Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Recap: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
The deceptively repetitive title of this final episode of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell tells us one thing: the boys are back together again. The mechanics of the reunion, however, are messy.
In his fit of self-induced madness last week, Strange selected a messenger to take several things back to London: a letter for Lady Pole, a letter for Childermass, and Lady Pole’s severed finger. That messenger was Drawlight.
Now, here’s a pro tip: when selecting an agent to play a crucial role in your plan, don’t choose the fop with the vertebral fortitude of a sea sponge.
Drawlight does do one thing correctly: he mails the letter to Lady Pole. But before he can transport Childermass’s care package, he’s shanghaied by Lascelles, who’s gone from a fashionable man about town to a lackey off the reservation. Lascelles demands Drawlight give him the goods instead.
Drawlight, calculating which camp he’s more afraid of, grabs the letter and the finger and speeds off as fast as his legs will take him. Which, as it turns out, is not very fast—Lascelles pulls out his dueling pistols and shoots him down. RIP Drawlight. You almost made it.
The implications of this mail-tampering are profound. Strange sent Lady Pole instructions that she was to stay in Lost Hope to watch over Arabella and light a safe path for Strange when he mounted his rescue attempt. In his letter to Childermass, Strange instructed him to return Lady Pole’s finger to her when he received the signal. RIP context.
Lady Pole does her part, staying in Lost Hope on a semi-permanent basis and going comatose in the waking world. Her husband has fled parliament to be by her bedside, because Jonathan Strange’s return has taken on the same feeling of ominous doom as Y2K.
There was, of course, one more message Strange wanted Drawlight to deliver: “Tell Norrell, I am coming.” Lascelles delivers that missive to Norrell, who hurriedly proceeds to protect his library with enchantments. When Lascelles can’t adequately explain Drawlight’s absence, Childermass consults his Tarot deck and comes to the conclusion that the sniveling weasel is a liar. Lascelles and Childermass struggle over Lady Pole’s finger. Childermass wins, but not before Lascelles slashes his face, which marks the second wound the poor man’s received in Norrell’s service. And the thanks he gets? Norrell forbids him from going to Lady Pole.
“Goodbye, Mr. Norrell. You’ve made the wrong choice, as usual,” Childermass says as he exits. Burn.
An exit not a moment too soon, by the way, because Strange’s Black Tower has arrived at Hurtfew. Norrell assumes Strange has come to kill him—the fireballs with Strange’s face in them probably enforce this belief—but really, the younger magician has come for something more important: help saving Arabella.
So the dream team pairs up to solve a greater problem than professional rivalry: how to kill that darned Faerie. They decide to summon the last person who did such a thing—The Raven King.
Childermass, meanwhile, has gone to the unwakeable Lady Pole. Upon his arrival with her finger, Sir Walter has Segundus and Honeyfoot throw poor, pitiful Stephen into a convenient in-home prison cell for his aiding The Gentleman.
The rest of the crew sets about reuniting Lady Pole with her finger. But while Segundus searches for the right spell, Childermass has a discussion with Stephen, who desperately warns him not to pull her out of Lost Hope yet. This realization is too late, and a very cross Lady Pole awakens.
Speaking of cross, The Gentleman doesn’t like it when guests leave his party early. He shows up to vent and torment Stephen some more. Childermass, the king of expertly timed exits, leaves just before The Gentleman’s arrival to find the corpse of Vinculus and read his dermatological text. Good news for him, because The Gentleman is not to be trifled with.
Lady Pole does the unthinkable and insults his style, calling him an “unsightly, filthy bore” with “tasteless clothes” and “hair like thistle-down.” The Gentleman plants a rose in her throat. Honeyfoot opens fire. “Why are you firing walnuts at me?” The Gentleman sneers, baffled, before disfiguring all the men in the room.
The Gentleman then instructs Stephen to kill them. Fortunately, Strange and Norrell intervene first, accidentally. The two succeeded in summoning The Raven King, but magical Ozzy Osbourne leaves them to resurrect and rewrite Vinculus. Accordingly, Strange and Norrell move on to the second stage of the plan, which involves giving The Raven King domain over all English magic, including a begging, pleading Norell’s library.
“I’m not about to stand here and summon the most powerful magician who has ever lived and say to him, ‘I offer you all of English magic apart from—I am sorry—Gilbert Norrell’s books,’” Strange shouts.
Fine. The two perform the spell, but they get Stephen instead of the ancient heavy-metal magician. It seems like all that “Stephen will be king” talk is true! Until a shot is fired. Stephen collapses to reveal pistol-happy Lascelles, who’s been wandering the labyrinth outside Norrell’s library until being cued by the narrative to ruin everything.
The Gentleman gets very angry when you kill his pets, FYI, and he turns Lascelles into a crumbling porcelain doll before whisking Stephen away to Lost Hope. “We have channeled all of English magic into a butler, and he shot him!” Norrell says as he recovers from the last few moments. Sounds silly when you spell it out like that.
But all this silliness has awakened a dormant spirit of adventure in Norrell, who finally performs some neat magic of his own and drags Strange into the realm of the Faerie. They crash the somnambulant gala, where it becomes clear by his “dancing” that Norrell has never before attempted the act. Stephen revives, newly empowered by magic, and realizes that to be king, he must overthrow The Gentleman. As he cathartically feeds the Faerie to a tree, Strange smooches a newly lucid Arabella and sends her tumbling through a mirror onto Flora’s Venetian floor. He and Norrell scamper to safety at Hurtfew.
All is well, right? Nope. As Norrell and his newly Einstein-y wig celebrate the achievement of killing a Faerie, Strange tries to leave for Venice. But he can’t. Despite The Gentleman’s demise, he and Norrell are still trapped in the Black Tower, which poofs out of existence with the magicians in tow. Where they’ll stop? Nobody knows.
There are detectives on the case, however. Flora takes Arabella to Strange’s Italian digs. As Arabella nears a pool of water, her husband calls to her and she finds him in the water’s reflection. Where is he? He doesn’t know, but he looks much healthier than when we last saw him.
Back in England, Childermass has reconvened the Learned Society of York Magicians to give them a new assignment: deciphering the new text on Vinculus’s body. Maybe, just maybe the answer to the whereabouts of Strange and Norrell lies somewhere on a hobo’s torso.
If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.