Yeah, all of this. I did think that the Eliot/Quentin plot was left—open in a narratively suggestive way that definitely could've been deliberate, after 3x05, but I also had the (dubious) benefit of watching all of S1-3 for the first time in, like, October of 2018, all in one go, so like—they'd done this before, I'd watched them do this before, where they laid a bunch of structural groundwork and then didn't return to it for like a year. So on that front, 4x05 didn't surprise me; I thought it was totally in line with the threads they'd left dangling: Eliot feeling like the mosaic timeline was a thing he'd fuck up all the way back to his convo with the Great Cock; the Alice framing on "a different life" as an idea; the particular kind of tension you can see between Eliot and Quentin in the back half of S3, et cetera.

But seeing where they made space for an on-screen, ongoing, in-canon relationship between Eliot and Quentin is really different from actually thinking we might get, you know, an on-screen, ongoing, in-canon relationship between Eliot and Quentin. I honestly don't—I feel like my base expectation for The Magicians was so low, that they would basically do some super compelling character work amid all the magic nonsense they wave around all over the room, that my disappointment at this point is really centered there: that they set up a bunch of compelling character work, and then just—torpedoed the fuck out of that bastard!! Why? Because—honestly I am still not fucking clear on that.

I'm mad about them dangling Eliot/Quentin from a representational perspective, sure. But I'm also just mad because it was such shitty fucking storytelling. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