I always watch an episode at least twice before writing about it, and I’m very glad I did in this case. “The Education of a Magician” is definitely a piece of work that improves upon better acquaintance. On first viewing, I was disappointed at some of the liberties taken from the source material, but the second time around I was impressed with how well the adaptation is bringing to life the spirit of the novel, if not every single detail that I want to see on screen.

This episode contains, essentially, three stories: Jonathan Strange’s experiences in the Peninsular War, Mr. Norrell and how he deals with his pupil’s absence, and the advancement of Arabella Strange and Lady Pole’s friendship. We also start to see the increasing entwinement of the fates of Stephen, Arabella, and Lady Pole as well as the beginning of a huge gulf forming between Strange and Norrell as both of them cross some lines that they probably ought not (even though, at the end of this episode they seem as close as ever).

Interestingly, “The Education of a Magician” doesn’t open with Jonathan Strange, even though that might seem like the most exciting place to begin. Instead, the episode starts with Lady Pole waking up and having a new idea for how to tell Arabella about her predicament. She gets out of bed quickly and starts ripping up her dress to make a tapestry. Lady Pole’s tapestry is a somewhat interesting departure from the book, as it continues the show’s trend of expanding Lady Pole’s role and granting her somewhat more agency than she had in the novel. It’s nice to see, because I think Lady Pole is a tricky character who could easily have been flattened into a handful of unpleasant tropes or made into a simple damsel in distress. Instead, this adaptation actually improves upon the source material, giving us a Lady Pole who is clever and resourceful and never gives up trying to take back control of her life.

As Lady Pole is working out new ways of communicating, Childermass is, at Norrell’s instruction, intercepting letters to prevent Arabella from telling her husband anything that Norrell might disapprove of. Also sandwiched in here is a pretty much straight-from-the-book conversation between Arabella and Drawlight that I was happy to see included.

In Portugal, Jonathan Strange gets off to a rocky start with his military career, and Lord Wellington is downright dismissive of him. It seems to the two magicians have so far done more harm than good for the war effort, and Strange can’t provide what Wellington wants–men and arms–and is therefore useless. Strange is left quite at loose ends, with no magic to do and struggling to find a way to make himself useful in the war effort.

Meanwhile, back in England, Childermass is also busy making sure that no one in England besides Norrell does anything resembling magic. He rides out to Starecross, which Segundus and Honeyfoot are turning into a school for magicians and advises them to stop this plan before Norrell finds out. In exchange for their going into another sort of business, Childermass offers to send clients their way when he gets the chance.

In London, Arabella continues her visits with Lady Pole, who is continuing to work on a tapestry illustrating Lost Hope. She shows the tapestry to Arabella, who doesn’t understand at all, which I found a little frustrating to watch, if I’m honest. For one thing, it’s not entirely clear quite how Lady Pole is not only able to make this tapestry but also to talk rather at length about it to Arabella. And in light of how much Lady Pole is able to say in this manner about her and Stephen’s enchantment, I’m honestly just not sure how Arabella manages to not see what her friend is getting at. I’m also not sure why Arabella doesn’t recognize the Gentleman in the tapestry, since he’s been creeping on her for a good while now.

For all that I’m not entirely happy with the way this is playing out, this visit with Lady Pole has one of my favorite speeches in the show so far. Arabella tries to cheer up her friend by basically advising Lady Pole to count her blessings, among them Sir Walter’s love, Lady Pole will have none of it and even turns it around on Arabella, asking what good Mr. Strange’s love ever did her.

On the continent, Jonathan Strange finally figures out a way to contribute when a soldier complains to him about the poor roads destroying boots. Strange presents a plan to Lord Wellington whereby he will use magic to make roads the troops can march down more easily. This is quickly done and earns Strange Wellington’s gratitude and, against his protestations that it’s not respectable, the nickname “Merlin.”

For a nice bit of foreshadowing, Strange’s dinner with Wellington and the officers includes Jonathan Strange’s rather famous line from the book. When Wellington asks if a magician can kill a man by magic, Strange replies:

“A magician might, sir, but a gentleman never would.”

At which point every even mildly astute viewer groaned a little inside. Because, obviously, we’ll see about that. I think my issue here is that sometimes a great line in a book only ends up being really obvious when it’s delivered with such deliberate nonchalance in a screen adaptation. I suppose it beats having to see the line delivered with melodramatic significance, but I think perhaps they went a little too far in the opposite direction from that here.

In England again, Childermass is having some misgivings about stealing all the Stranges’ mail and says so to Norrell. Norrell is characteristically evasive, but manages to assure Childermass that it’s for the best. Norrell then sends Childermass on an errand, which turns out to be breaking into the Poles’ house and stealing Lady Pole’s tapestry, which he does.

