Episode 27: Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen
Episode 27 of The Descent Is Easy discusses Arise, Awake or Be Forever Fallen, Episode 18 of Season 2 of Shadowhunters.
Unsurprisingly, this episode is long…
We talk about this episode containing all of the awesome and also, all of the awful. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the moment where Alec’s heart breaks in half and so do ours, because Alec lets go of Magnus’ hand. He lets go of his hand…
Also? Harry Shum Jr. is amazing. Just in case you forgot. He is.
And Clary’s arc of being a team player finally pays off when she has a thought, develops it into a plan and executes that plan flawlessly. You go girl!
The mobile phone head canon by maleccrazedauthor we mention in the episode can be found HERE – we thoroughly recommend it!
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24th February 2018 @ 4:14 am
I’m commenting here because the character limit on Tumblr asks will be a pain in the butt for this post.
To begin with, I may miss something here that you address in the post-episode part of your podcast this week. If I’m stationary for more then ten minutes I am usually reading or writing something and I can’t listen to podcasts and read/write at the same time (at least not if I want to remember what is said on the podcast.) Therefore I always find myself listening to this podcast in the car and it ends up I don’t usually have two hours worth of driving to do on a given day or sometimes even in a given week. (I think I may need to adopt a habit of circling the block for two hours on tDiE release day. But I digress…)
My point is, I’m only up to the part where you’re dissecting the scene where Alec and Magnus *ahem* speak after Max recovers. So I may be making this comment having missed something you cover in your post-episode analysis, but I need to make the comment before I forget what it is I intended to say (I do that literally every week; you have no idea. “Oh, I wonder if Ruth and Michelle considered…oops, light’s turned green, time to go!” and then it’s lost forever.)
So in your discussion of Magnus and Alec in the hand-holding/hand-releasing scene, I think there was one parallel/tidbit of symbolism you didn’t address (yet). Your discussion is focused on Magnus and Alec and trust, which is of course a huge theme in the episode, but there’s another theme threaded throughout this half-season that you didn’t mention.
When Alec let’s go of Magnus’s hands, he’s not just letting go of Magnus’s hands. He’s letting go of Magnus to GO BE WITH HIS PEOPLE. And yes, those people are his family and Alec’s place probably should be with them in this moment of family crisis, but the optics of that scene are VERY striking. Alec lets go of THEM (i.e. Magnus-and-Alec as a unit) to go be with other Shadowhunters, and Magnus, a Downworlder, is left standing alone, on the outside looking in, as it were.
That’s a huge and important part, because we see afterward on Magnus’s face this moment of “Well, ok, there we have it then; he’s choosing his people, I need to choose mine.” I wouldn’t even call his expression resignation. It’s more like he’s steeling himself.
This Shadowhunter/Downworlder divide, of course, a recurring theme not just in this episode, but throughout all of season 2B.
In the 1×06/1×07 flashback, amidst their discussion of trust, we’re reminded that Magnus and Alec have very different allegiances. Alec quickly denies that a Downworlder (Luke) is his friend. And Alec doesn’t want anyone to know he stayed at Magnus’s,. While I think Alec is mostly concerned about anyone finding out he stayed the night with a MAN and that denying any friendship with Luke is mostly Alec being his typical season 1 grumpy-cat self, Magnus clearly takes it as Alec not wanting anyone to know he stayed the night with a Downworlder, which is why Magnus comes right back at him with “if my people found out I let a SHADOWHUNTER stay the night…”
So we’re reminded very pointedly in that first flashback that this is an interracial (inter-species?) relationship. These guys have allegiances to their own respective peoples. And one has to wonder, when we get to the 2×07/2×08 “morning after” flashback, how much of his reluctance to examine his fear was Magnus being cognizant of the fact that they are from two different worlds and that they are going to face conflicting loyalties, and knowing that in all likelihood, that will ultimately be the issue that pulls them apart in the end.
Because Magnus is very old and very wise (usually.) He’s not naive enough to go into this relationship thinking that they’re never going to have problems relating to their statuses as Shadowhunter and Downworlder. Alec probably is actually very naive on that front, which is really probably a symptom of not just his youth but his relative privilege; he has the luxury of being naive. Magnus doesn’t.
Ultimately, that scene with the hand-releasing and the optics of Magnus standing alone while Alec leaves him to go be with other Shadowhunters brings the ongoing theme of the half-season sort of full circle.
Pretty much out last parting shot of psychological manipulation from Victor Aldertree in 2×10 was him telling Alec that Shadowhunters and Downworlders can never be together, and in the hug that follows Alec and Magnus’s declarations of love at the end of that episode, we get this moment where Alec is holding Magnus, but his eyes are open and there’s a sort of concerned expression on his face. I predicted at the time that that was a giveaway that season 2b was going to deal with this issue for Magnus and Alec, and of course, it totally does.
In 2×11 and 2×12, we see Alec sort of taking Magnus’s assistance for granted, and we also see him being very dismissive and unpleasant to a Downworlder who is only trying to help, (unreasonably, though somewhat understandably on just a sheer human level) blaming Raphael because Isabelle is suffering.
