Review: _The Magicians_

Just finished The Magicians, which was made for SyFy and I've been streaming on Netflix. It is remarkably unclear whether there might be a season 6 -- it was certainly cancelled; I have found an announcement of the season 6 schedule from long after the cancellation; I'm still seeing assertions that it was cancelled. We'll see, but season 5 comes to a decently satisfying conclusion, so let's figure that it's probably done.

I haven't read the original books, just a graphic novel adaptation of part of it. So I'm not going to speak to the books, save to say that the TV show is considerably better than what I've seen of them.

When the show started, it was billed as being the story of Quentin Coldwater, as he receives his invitation to apply to Brakebills University, a college for magicians. The ads mostly centered on Penny and Kady having sex. So it was very clear that this was "Harry Potter for adults", and honestly, it looked pretty cheesy.

It's not a major spoiler, so let's just say it upfront: this mostly isn't a Harry Potter riff. At heart, this far more a Dark Narnia story. You don't have to know the Narnia books in order to appreciate the series, but homages, inversions, and parodies of them can be found throughout the story, right through the finale, and the parallels are often fairly blatant if you know those books. There is a deliberately uneasy mix of childlike innocence and Grimmsian horror throughout, along with constant bits of very modern social commentary.

It's not actually that reductive, though -- as with any good series, this is really about the characters, and quite to my surprise I wound up really loving them. This show has arc out the wazoo, and everybody winds up finding their role and growing into it.

Let me put it this way -- by the end of the story, I would characterize our seven initial protagonists (there are several more added by the end) as:

• The Wizard
• The Heart
• The Monarch
• The Hero
• The Leader
• The Grown-Up
• The Sacrifice

None of those are obvious from the first half-season. A couple of them might be reasonably guessed, but some of them turn out to be far deeper and more interesting than I would have expected from the beginning of the story. (All of those are, obviously, subjective, and you can debate those characterizations, but they work for me. They're all spoilers, so I'll talk about them in the comments.)

The show is good from a diversity POV. The cast is significantly less whitebread than the graphic novel (which I assume fit the original vision of the books); one of the leads is gay, and a bunch of characters are queer in various ways; and the show has no patience whatsoever with simplistic gender stereotypes. (The women do most of the butt-kicking, and Josh turns out to be the group's cook.)

Content warnings for -- well, everything. There is a major pedophilia plotline, a rape (and a rape-revenge plotline that goes on for a fair while), and people doing all sorts of bad things. A number of characters die, including some major ones. (That said, there's not a great deal of graphic violence.) There are all sorts of depression and mental-health issues throughout.

Our heroes are by no stretch of the imagination perfect -- indeed, it is pretty common for them to be spending today dealing with a crisis that is a side-effect of their fix to yesterday's problem. Much of the show is a roller-coaster ride, loop-de-looping from war to potential apocalypse, and along the way they manage to piss off approximately every deity in existence.

That said, I had an uncommon amount of fun with this story, and it has a good heart. It's often dark, occasionally even somewhat bleak, but with a wry sense of humor that is constant by season three, and our lead cast have grown into a fucked-up but real family by the end.

Is it brilliant? No -- one friend described it as "a hot mess", and I can't really argue that point. But I enjoyed it more than I do most stories. If you can deal with its very weird and sometimes very dark ride, it's a hoot.