The Librarians and the City of Light – Director: Tawnia McKiernan/Writers: John Rogers, Jeremy Bernstein
This one starts in the woods near a small town called Collins Falls, where a UFO hunter (Victor Finch) is investigating reports of strange lights in the area. We see some strange energy patterns following Victor and when he puts on
his special goggles, he can see them too … and they look human-shaped. Victor freaks out and runs to town to warn everyone, but it seems like some of them already know and they use some kind of energy to attack Victor.
When the Librarians hear about the weird happenings in Collins Falls, 
Ezekiel is sure it really is aliens, even though Jenkins insists there’s no such thing. They head to Collins Falls to check things out and Cassandra soon realizes Ezekiel is a UFO geek. Eve doesn’t believe in aliens either, but Jacob points out some anachronisms in the local architecture, so she tells him to look into it while she and Ezekiel search the woods. Jacob and Cassandra meet the local archivist (Mabel), who Jacob starts flirting with immediately, much to Cassandra’s
exasperation. In the woods, Eve and Ezekiel hear some noises and find an antique lamp post (like the ones in town) in a clearing. Victor Finch shows up and attacks Ezekiel, but when Eve shoves Victor into the lamp post, it knocks Victor on his ass and makes Eve disappear in a burst of energy.
Jenkins gives them shit for losing Eve, although he manages to determine that she’s still somewhere on the planet. They talk to Victor, who doesn’t 
realize he’s been missing for three weeks, but does let them take his goggles. Jenkins figures out that the goggles can detect weird energy patterns, some of which are visible on the video Victor took in the woods where Eve disappeared. Jacob goes back to talk to Mabel and they bond over being small town people with big dreams. Mabel says she’s never been out of town but has always dreamed of travelling (especially to Paris) and Jacob admits that until lately he’d never been very far from his own home town. Mabel won’t let Jacob look at the archives, so he takes her out to the lamp post in the woods, which Jenkins and the others are examining. When Eve briefly materializes, they try to
bullshit Mabel with an explanation about optical illusions, but she doesn’t buy it. (Normally, the magic of the Library makes everyone believe whatever wild explanation for weird phenomena they come up with as soon as they introduce themselves as Librarians.) Mabel tells Jacob she wants to know what’s going on and he asks her to look through the archives to see if there’s anything about the lamp post in the forest. As Mabel leaves, we see one of the people who attacked Victor lurking in the woods.
Jenkins tweaks the goggles to detect energy signatures and gives them to 
Ezekiel, while Jacob heads to the archive to nose around. Mabel isn’t too happy to find him there, but agrees to help him research the early town records. In the woods, Ezekiel follows the energy trail and Cassandra figures out that the lamp posts form a circuit for the energy. Ezekiel sees Eve, who tells him to follow her while Cassandra tracks down the source of the energy. Jacob realizes Mabel is hiding something and she shows him evidence that the town was built around the gas lamps because there was another town already there. Cassandra tracks the energy to a dam where she finds photos showing Nikola Tesla. Ezekiel
follows Eve to town and sees that some of the townspeople have been possessed by the energy forms. They chase him and he uses a lamp post to short them out before running to the archives to warn Jacob. Cassandra is confronted at the dam by the possessed Victor Finch and she decks him with a wrench before going back to tell the others that Tesla built the original town (Wardenclyffe Falls).
As the possessed townsfolk arrive, Cassandra shows the others a photo from 1915 with Mabel in it. Mabel tells them Tesla was doing wireless power 
experiments involving the lamp posts, but when they were activated everyone (all 87 of them) was knocked out of phase with reality, so they could see the world but not interact with it. Tesla modified the lamps to keep them from dissipating and since Mabel was in the control room at the time of the accident, she was somewhat insulated from the effect, which made her a sort of “grounding wire”, an anchor to the others. They’ve been borrowing bodies to interact with reality—which really offends Ezekiel—and now they have a plan to reintegrate themselves (which is why they took Victor’s body, so he can help implement the plan). Mabel takes them to the dam and says Tesla built
a capacitor that’s been storing energy for 100 years. That energy should be enough to bring everyone back, but the capacitor is getting pretty rundown so they’ll only get one chance. Cassandra points out that there’s only a fifty percent chance of success and if it doesn’t work, the feedback will destroy the lamps, stranding the people forever. Ezekiel is still pissed off about Mabel and the others taking over bodies without permission, but Jenkins mentions that helping them is the only way to get Eve back, so he agrees to help.
They work together to get things ready and Mabel continues bonding with Jacob, admitting that the circuit stabilizes her and that’s why she couldn’t 
leave town. Jacob tells her his family business was going down the crapper, mostly because his dad is a booze-hound, so he stuck around to keep things going, even though he knew that was an excuse not to leave. They end up kissing. They activate the capacitor and it heads towards critical, making Cassandra recalculate things. She realizes that if this doesn’t work, the backlash will destroy the town and everything around it for hundreds of miles. She’s ready to shut it off, but the guy possessing Victor smashes the controls and locks her in, saying he can’t go on as a disembodied spirit any longer. Cassandra changes the turbine frequencies to send a Morse code message for help (in a
“mosquito tone” that only Ezekiel can hear). They rescue her and she tells them the danger if the experiment fails. Mabel agrees they should shut it down, so she, Jacob, and Ezekiel head for the roof to use the safety switch. The fence is highly charged but Mabel and Jacob get inside (thanks to Mabel being grounded), leaving Ezekiel to deal with a pissed off Victor. Mabel is close to being overloaded by the energy discharge, so Jacob has to carry her. Eve takes over Ezekiel, allowing him to pound the more aggressive possessed people and she ends up 
reintegrating. Mabel shuts off the capacitor but dies from all the energy she absorbed. The capacitor is fried but the lamps are fine, meaning everyone is trapped again. The Librarians are pissed off about that, but Eve says sometimes you just lose, even when things seem to be working. Jenkins tells Eve to leave a message for future Librarians in the Library Appointment Book so someone can try the experiment again after another hundred years of a new capacitor charging. In honour of Mabel, Jacob uses the Annex Back Door to visit Paris.
This was a pretty good episode, with nods to Nikola Tesla (a fount of weirdness even in real life) and Brigadoon. The episode was written to show how the Librarians could solve a problem without Eve’s help and I think
they did pretty well. Eve’s lesson at the end about how you sometimes lose for no good reason was cool and felt authentic. The Jacob/Mabel romance was sweet and I like how they bonded over getting stuck in a place and finding it hard to get out, which was paralleled in the Wardenclyffe Falls residents’ plight. It was great to see Jacob visiting Paris kind of as a proxy for Mabel.
Favourite Quotes:
- “Minotaurs, haunted houses, Santa Claus, yes … but UFOS, don’t be silly!” Eve expressing incredulity at Jenkins’s statement that UFOs aren’t real after all the other crazy stuff they’ve dealt with. (The creators of the series had said that no matter what weird shit happened on the show, the explanation would never be aliens.)
- “Magic is not an exact science … if it were, it would be science.” Jenkins pointing out the obvious.