“Shaking It Off...?’: Is the Magicians Surviving Post-Quentin in Season Five?
Editor’s Note: Spoilers for the current season of The Magicians lie ahead. Read at your own risk.
I still can’t listen to it.
Every time I was at work, the radio loved to drop in Taylor Swift. I admit it. I love Taylor Swift. It was earned respect so I won’t knocked it. However, when I heard ‘Shake It Off,’ I changed the station. Why? Because I was reminded every time.
The Magicians Episode 4, Season 1…Quentin Coldwater in the mind asylum. Him singing it. It was a turn left moment in a somewhat serious scene that was hilarious.
But I was always reminded when I heard the song. Now…
Quentin Coldwater was dead.
In case you missed it, the fourth season of The Magicians went out with a bang. In order to save the world and his friends, Quentin Coldwater sacrificed himself. It was a heartbreaking moment and yes, there were tears at the gang’s tribute to him with a cover of ‘Take on Me.’ It was also shocking because who would have thought a show would kill off their main character, the character that viewers are brought into the show by. Even ballsier? Leaving the main character dead, confirmed immediately after the episode aired that night by way of internet interviews from the producers.
That was the world viewers were coming into walking into Season Five. Unlike Supergirl which I dropped in Season Four due to the on-the-nose political writing, I was curious to see how the writers would play the death of their main character.
So how was it?
Did Someone Order an Apocalypse?: Raising the Stakes in Season Five
After a season where magic was rationed out, this season was different. Now there was too much magic. How much? So much that people were exploding for crying out loud.
As a result, there were plot threads being introduced. You had Penny being made a professor at Brakebills and dealing with the presence of a signal that one of his Traveler students was hearing. You had Kady struggling with being the leader of the hedgewitches while being in the middle of a mystery involving the disappearance of a book depository. Most importantly, there was a Pig running around, encountering Julia and saying an apocalypse was coming.
Hm…the end of everything. While the Magicians has had moments that were life and death, I do not think it has actually dealt with an apocalypse. It sounded so Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And it was during one of these moments of too much magic that the apocalypse was supposed to happen.
And this was all in light of the fact that Quentin was only dead a month. Alice, Julia, and Elliot were the ones who were hit the hardest by his passing. Julia was Quentin’s best friend. Alice was Quentin’s girlfriend. Elliot was his woulda, coulda, shoulda. But as usual, the world as they knew it needed saving.
And there were casualties on the way to the apocalypse. Penny lost his ability to control his Traveler abilities so much so that he could accidentally kill himself now. Dean Fogg was lost to a whole dimension in Kady’s pursuit of the book depository. In the gang’s attempt to stop the apocalypse, they succeeded. But there was a BUT.
WRONG apocalypse.
All that struggle. Encountering goddesses with agendas. The return of evil hedge witch Marina who was behind the depository mystery. Kady almost was killed by an assassin. Elliot and Margo got stuck in a time loop.
It was all for the wrong apocalypse. You see the Pig was talking about a whole other apocalypse that was coming. One that appeared to be tied into another plot thread from last season involving Elliot and Margo being trapped at one point in the Narniasque land of Fillory 300 years in the future and its future ruler the Dark King.
Oops.
The Power of Three: Character Development in Season Five
Magic comes from pain.
Eliot said that to Quentin in the first season. Over the course of the seasons, that has truly held up quite well. Going into Season Five, there was still plenty of it. And that brought me to the character development for Julia, Alice, and Eliot specifically. Their pain. Their grief over Quentin’s death.
I loved Julia’s Season Four arc. The ‘is she or isn’t she still a goddess?’ arc. She had been practically redeemed in Season Three. She had sacrificed her being on a higher plane for her friends. And where did she go from here? From here led to a new relationship with Penny, getting to get close with her best friend Quentin again, and have a chance to be a full goddess again. However, that was snatched away from her by the Monster and so was Quentin. She was human again with no magic…until her pain over Quentin’s death, bringing her magic back to the surface.
And that miracle was what was driving Julia this season. She was determined to not have Quentin’s death be in vain. She was going to stop those apocalypses. She was so determined that it was revealing cracks in her relationship with Penny. In fact, they broke up…just in time to find out that Julia was pregnant. So would Julia keep focusing on stopping apocalypses to honor Quentin’s memory, or would she focus on herself and her future which may or may not include Penny? Oh, the dilemma…
And then we had Alice…
Honestly, I haven’t liked Alice since Season 2. She was cute. She was brainy. She wore glasses. And Niffin experience, while a great plot twist for those of us who hadn’t read the books, really tainted her. And any sympathy she got for her pain was destroyed by betraying the gang by helping the Library at the end of Season Three. I enjoyed everyone giving her the business in Season Four.
So I was saddened to see Quentin take her back. Especially with someone better hanging in the wings.
