Full spoilers for The Magicians: Season 2 finale continue below.
Magic is gone, the Fairies are invading, and all hope seems lost yet again for the main characters on Syfy's The Magicians. That's exactly the way showrunners John McNamara and Sera Gamble like it, they tell me, as I beg them to offer some preview of what's ahead in the previously announced Season 3.
We'll still have to wait a while for The Magicians to return and pick back up with these dire circumstances, but until then, here's a look at what the plans are for Quentin, Alice, Julia, Eliot, Margo, Penny, Kady and the rest of the troubled characters we love so much on The Magicians.
IGN: Like last season, you end with our heroes in such a terrible spot. What is it that appeals to you about tossing your characters in such a horrible situation, and what do you look forward to in writing them out of it?
John McNamara: You know, it's like life!
Sera Gamble: Being a good storyteller is being similar to being a sadist in that you really have to do bad things to people so you can watch them struggle and grow to try to get out of those situations. John and I have a really strong philosophy in the writer's room, that was John's before mine. I actually learned it working for him on my very first TV gig, and that is, "If you don't know what's about to happen as a writer, if you're a little stuck, if you don't know what's going to happen next, then the audience doesn't know what's going to happen either." So we're as brave as we can be at all times in terms of throwing things at ourselves that we don't know the quick and easy solution to. We like it to be hard.
IGN: So have you already started figuring out and plotting already what Season 3 will be? Or do you wait until you get back into the writer's room for that?
Gamble: When these ideas are pitched in the room, we start talking immediately about where they would go next and what their solutions could be. So we have a general framework and a general idea. When Julia makes that spark in the last scene, we had a large conversation about what could happen next and what could happen after that. But we always go in the writer's room knowing that they're going to change a little bit along the way. We have a very, very broad map, and as we start to fill it in the landscape kind of changes.
IGN: Would you say the main focus of Season 3, at least when we pick back up, will be the quest to try to bring back magic?
McNamara: There's no question: the most urgent, immediate problem for the entire group is to try to get magic back. Then each individual has some specific stuff to deal with that's related to but ancillary, like Alice.
Gamble: Alice has pissed off a lot of people. Eliot's got a child in the fairy realm.
McNamara: Fen has no toes. Margo has one eye. Oh, and the Fairies are going to take over!
Gamble: They sure look like they wanted to take over in that last beat.
IGN: There's been this theme you've been exploring of parents and their relationships with their children and whether they are complicit in the behavior of their offspring. How will you continue to explore that in Season 3?
Gamble: Yeah, we have a lot of parental issues that we're going to deal with. [laughs] I think some of it is a direct analogy to parents, and in a certain way it's also akin to a feeling that would be familiar to anyone who works in a large company, like an international corporation --
McNamara: Like we do. It's a bit like Cabletown.
Gamble: Like we do! There are the people we deal with, the people who are in charge of TV, and then there are people way above them, and you just don't really want them to notice you. You want to do your job, you want to have your success and you want to live your life, and you don't want to get so far outside the bounds that those people even really know your name necessarily. I think that that's an analogy that you can make in a lot of different situations in life, and our characters have made themselves visible to a class of being that shouldn't know who they are. It's like suddenly knowing the name of the gnat that's been flying around the room kind of annoying you for a few minutes. The power imbalance is incredibly dangerous to our characters.
IGN: So is your plan to thrust them into the audience of those characters now?
Gamble: I mean, maybe, maybe not. Just because they sent their plumber to flip a switch doesn't mean they want to have a conversation. Certainly our characters have made a mistake that they want to try to fix, and to do that at least they're going to have to try to get in front of some beings that would sooner kill them than say hello. It's not a great situation for Quentin and his friends.
IGN: As you mentioned, Alice pissed off a few people during her time as a Niffin away from Quentin. How is finding out what happened during that time away and how that affects her now going to play into her arc in Season 3?
Gamble: It will play into her arc because she f**ked with some people when she was a Niffin --
McNamara: And now she's powerless.
Gamble: We tipped our hand a little bit in the season finale and let you know that although magicians are s**t out of luck and the magical current has been turned off now by the Mario Bros. of the gods, the same does not necessarily hold true for magical creatures. They seem to follow a slightly different rulebook, and if that's a little mysterious then that's OK. We'll get into that more in Season 3. But again, the scales have been tipped not in Alice's favor now.
IGN: By this point, you've remixed a lot of Lev Grossman's source material and gotten into some deep Book 3 material. Are you looking to continue to pull in book storylines at this point, or are you going fully off-book with your own version in Season 3?
