Recap: Alibaba fights a giant monkey. There’s lots of blood and dear god it’s dull.

Zigg’s Thoughts: Back to back extremely frustrating episodes is a bad sign for any show and I found myself incredibly annoyed by Magi this week as well. The show has just stagnated so alarmingly that it’s difficult to believe it’s the same as the wonderful adventure of season 1. This episode encapsulated all of the problems that this second run has had so far – it’s boring, poorly animated, logically inconsistent and while it makes gestures towards character development, there isn’t really any meaningful movement here.

Alibaba at this point is just a boring character, but worse still he’s also one stuck in stasis. The story has only ever come up with one decent emotional arc for him – his guilt over Kassim – so it’s replayed it ad nauseam over and over again. How many times has he been struck down by guilt over it? How many times has he said some sort of epiphany and RISEN ABOVE to conquer his foe? It was never the most profound motivation (it’s a dead little sister story for god’s sake) but having used it again and again it’s become tedious in the extreme. At this point they pretty much need to commit to never showing or mentioning Kassim again, given how thoroughly sick of him I am.

Also, somehow basically an episode entirely comprised of fighting managed to be dull. There are simply no stakes to Alibaba’s battle with the giant monkey thing – the animation is rubbish, the choreography is rubbish and we’ve seen way more interesting looking and scary monsters. It’s also riddled with logical inconsistencies – why is Alibaba’s arm not torn off? If the giant ape can collapse from blood loss, why doesn’t Alibaba do that when he has giant wounds right through his arm? At no moment did I feel invested or excited, and the entire episode was kind of depressing in general. Given the excellence of the first season the show earns a stay of execution, but (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) I’m hovering over the big red button marked DROP.

Random Observations

• I’m intrigued by the presence of Scheherazade, but ‘magical loli’ is a trope which has been done to death, so they’ll have to make it interesting. Also, aren’t Magi meant to choose rulers rather than *be* rulers?
• If the ‘two types of magoi’ problem has resolved itself already, uh, why bother bringing it up in the first place?
• “He would have done the same thing, that’s all” Then you are both complete idiots.