no reason not to finish it out now that we’re 2 episodes in.

Oh I almost forgot. Before the episode ends, the producer is spying on the security team down in the boat as one of them makes a phone call. He explains to the person on the other end that if Emmet found “The Source” they would have to kill him. So apparently there is some sort of central source to all of the magic that they have been encountering… Again, sounds eerily similar to LOST if you ask me.