<em>The Magicians </em>Is Your Next Great Escape

Though set in a fantastical world, the series navigates these characters’ lasting traumas with deftness and realism. One form of pain it explores is sexual assault: The series’ approach to the subject, through a story line involving Quentin’s childhood friend Julia (Stella Maeve), is abrupt and cruel. The show has been rightly critiqued for portraying how Julia’s violation at the hands of a god imbues her with power—an antiquated and alarming trope lifted from Grossman’s books. But The Magicians worked to rectify those missteps by spending more than a single season on the fallout. It goes on to show how Julia is fundamentally affected by the attack without letting it become the only thing that defines her.

Elsewhere, minor characters flow beyond the sidelines. In one self-aware scene in a pivotal episode, Penny asserts: “When you file people away as sidekicks, you don’t realize their importance to the story, and this story belongs to a lot more people than you think.” The Magicians insists that even small-seeming characters can become heroes or villains; nothing is static. Watching these friends come together then split into their separate quests over and again feels especially resonant right now, when the most any of us can do is isolate ourselves to protect our neighbors and communities. Our value for the collective has set us on some lonely paths, but like the magicians, we’re in this together.

Quentin, called Q by his friends, embodies this interplay between retreating inward and looking outward. Unlike most of his classmates, Quentin is such an unremarkable magician that his specialty goes undetermined for years. His most notable gift may be his fan-boy obsessiveness for the details of the Fillory books and his affection for the deadly reality of the world as it actually exists. (“The air there,” Quentin notes, “is 0.02 percent opium, which is a pretty unfair trick to get you to love a place.”) His constant reference to kid-book minutiae makes him something of an immature dork, but it also helps him and his friends as they try to survive in Fillory’s strange kingdom. Q doesn’t grow in power, but he develops a knack for understanding the relationship between characters in the Fillory stories and the real-life journeys that he and the other magicians are on.

Q’s passion for those quests is eventually redirected toward his friends. In many ways, Quentin’s great escape is from himself. Syfy’s The Magicians is a love story of a young man learning to look beyond his own darkness and fantasies to devote himself to his friends—who are just as worthy, and some, more worthy adventurers than he is. Sadly, this impulse to evenly rest the show on the shoulders of its deep cast contributed to issues that made the last season frustrating for some of the series’ fans. (News of The Magicians’ cancellation hit in early March.) The death of a major character skewed the show’s balance. With a new gap in this carefully knitted crew, much of the final season oscillated between mourning and apocalypse-hopping, with plot issues threatening to nip at the fabric between The Magicians’ many worlds. But at its close, the series again offered the promise that even after great loss, a bit of magic can be saved. The world itself may be altered forever, but those who are left will start anew.