The Magicians: It’s Been Renewed, and I Can’t Wait for Season Two!

I really enjoyed watching The Magicians, this past season. It had so many of the things I love in a TV program: fully fleshed-out, believable characters, intriguing, unpredictable plot-lines, exciting twists, and… magic!

Some people have been saying that they were shocked by how dark it got toward the end, but I think that if you were paying attention, it was dark right from the very beginning.

When the character Julia, played by Stella Maeve, didn’t get in to Brakebills Academy and became depressed and self-destructive; when she joined a group of Hedge witches and got caught up with the evil Marina (Kacey Rohl); when she took revenge on her ex-best friend Quentin (Jason Ralph) by locking him in a mental institution in his mind, and when she teamed up with Kady’s (Jade Taylor) mother Hannah, played by Amy Pietz, and a spell backfired getting Hannah killed, it showed just how dark the series was willing to go.

I watched each episode of the show with feelings of excitement and dread, always wondering when the next terrible thing was going to happen. In The Magicians, magic doesn’t make things nicer, it often results in horrors.

When Quentin and his fellow first year, the prodigiously talented but pathologically shy Alice (Olivia Taylor-Dudley) tried summoning her brother back from wherever he had disappeared to, first they accidentally brought forth The Beast, with devastating results for the Academy.

Then, when they couldn’t leave well enough alone and tried another spell, they were successful in bringing back Charlie, but he emerged from the school fountain as a creepy monster that Quentin had to lock into a magical box to keep him from doing any harm.

It was refreshing to see this type of show on TV, and it was exciting never to know what was coming next. When the Beast got into the heads of the travelers and some of them committed suicide, rather than risk being controlled by him, and when Penny (the amazing Arjun Gupta) almost died of a drug overdose, trying to silence the Beast’s voice, that was terrifying, thrilling TV.

Throughout the season, the writers never spared us the blood and gore, but it never felt gratuitous. This is a fully-realized world, filled with monsters and demons, and with inexperienced, poorly prepared young people trying to combat these murderous creatures at a huge disadvantage. As I watched, I agonized for these kids as they inadvertently leaped from one fiasco to another.

The Magicians is really interesting. Various characters are confused, depressed, alcoholic, socially awkward, bitterly angry, terrible snobs, and vindictive game-players. Bad things happen to almost every single person in the show, and yet they all keep moving forward, trying to beat back the evil in their midst.

And just when you thought you had it all figured out, the Beast turns out to be none other than poor Martin Chatwin, the once-traumatized little boy who then grows up to be infinitely more horrific than his abuser and ends up brutally murdering his sister Jane (Rose Liston) toward the end of the first season.

If season two is anywhere near as good as season one, this show is going to be an enormous hit. It’s unpredictable and always keeps us guessing. The final scene hints at an intriguing twist. Will Julia go to the dark side herself? I guess we’ll all have to wait until next year to find out. I’m holding my breath.