Robbed of her tapestry–effectively having her voice stolen–a distraught Lady Pole attempts to kill herself, only to learn from Mr. Norrell that she cannot die. Not for another seventy-odd years, anyway. This scene is, frankly, absolutely chilling: Lady Pole in her nightdress, strapped to a small bed in an empty room, with Norrell standing over her. Norrell giving her the bad news and then physically trying to silence her anger, frustration and despair. And, finally, Norrell going to Sir Walter, lying about Lady Pole’s condition and then advising Sir Walter to separate Lady Pole from Arabella.

And this is all edited together with more of Strange’s escapades in the war, which on the one hand is perhaps a good thing–to break up these scenes so it’s not just one long sequence of Norrell’s terrible treatment of Lady Pole–but is made into something much less than comfortable when we see what Strange is up to, which isn’t much good. Indeed, Strange is being shaped into someone rather frightening himself.

First, Wellington wants Strange to move an entire forest, which brings up an interesting conversation about how that might be done. Unfortunately, Wellington isn’t interested in Strange’s musings about talking to trees, because I would have loved to hear more about it. When Strange goes to move the forest, he and the men he’s with find themselves under attack. Strange can’t get the forest to move, and while Strange does manage to save the lives of most of the men, Strange’s servant, Jeremy, is hit by cannon fire and dies. Also lost are all of the books that Strange has brought with him to work from.

This is a significant problem when it comes to Strange’s next task, which is to find out where some Neapolitan soldiers have taken a bunch of cannons they stole. Strange is without any books, the army has no live Neapolitans to question, and scrying in water just shows trees and grass that could be anywhere in the countryside. However, it turns out that they do have some Neapolitan corpses, which Strange brings to life and grants speech to, in an interesting counterpoint to Norrell’s silencing of Lady Pole.

Unfortunately, Strange is no more successful than Norrell with this sort of magic. While Norrell only managed to give Lady Pole half a life, leaving her quite absent from the real world, Strange’s Neapolitans are all to real and persistently alive-ish. And rotting. And begging to be allowed to return to their families.

It’s very shortly obvious that Jonathan Strange has done something pretty messed up here and doesn’t have any idea how to undo it. In another parallel to Mr. Norrell, Strange is also lauded as a sort of hero for what is pretty much exactly the sort of magic that he doesn’t want to do at all. This is not modern magic. However, Strange seems consoled as he rides away into a beautiful new dawn while the unlucky undead Neapolitans are burned behind him.

It feels very telling to me how much alike Strange and Norrell seem when Strange finally returns to England. For all their differences in temperament, age, appearance, and experience, they seem very nearly equals now.

The episode ends, of course, with Lady Pole’s attempt on Mr. Norrell’s life, in which she misses her mark but succeeds only in shooting Childermass instead.

It’s a great ending to a very busy episode that covered a lot of ground. I still think the show struggles with conveying the passage of time–it’s not at all clear that Jonathan Strange has been gone for some three years, for example–but the pacing of this episode felt just right and the interweaving of the various story lines  was masterfully done. So far, the mini-series is faithful to the book without being a slave to it, and the changes that have been made are mostly smart ones that I think enhance the material rather than otherwise.

For all that the novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is often said to be a slow starter, I feel like the adaptation so far has remained pretty remarkably true to the source material while also moving through it at a pretty good clip. “How is Lady Pole?” covers an enormous amount of story, even more than last week’s episode, and things are getting exciting.

The episode opens with one of my favorite bits of magic from the book: Mr. Norrell’s ships made of rain. They’re gorgeous, but this scene, to me, isn’t quite right. The problem isn’t the ships, which are great. It’s that I don’t feel any passage of time. In the book, Norrell’s illusory ships are a blockade that keep the French fooled for eleven days. The way it’s presented here, it looks like just the work of an afternoon; the French see the ships, break out their spyglasses, then immediately row out to them and learn that they are just made of rain. I suppose this is still a waste of French time, but it’s not as impressive as the eleven days of the book, and it doesn’t seem to warrant the degree of congratulations Norrell receives from the ministers in London. It just all seems a bit much, and I think it wouldn’t have been that difficult to at least hint at some greater passage of time here.

That said, I love the way the show has done Mr. Norrell’s scrying. It looks awesome. It’s nice to see this attention to detail when they could just as easily have sort of ignored the less flashy magic in favor of just focusing on bringing to life big stuff like the rain ships. Speaking of details, I also really appreciated Norrell’s wigs in this episode. He’s got a variety of them, and every one is either ratty-looking, ill-fitting, or both. Because, obviously he can’t be bothered. It’s a lovely little bit of visual characterization that makes me think that the people involved in the production are really committed to making something special.