In 2×12 and 2×13, we see Alec and Magnus dealing with tension that results from Alec’s blind obedience to the Clave. In 2×12, he chooses obedience to the Inquisitor over his own better judgment/gut instinct, and Magnus almost dies as a result. In 2×13, Alec chooses operating on the assumption that Magnus need to somehow establish his innocence at the outset rather than defending Magnus’s right to the presumption of innocence and that leads to a rather significant disagreement.
In 2×14, of course, the Seelie Queen tells Simon (and gives him a practical demonstration) that the Shadowhunters will choose their own kind and so much the Downworlders. As you pointed out early in this podcast, she reiterates that to Magnus during their meeting in the Seelie Court.
2×15 sort of gives us hope that maybe Magnus and Alec are going to be able to move past that, but then 2×17 happens.
So the issue here isn’t only that Alec has betrayed Magnus’s trust. It’s that Alec has betrayed Magnus’s trust in favor of his allegiance to the Clave (or has bought into the Clave’s paternalistic conviction that keeping non-Shadowhunters in ignorance is somehow the beneficent thing to do; it’s “for their own good”.) And by 2×18, this has become a recurring issue in their relationship. It’s literally the basis of every conflict they’ve had.
So when we get to the breakup in the hallway, when Magnus says he has to choose his people, you sort of claim that comes out of nowhere or doesn’t follow from what has preceded it, but…it really actually does. A LOT.
26th February 2018 @ 10:36 pm
Hey!
Sorry for slow response – our website seems to have eaten our message alerts!
Thank you x1000000 for such a thoughtful message – we totally knew after 2×18 that there was a massive bunch of Magnus stuff that we didn’t manage to talk about. All that you mention here is absolutely something we should have spoken about and need to talk about further – so to save the front of our 2×19 episode from becoming 40 minutes of Magnus, we’ll circle round to this in our 2b round up. Talk to you about it then?
R x
26th February 2018 @ 11:44 pm
Yeah I figured that would be the case. I shudder to think how long the 2×18 podcast would have been had you gotten into all this stuff as well.
Can’t wait for the roundup!
27th February 2018 @ 4:48 pm
God, don’t! We always knew 2×18 was going to be long but sheesh!!
27th February 2018 @ 4:46 pm
absolutely what Ruth said, but also in addition, please don’t start circling the block every Friday just for us!!! However I do love the thought of you at a red light, frantically typing notes on your phone until the lights turn green lol
My podcast time is travel to and from work and cooking in the evening, though that often leads to flatmates I can’t hear entering the kitchen and scarying the crap out of me, so i wouldn’t really recommend that either! haha but yeah, I totally get where you’re coming from. I quite often sit down to listen to a podcast or to edit ours and think ‘oh, i could read some fic at the same time’ erm… no ‘oh, I could put on this TV show in the background’ erm… no haha podcasts are really not designed for multitasking!
As Ruth said, there is so much more Magnus & Alec stuff to talk about and the things listed in your comment are absolutely things that we should have brought up in 2×18 and will hopefully be able to discuss further in the S2b round up when we’ll have a bit more space and time for it.
I think. certainly for myself, I can get really bogged down by the actual script of a scene, and if it doesn’t make 100% sense, I get stuck trying to unravel that and make it make sense. When really it would be better to move on and look at the message behind the (possibly slightly unfortunate) dialogue and I think that’s where my notion over Magnus chosing his people coming out of nowhere comes from.
You are of course right, that so much of this half season deals with this shadowhunter/downworlder divide, so thematically it was absolutely talked about all the time. And there’s a couple of example you’ve listed that I didn’t even have on my radar in regards to that discussion and theme, so thanks for that!! I think what I got stuck in my head is that textually, all of Magnus’ reasoning for the break up within the episode is about Alec and trust, only to then “suddenly” bring up his people, “out of nowhere” at the end.
so yeah, certainly for me there’s just this conflict between overall theme and direct textual discussion I suppose. Not sure whether that makes any sense but yes, as Ruth said, we’ll hopefully have time to talk about this further and your insightful comments and episode tags will be hugely helpful in this regard, so thank you so much for that!
27th February 2018 @ 6:03 pm
It’s…interesting the way they handled the shadowhunter/downworlder divide in this episode. They were SO in-your-face with it in other episodes this season, but except for that scene with the Seelie Queen, played it more as subtext for the rest of the episode. So it’s easy to get a read that Magnus is disregarding that issue and focusing simply on the trust issue.
But once you begin picking apart the subtext, especially in that first flashback, you can’t help but conclude that this has been on Magnus’s mind a lot more than he’s ever let on. In the second flashback, there’s a moment when he almost forgets, and then Alec literally reminds Magnus he’s a Shadowhunter. And then the cat-eyes reveal…why would Magnus be so worried about Alec seeing his eyes, except for the fact that it’s very much a reminder to Alec that Magnus is a warlock, and usually Shadowhunters are very put off by that?
God, I could dissect this episode forever. It’s actually some very deft writing because if they went too heavy-handed with it, we’d be getting Romeo-and-Juliet vibes or something, y’know? There probably just needed to be a TINY bit more to bridge the two reasons Magnus is conflicted, maybe?