McNamara: I don't think we accessed all of Book 2, for sure, and I think we've only dipped into one tiny thread of Book 3, which is the Niffin/Alice thing. Otherwise those are completely open for adaptation.
IGN: So how do you figure out what the balance of it will be: what you draw over and when, and what you create your own storyline with?
McNamara: I hate to open the door to the sausage factory, but it's pretty boring: we just talk... and talk and talk and talk and talk.
Gamble: It's entirely instinctual, really. We're incredibly fortunate in that we have access to the author of the book. We show him all of our material first, but more than that we just chat with him about the show. Early on, his job was to give us a lot of really smart notes and get really specific about why the rules are what they are in the books, but then also he gently encouraged us to make the show its own thing. He was having fun right along with us kind of iterating and throwing out ideas that didn't make it into the books that might be fun in the show. I've got to say, it might look like we're doing some very complicated calculus, but really we're just following our nose with these storylines.
IGN: Are you guys still tied to any specific locations, like Brakebills and Fillory, or are you looking to mix up some locations next year?
Gamble: Probably both things are true. When we say we don't know what world we're going to be in next season, that goes beyond just literally "will you see the throne room again? Will you see Brakebills again?" They are not the same places they were in Season 2 because in Season 2 they had magic and in Season 3 they don't. So it's sort of a rediscovery of these places, especially because a lot of our characters are stranded in these different worlds when we leave them in Season 2. So the rules have changed, and the tools have changed for our characters. So that's really where we're starting and where we're thinking about it.
IGN: I also am very concerned by Kady's decision to essentially be a mole again, even to protect Penny. I can't imagine he'll be very happy about that! What can you tease for what's ahead for those two?
Gamble: I mean, yeah, that seems to be what Kady does, huh? She gets herself in these situations. The one thing I really enjoy about Kady and Penny, about writing that relationship, is it's really quite a grand and romantic relationship in the most classical sense in that they're two people who just care so deeply about each other and have such a deep, inexplicable connection that supersedes things like the definition of a boyfriend or who's on what side. I think it's really interesting to put these characters in these compromising situations because at this point I don't think any of us doubt what they feel or what they care about. What's interesting is to see them fight for that, and fight against things they have to fight against.
IGN: On that note, Margo and Eliot went up against each other a lot more this season than they have in previous years as they became partners even more as king and queen. In what new ways are you looking forward to testing them in Season 3?
McNamara: What's interesting is their relationship is strained and they don't have magic, so that should yield some interesting conflicts but also provides for some interesting bonding.
Gamble: Margo and Eliot are the friends who their relationship was initially based on a lot of fun and partying. They were a big fish in a comparatively small pond. We have thrown a lot of really, really adult stuff at that relationship. It was, I think, in essence a fairly adolescent relationship when we met them -- which is not to say that they don't care about each other. I think they care very deeply about each other, and their bond is real. They had never been tested on this level. The worst thing that happened to them when you met them was they were partners in the Trials, and neither of them were really sharers who did a lot of therapy with the other about their tortured pasts. They got high and they banged a lot of freshman. Certainly, I had a lot to pull on in my own life. Sometimes your friendships survive those transitions into adulthood and into the real problems and responsibilities and boredom and just pressures of adulthood, and some of them don't. Margo and Eliot are smart enough that they know this is a challenge now. They see the foundation of their relationship being rocked, and if they want to hold onto each other they have to work for it.
IGN: We met a lot of really fun new characters this season. Who are you see continuing to be major characters next season if you can bring them back again?
Gamble: We have an embarrassment of riches.
McNamara: Yeah, we really do.
Gamble: We say this with the asterisk that the people we are talking about, most of them are guest stars to our show. We don't own them full time and we have ideas and want to explore their characters more, but we can't 1000 percent promise we'll be able to do it right away. We love Fen, we love Josh, and we just met the Fairy Queen, but I'm so intrigued by her. She was especially fun for us to create because the question on the table when we created that character was, "What kind of a queen can we create that would go toe-to-toe with Margo?" You end up meeting this person who is fun and sexy and fearless and in her soul is a strong matriarch. I think that's just interesting on screen, and it's certainly someone who's interesting to see against Margo. So she's someone I've been thinking about. We were lucky to have Marlee Matlin and we'd be lucky to have her again. There are so many of them. We killed a few of them even though we loved them.
IGN: I miss Marina!
Gamble: I mean look, everyone loves Kacey Rohl so much and she does such good work that every day there's a pitch for a way where she can come back, like can we see her ghost or can we see another version of her. When you're on a fantasy show, that's always the temptation to erase all of the consequences so you can enjoy the actors and the characters that you like more. All we can say is if the story demands it, we'll figure something out.
Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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