The show has combined the Shadow House and Starecross into one place, and they’ve moved up Segundus and Honeyfoot looking to open a magician’s school on the property. I’m not thrilled with this change, because I want to see as many great magicians’ houses as possible, but it makes a lot of sense with the way the show is generally just shuffling things around and streamlining events. And, really, it doesn’t matter which house it is; what matters is that Segundus and Honeyfoot are in the right place at the right time to meet Jonathan Strange so they can refer him to Mr. Norrell.

In London, Lady Pole is a wonderful dinner hostess. I love how loud and opinionated she is, which make the rest of what happens to her in this episode extra horrifying. I’m kind of surprised by just how much I love the show’s Lady Pole, to be honest. I adored the character in the book, but seeing her brought to life is even better. She definitely improves in adaptation, and I’m especially pleased that the show seems to be making just as certain as the book ever did that we know that Lady Pole is not actually crazy. Rather, she’s enchanted and spitting angry about it.

This episode introduces Sir Walter’s butler, Stephen Black, who is exactly how I imagined him, if a bit more taciturn than I would have liked. Some of that is because basically all the characters that Stephen interacts with in the book have been cut from the adaptation, so he speaks very little except with the Gentleman, and then it’s mostly utterances of confusion and helpless dismay. In the book, Stephen is a complicated character who doesn’t say much but who does think a lot, only here we don’t have the insight into his private thoughts that the book offers. Additionally, I don’t think it helps that they seem to light most of Stephen’s scenes to flatter the white fairy, which makes Ariyon Bakare’s very dark face hard to read at times simply because he nearly fades into the background.

We do get our first proper look at Faerie in this episode, in flashes in Lady Pole’s dreams and then more thoroughly when the Gentleman takes Stephen there. I absolutely loved the dark forest, the path Stephen follows the Gentleman down, and the outside view of Lost-hope. Once they get inside, though, I was disappointed. Everything is so positively gray, and I would have much preferred to see some color. I’ve always felt like part of the horror of Lost-hope is the dissonance of the place–bright colors and whimsy and dancing, but surrounded by an ancient battlefield and a dark forest and with gloomy tolling bells. There’s too much of a sameness to everything here, and while there is some sparkle, it’s not enough to keep the place from just feeling terribly bleak when I feel like it ought to have instead been disturbing and strange and awful in that way instead.

Probably the most important thing that happens in this episode is the meeting of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and it’s so very like it was described in the book that I felt a little teary. Again, though, the show seems to struggle a little with portraying the passage of time. I love how they show the early days of Strange and Norrell’s partnership (and I laughed out loud at Norrell’s ten year plan written out), but it felt like just a single afternoon and didn’t convey months or even weeks passing before things quickly moved along to other meetings and scenes between character pairs.

This focus on pairs of characters is something else about the book that I’m very glad to see preserved in the adaptation. Indeed, most scenes in the show are between pairs of characters, and this episode in particular either works to pair characters off in significant ways (Strange and Norrell, Stephen Black and the Gentleman, Lady Pole and Arabella) or expands upon our understanding of the relationships between already existing character pairs (Childermass and Norrell, Drawlight and Lascelles, Strange and Arabella, Honeyfoot and Segundus). Like the book, the show is constantly pairing off characters and then switching them around and seeing how they interact in various combinations so that we can see a variety of fascinating contrasts and parallels between them.

In a sequence that is perhaps a little heavyhanded, we get to see two feats of magic at Portsmouth. First, Mr. Norrell finally completes the series of sea beacons that he promised the government. While a good number of people have gathered on the beach to watch him finish the spell, it turns out that there isn’t anything to see. As one might expect, everyone is terribly disappointed.

The next morning, however, they are in for a treat. Probably because of the sea beacons, a ship has run aground on a shoal. Norrell claims to have a headache that prevents him from doing anything about it, but Jonathan Strange comes back out to the beach to see if he can help. After a couple of bad ideas, Strange thinks to use the sand itself to upright the ship, and because the shoal is called Horse Sand, he forms the sand into horses that go out to the ship and set it back up in the water. It’s extremely impressive, perhaps even excessively so, and it’s definitely the coolest piece of magic we’ve seen performed so far. Mostly, though, it establishes Jonathan Strange’s reputation as a powerful magician in his own right, and it plants the idea in the ministers’ heads that maybe they could send a magician to the war after all.

By the end of the episode, this is what indeed happens. Although Norrell was at first very opposed to the idea, knowledge of an imminent book sale (provided by Lascelles and Drawlight) convinces him that perhaps Strange would be better off out of the country for a while after all. I hope that Norrell is getting a lot of new books, since Strange is taking forty or so of Norrell’s books with him to the Peninsula.