That said…the pain that Alice felt for Quentin dying. The staying in her room. Her wearing his clothes. Her trying to resurrect him. That felt real. And for the first time, Alice felt like a person again. She felt like Alice. And as the current season has progressed, a new persona has taken over: old Alice. The last few episodes had brought back the brainy, the problem solving, and dare I say it the cute Alice from the early seasons. From the darkness, she had come back into the light.
And finally, there was Eliot. Eliot spent the majority of Season Four possessed by an ancient Monster. A Monster who was on a mission to resurrect his even more dangerous sister. In the process of Eliot trying to find a way to contact Quentin, Margo, and the gang, it was revealed that there was a scene not revealed to the audience. Back during the Season 3, Episode 5 episode “A Day in the Life,” Quentin and Eliot were trapped in a time loop of sorts and lived a whole life together. Fell in love. Had a child together. Died. In the end, quick thinking brought them back. And it was over…right?
Wrong.
It turned out that Quentin and Eliot had had a talk. Proof of concept. Most people took a chance when they got into a relationship. Here they had a whole lifetime and saw they worked together. So…Quentin wanted to make it real. The debatably straight character wanted to give it a go…but Eliot pulled away. Being trapped in a Monster gave Eliot that push. The push he needed to get free and tell Quentin that he was ready to give it a go.
So of course…Quentin died.
And just like that…they became Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Tara and Willow. They became like The 100’s Clarke and Lexa. What did I mean? I meant that the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope struck again. You know, the trope in literature and tv where two people of the same sex cannot be happy and if they found happiness it usually ended in tragedy. And the fact that Quentin got some form of closure with Alice in terms of their relationship while he did not with Eliot was quite the tragedy for fans.
While I personally would have liked to see some closure for those two (called Queliot by their fans) due to the relatability of their situation (which happened more in real life than people thought), I was pleased to see that in the latest season that Eliot was definitely dealing with his unsolved feelings about Quentin. Not only did he find some closure to it, he even got to some closure with Alice as well since they had quite a bit to deal with between each other. Bonus, Eliot had been bantering with the Dark King, this season’s potential Big Bad who happened to be flirting with Eliot.
A happy ending for our resident gay man? This is The Magicians. So…iffy. LOL!!! Especially after that reveal in Episode 9. So time would tell how the relationship between Eliot and Sebastian the Dark King would resolve itself.
Speaking of…
Pieces of a Puzzle: Using Plot Threads that Work Well in Season Five
While a lot of the seasonal plot arc had to do with the gang dealing with apocalypses, there was also the arc having to do with the Dark King who usurped Margo’s rule of Fillory. Fans got to meet him in a clever introduction during Alice’s and Eliot’s quest to give closure to Quentin. Thus, the tension between Sebastian the Dark King and Eliot began.
In another blog I did ( https://someplace-that-is-else.tumblr.com/post/183733192088/well-fuck-how-i-fell-into-syfys-the ), I mentioned that protagonists were only as good as their antagonists. The more complex the antagonist, the better. And if the Dark King was to be the main villain this season, the writers did him right. On one hand, there was the burgeoning relationship between him and Eliot and the fact that Fillory worshipped him for his ability to push back the invading Takers. On the other hand, it was revealed HE was behind the Takers being in Fillory in the first place and was immortal to being killed. Add on to that the reveal in Episode 9: Sebastian was one of the Chatwin siblings, brother to the Beast…
...still the best villain in this series. His goal: to resurrect his lost love. Given the gang was dealing with the aftermath of Quentin’s death, how could they not relate? How could we? Things were more murky.
Meanwhile, there was the mystery of the signal. As mentioned earlier, the increase in magic meant there were a lot of new traveler magicians coming into their abilities with no one to guide/teach them. Enter Penny the only Traveler alive to tell the tale. At first Penny was reluctant, but he attempted to. That was how he met Plum, one of his students who was hearing the mysterious signal. In the process of hearing the signal, Penny lost his abilities. And to add on to the mystery…Plum...
... was ALSO a Chatwin. Whom daughter…Jane, the Beast aka Martin or Sebastian…remained to be seem.
And then there were two.
Finally, there was the world seed. I had greatly enjoyed seeing Alice morph back into her brainy persona that I remembered from the first two seasons. At the same time, she had started a bantering friendship with another magician who was some expert in possibilities. And from some notes left around by Quentin, Alice and this student had been creating a world seed. The belief…that it could create a whole new world. Leave it to Quentin to be gone, but NOT forgotten.
How that would come into play with Plum, the Dark King’s plans, and the Fillory apocalypse was too early to know. It was recently announced by the SyFy Channel that they had cancelled The Magicians. Insert eyeroll here given my colorful history with SyFy. However, the producers of The Magicians have always mentioned that they wanted to adapted the last book in the series The Magicians’s Land for one of their seasons. And all signs of what I knew to happen in the book revealed this current season was loosely based on that book (in the book Quentin was still alive for example). So it would be interesting to see how it all ended for everyone.
With a bang…or a whimper?
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