The Syfy series continues to be an audacious delight.
Full spoilers from The Magicians continue below. For a preview of what to expect in Season 3, make sure to read our Q&A with showrunners John McNamara and Sera Gamble.
With Season 2, The Magicians continues to be the best show on TV that you're probably not watching. It consistently transcends and subverts genre tropes, both as a fantasy series and as a story exploring relationships between college-aged students.
After discovering Fillory in Season 1, The Magicians spent a vast majority of its time in the magical land in Season 2. The new land offered a new wealth of opportunities for ways to screw with Quentin, Julia, Alice, Eliot, Margo, Penny and Kady, and showrunners John McNamara and Sera Gamble took them with glee. They are fearless as showrunners, and the dark thread through the Magicians means that these characters keep getting thrown into worse and worse insane scenarios, and much of the fun of the show is seeing how they'll try to get out of them.
Not every experiment worked, starting with the very beginning. The cliffhanger at the end of Season 1 had the Beast kill pretty much every character -- about as brutal a cliffhanger as they come. But within minutes of the Season 2 premiere, that entire situation is reversed and everyone is magically fine. While it's clear why Gamble and McNamara made that choice -- it was to underline Alice's exceptional powers and start the season with the lesson that no one in Fillory is just there to help out of the goodness of their hearts -- it also showed that even the most dramatic situations won't necessarily stick or have consequences on that show.
Fortunately much of the rest of the season was about proving that wrong, and that looks like it will continue heading into Season 3. Every single character was tested and challenged in new and interesting ways, most notably Julia and Alice. Julia is a character who started off the series with one of the most frustrating storylines and has evolved into one of the most compelling characters on the show, largely thanks to Stella Maeve's performance.
The thread of her needing to befriend the Beast, an enemy, to take down Renard, an even bigger enemy, then needing to lose her Shade farther down the road for the greater good, and sacrificing the opportunity to ever get the Shade back for the sake of someone else, all was great story telling. However, the forced baby from a rape storyline was one of the weaker plot lines of the season, even if it was just done to set up Julia needing to lose her Shade. The Magicians has been largely very sensitive with the serious topics that it addresses, like depression and suicide, but this whole situation of Julia fighting and failing to abort her child conceived out of rape periodically came off a bit tone-deaf.
Meanwhile, Alice's storyline subverted book expectations by keeping her alive for several episodes, before surprisingly killing her and turning her into a Niffin. Though much of her plot this season was pulled from book material, particularly the third, it still felt surprising and new. Dark Niffin Alice who only Quentin could see gave Olivia Taylor Dudley the opportunity to try something completely different with a more nasty, vile performance, which in turn forced the audience to see Quentin in a new light. The best part of this arc was the promise of repercussions in the future; there's the sense that we've only begun to see all the trouble her reversion back to human after her time as a free Niffin will cost her.
I could go through and offer similar breakdowns of all the great material for Quentin, Penny, Eliot, Kady and Margo, as each of their plot threads were jam-packed with surprising and rewarding twists and turns. It makes for a sense viewing experience, but what we can come to trust with The Magicians is the sheer audacity of its storytelling. If there's something crazy but perfectly fitting that pops into the writers' heads, they find a way to make it work, and seemingly without fail it pays off. From the '90s pop culture questionnaire in the first episode that made Quentin, Alice, Eliot and Margo kings and queens to Eliot and Margo's standout Les Miserables musical sequence, these surprising, unexpected moments were the highlights of the season.
Fillory as a new primary setting in Season 2 was a lot of what helped make this work. It's a land that is impossible by nature, and so the showrunners could write in their twists and turns to fit the story because yeah, sure, it must happen in Fillory. There were a lot of frills added to Eliot's story involving fighting the Lorians and learning he could take a husband in addition to a wife here, but it was all to service the more personal story of him finding himself in a marriage that was forced on him, trying to make the best of it and still realizing there was a part of his life that marriage wasn't satisfying. A big theme of Season 2 was about forcing our favorite Brakebills students to grow up, but it felt different from the typical manner TV stories go about exploring that because there could be such bizarre ways with which to teach the characters lessons.
The Magicians also isn't afraid to subvert expectations of what "winning" in a fantasy story can be. We saw some of that last season, particularly with the Beast defeating everyone in the final moments, but this season took that a step further. The quest to kill the Beast turned him into an unlikely ally, and his death at the hands of Renard, another Big Bad, came partway through the season instead of in a climactic final battle. Julia's quest to kill Renard took a sharp turn when we learn Our Lady Underground is both real and his estranged mother, and Julia makes the hard choice to let Persephone keep him, alive, rather than kill him. Even the expectation of who the Big Bad was changed over and over, until we learn that it's Ember and Umber being bored and at odds that was ruining Fillory and the Well Spring.
It's those types of story turns that make the experience of watching The Magicians so rewarding, and in many ways Gamble and McNamara and their writing team stepped up from the first season. This was a much more solidly great show than Season 1, and hopefully any lessons learned in creating Season 2 can be applied and result in an even more exceptional Season 3.
The Verdict
The sheer insanity of many of The Magicians' scenarios and storylines means that not everything works, but the audacity of this show and it's willingness to swing for the fences makes it one of the most consistently rewarding and fun shows to watch on TV. Season 2 improved on the first and offered rich character development, and offered up a fresh experience with the inclusion of Fillory as a setting. The season finale was surprising and shocking, and has us excited to see what Gamble and McNamara cook up next in Season 3.
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