The Librarians and the Image of Image – Director: Emile Levisetti/Writer: Paul Guyot
This one starts in London, where Jacob and Cassandra are hanging out after doing some research to find Prospero. Outside a club called Effigy, a jauntily-dressed dude crosses the street and gets hit by a car, but it doesn’t affect him at all. Instead, a girl who just came out of the club goes flying twenty feet through the air. Jacob catches her and realizes magic is probably involved, prompting Cassandra to wonder why the Clipping Book didn’t warn them.
At the Annex, Cassandra finds another anomaly, a guy named Curt Cooper who suffered the effects of an overdose without ever doing drugs. Turns out Curt worked in his mom’s pub and never left that night, except to make a
delivery to—you guessed it—Club Effigy. Cassandra finds seven other people who suffered mysterious overdoses or accidents in that area and Jenkins figures the club is a magical nexus of some kind. He also thinks he recognizes the neighbourhood, but can’t recall why. The team has to go in undercover as clubbers, something Eve is not into at all. But she ends up going along with it and naturally she and Cassandra are let in immediately, leaving Ezekiel and 
Jacob outside with all the other hopefuls. The club confiscates everyone’s phones upon entry but displays huge images of the “Chosen Ones” on a giant screen outside. Ezekiel spots pictures of the two victims and Jacob wonders why a delivery boy is among the chosen few to have their image displayed. He engages the bouncer in an argument over American vs. British literature, giving Ezekiel the chance to sneak inside.
Eve and Cassandra are accosted by a photographer and Eve avoids having her picture taken, saying she’s tired of being thought of as just a pretty face (like she has been for most of her military career). Cassandra does her
mathemagic thing and figures out who the next victim probably is, although she seems kinda out of it (which is weird since she ordered club soda). We see a guy listening to them talk about the next victim and it’s the same guy who was unharmed from getting hit by the car in the teaser. Ezekiel tracks the potential victim to a nearby restaurant where he and Jacob arrive just in time to see her collapse from a fatal 
overdose, even though she wasn’t doing any drugs. They jury-rig a defibrillator and save her life, although Jacob gets shocked too. In the club, Cassandra gets more wasted even though she’s not drinking. She and Eve meet the guy who was watching them and he waxes poetic about how more images of people are taken each year, pointing out that people aren’t even taking photos of others anymore, just themselves.
Eve assumes the club photographer has something to do with the victims and grabs him (with a little help from Jenkins) to examine his camera. The camera is completely ordinary, as is the photographer, who points out that
all the images are automatically uploaded to a server, but he has no idea where it is or who even pays him. Jenkins talks to Ezekiel and Jacob, suggesting image transference might be going on. He still feels the building is familiar ad tells them to look up its records. Cassandra is doing some more calculating when the smarmy guy sits down and introduces himself as Dorian Gray. She takes off and runs into Eve, telling her that the images at the club have been manipulated 
somehow. At the Annex, Jenkins remembers the street had a different name a century ago and they find out the building was once owned by Basil Hallward, the guy who painted Dorian Gray’s portrait in the novel, which Jenkins says was based on real people. Jenkins figures a still-young Dorian must’ve figured out how to transfer the results of his own sins to the victims. A company called DG Trust owns the club and a nearby art gallery, where Jenkins speculates they’ll probably find the original portrait.
Ezekiel and Jacob break into the gallery and find the portrait, which they destroy. Ezekiel goes to let Eve and Cassandra know, but nothing has
changed … Cassandra is still wasted and her photo has now appeared on the big screen with the others. Eve figures another portrait must be somewhere inside the building, so they head upstairs to look for it. They find a digital portrait of Dorian made up of hundreds of tiny images of the club-goers, including Cassandra. Dorian shows up and says whatever befalls him will affect the person in the last 
uploaded photo, which in this case is Cassandra. He demonstrates by cutting his hand, which makes Cassandra’s hand bleed. He tells them the real photo-montage resides in the cloud so it can’t be physically destroyed, then he leaves with a warning that he’ll cut his own throat (thus killing Cassandra) if they follow. Eve takes her own photo and swaps it with Cassandra’s in the cloud to protect her.
Eve tells Ezekiel to replace all the pictures in the montage with images of Dorian (taken from CCTV all over London) and goes after Dorian. She soon finds out that stopping him won’t be easy since she’s the one who feels it
whenever she hits him. Outside, Jacob gets into it with Dorian, but Eve takes the punishment. On the roof, Dorian threatens to jump off which would kill Eve instead of him. Jenkins shows up to try to talk some sense into Dorian and Eve realizes that Dorian has done all this because he’s incapable of feeling anything from all his excesses, so he’s been trying to live vicariously and up the stakes just so he can feel something (or anything) for himself. But Ezekiel has created a new photo-
montage of Eve, made up of hundreds of images of Dorian, so Eve kills him by jumping off the roof. They confiscate Dorian’s magic stuff and discuss the case, with Ezekiel suggesting that they were chosen as Librarians because they don’t have any deep ties to anyone and are thus expendable. Jenkins tells Eve she should think about why she was chosen as Guardian, reminding her there’s a big difference between image and identity.
This is a pretty good episode, using Dorian Gray to illustrate the price of vanity and tying it into our modern image-obsessed culture. Dorian’s vanity originally fuelled the magic in the portrait, letting him remain young
and unsullied and he ended up feeding off the vanity of others, who seem more interested in being seen than in looking for themselves. Drunk Cassandra (and hung over Cassandra) were funny, but there was a moment in the club when Cassandra seemed enraptured by Eve’s beauty; does she secretly have a thing for Eve? That would fit with the other clues pointing to Cassandra being either lesbian or bisexual, but maybe I’ve just seen too many Xena episodes. We find out 
some interesting factoids in this episode too: Jenkins used to be a party animal (dancing with Snakehips Tucker at the Cotton Club and the Magic Tramps at CBGB); the Clippings book can only warn about new threats (and since Dorian had been doing this for over a century, it didn’t warn about him); Ezekiel hacked the manufacturer of retinal image scanners and now has a free pass to about 600 galleries and museums around the world; and Eve apparently does a kick-ass karaoke rendition of “Janie’s Got a Gun”.
Favourite Quotes:
- “Now that I’ve met the building face to face, not that weird.” Eve explaining why she sometimes talks directly to the Library, referencing a couple episodes ago.
- “That’s just gonna live in my head now.” Eve’s reaction on hearing about Jenkins’s naked escapades at CBGB.
- “Worst … plan … ever!” Eve to Jenkins after jumping off the building to end Dorian’s life.