With one season finished and the next under wraps,The Librarians: The Next Chapterstill needs to make at least one improvement to deliver a stronger sophomore season. This is especially true after Gregor’s disappointing villain plot inThe Librarians: The Next Chapterseason 1 finalefailed to offer much in the way of the original series’ spectacularly high-stakes threats.
The Librarians: The Next Chapter’s casthas been largely responsible for carrying the series based on little more than charm alone.The first season of the spinoff has been sadly underwhelming compared to most seasons of the original, but that isn’t to sayThe Librarians: The Next Chapterseason 2can’t rectify the problem with just a few basic changes.
The Librarians: The Next Chapter Emphasizes That Non-Librarians Can’t Remember Magic
An Entire Episode Hinges On A Very Large Mob Forgetting About The Library
Considering the Librarians’ main goal is to preserve magical artifacts and keep them hidden from the non-magical world,it stands to reason that the sentient Library takes measures to prevent itself from being discovered. That said,The Librarians: The Next Chapterresolves this problem in a surprisingly specific way. Namely, non-Librarians who encounter the Library’s magic simply forget about it.
This doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, the spinoff chooses to assign a very specific timeline to this phenomenon. This is explained halfway through the spinoff’s freshman season, whenConnor brings a horde of followers to the Library and learns they’ll forget about it within six months. Aside from solving an immediate problem, this also sets up a fairly major overarching conflict.
Because Jacob gives Vikram and his crew exactly six months to clear up the damage they do in the premiere,the memory rule suggests that ultimately none of them will remember their adventures without becoming fully-fledged Librarians. They receive their invitations by the end of the season, but other characters’ fates under the memory rule are yet to be determined.
For instance,The Librarians: The Next Chapter’s Ivan Van Helsingbelieved in vampires his entire life before the Library’s lost tooth confirmed their existence.Forgetting about the Library should presumably cause him to forget about the confirmation that vampires are real, but the series plays too fast and loose with this rule to consider this presumption even remotely conclusive.
The Librarians: The Next Chapter’s Memory Rule Doesn’t Consistently Make Sense
DOSA Shouldn’t Be Able To Exist In The Same Universe As This Rule
Because it’s vague whether forgetting the Library overrides a person’s previous knowledge of magic, it’s also unclear whether someone like Hermione’s grandmother inThe Librarians: The Next Chapterepisode 11will one day simply forget her granddaughter is a muse. Butthe most perplexing characters in light of the show’s memory rules are allies like the Department of Statistical Anomalies.
Even if it’s fairly assumed that inherently magical allies like muses or Cupid wouldn’t be subjected to the Library’s mind wipe,the non-magical humans at DOSA have been dealing with the Library directly since at least the originalLibrarians. The spinoff begins significantly more than six months later, but there’s no explanation for why DOSA’s immune when Connor’s followers weren’t.
In fact, Connor himself raises questions about the Library’s memory rule. The very first episode establishes (and the conspiracy convention confirms) thatConnor learned about the Library from unclear sources and spent years searching for it. Whatever his original source, they clearly remembered the Library and documented it well enough to lead Connor directly to the Annex in Belgrade.
The Library’s well-established sentience might leave room for an explanation that Connor and DOSA get passes because one becomes a future Librarian while the others are valuable allies, butConnor’s side of that explanation would only raise further questions about why it takes him so long to get his invitation. There is, however, one explanation that season 2 can provide.
The Librarians: The Next Chapter Season 2 Can Fix Its Broken Rule With One Simple Fix
A Slight Amendment To The Memory Rule Could Fully Resolve The Issue
Connor and DOSA may seemingly be the biggest examples of why the memory rule doesn’t work, but they also provide the easiest avenue to fix it.The Librarians: The Next Chaptercan simply establish that continued focus on magic prevents the mind wipe from taking effect, which only takes a line or two of dialogue to set up.
The benefit to an easy fix like this is thatThe Librariansnever really bothered itself with obsessive focus on rules and canon. It’s a fun, charming, magical adventure series. It doesn’t need to be anything else. By that standard,the memory rule was never all that important to establish in the first place. It does more harm than good.
For instance, the theory that the Library picks and chooses which minds to wipe based on how useful they are as allies sounds borderline nefarious. Butthe Library doesn’t need help looking nefarious after trying to murder its own employeesas punishment for Eve and Flynn not getting married. It’s remarkable characters likeThe Librarians’ Cassandra Cillianstayed there afterward.
Yet they did. At the least, Cass and Jake are both confirmed for season 2. Throwing in a quick, simple fix to the memory rule and moving on is the best move forThe Librarians: The Next Chapterto continue on its merry way, giving fans the fun-filled adventures they want and moving past the need for unnecessary rules entirely.
The Librarians: The Next Chapter
Cast
The Librarians: The Next Chapter features a time-traveling librarian from the past who becomes stranded in the present. Upon returning to his now museum-castle, he accidentally unleashes magic across the continent. To address this, he assembles a new team of Librarians tasked with restoring balance.
