Hear me out: the version of Season 5 where The Magicians showrunners decided, “Instead of killing off Quentin, what if we just - didn’t?” and the Season 4 finale ends with everyone getting out of the Mirror World in one piece, but in the final scene everyone’s at Kady’s apartment, celebrating that Eliot’s pulled through the surgery and the monsters are gone and Library’s not bent on multi-world domination anymore, and then Poppy shows up and drops a diaper bag and a baby carrier containing one (1) baby in the middle of the floor and is like, “Hey dude, actually the kid is totally yours, I just lied since you were functionally the minion of a god-level homicidal monster, but it seems like that’s been wrapped up, so here you go, baby daddy - I’m off to a dragon-tracking expedition in Belize, be back in four months, probably, byeee!” and disappears out the door, and everyone stares at the baby and at Quentin, end scene. And then as of Season 5 Quentin becomes The Character We Never See, because obviously now he’s a harried single dad holed up in his dad’s old house in New Jersey, and has neither the time nor the inclination to participate in batshit dangerous magical plot shenanigans, but we keep getting updates on him and baby Misti and the random baby shit everyone keeps buying for her in between crises, and we hear Julia’s and Margo’s (and eventually Eliot’s and Alice’s) one-sided phone conversations with him, and see text conversations on-screen à la Sherlock, during one episode there is a ridiculous running joke of everyone looking up YouTube videos to solve some kind of bizarre baby problem Q is having while also trying to deal with whatever the much more important A-plot is - and maybe in the last episode Eliot’s talking to Q on the phone, telling him everyone and everything is more or less okay, and says, “It’s a long story, I’ll tell you later. I’ll be home soon.”
And I was thinking of this only in the context of one last season, but honestly, the longer it goes on, the funnier it gets. There could be a body-swapping episode where Quentin’s stuck in someone else’s body and so interacts with everyone that way, and one where he’s invisible and inaudible to everyone but Penny, so it’s just Penny sniping at empty space the whole episode, a wedding episode where it’s just all the preparations and shit going wrong in the background of the A-plot, and we never actually see the wedding - so many possibilities, while still subverting “Q as the hero of the story” thing -
jacobvanloon
titsay
dailybridgerton
stormborns
