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drwexThe Magicians is a five-full-season series that originated on SyFy and is now available on Netflix. Nominally it's based on Lev Grossman's books of the same name - novel-turned trilogy - and reportedly Grossman was involved with scriptwriting throughout. With an obvious nod to predecessor series such as Narnia and Harry Potter, The Magicians takes the idea "what if that magic and magical places you read about and loved as a kid was real" and twists it.
Please read the content note below before going into the spoilers section.
The Magicians asks: what if magic wasn't born out of fairies and rainbow-sprinkle unicorns, but rather it came from pain and suffering? What if fairies were vindictive homicidal creatures? What if you had a school for magic but it was run by a burnt-out drunkard and kept most of the people who could be magicians outside its gates? What if gods were real, but seriously messed up, and monsters were real and could kill you with a flick of their wrist, and thought it was funny to do so?
As imagined by this series, The Magicians is something of a soap opera - or more properly a telenovela. It has more twists and turns than you can imagine. So many that at several points its characters remark "could we just have one world-ending crisis at a time please?" and that's not breaking any fourth walls. First out of necessity, then out of desire, the main cast become world-saving... people. Not heroes - not even a little. Just people, with abilities and flaws and stories. Oh, so many stories. did I mention this was a soap opera?
Content notes for the rest of this review - discussion of abuse of children, rape, trauma, misogyny, and mutilation/self-harm.
I almost stopped watching at several points, notably early on when one of the characters is raped by a non-human attacker who has already horribly mutilated several other people. And he gets away with it.
At first I thought this was going to be a particularly nasty incarnation of the using-rape-as-a-motivation misogyny trope. They avoid that, in substantial part by letting the target of the rape be a focus. We see her struggle to regain agency, her trauma and aftermath. We see her and some of the crew plan to kill this being, not because he did this one heinous act but because he is a much bigger threat. The series writing problem isn't that.
The biggest problem is that the writers insist on having multiple threads going on in every episode. Ensemble cast writing is hard and this series makes something of a big deal out of character roulette. Through various contrivances, characters end up shuffling pairings off and on every season. And some of the pairings are funny and played for laughs.
The problem is that the show keeps cutting back and forth between them. We'll have a scene of someone being mutilated, and then a scene of silly people doing funny things. Emotional whiplash doesn't begin to cover it.
I understand that they didn't want to make the show unremittingly dark. It deals well with some pretty horrible events. Early on the characters discover that the author of their favorite children's books, from which they all got to love magic, was a pedophile. This man repeatedly raped a young boy, who grows up to be a powerful monster in his own right, committing ever-greater atrocities.
But there's a long way between omg dark and slapstick. I found it disconcerting that the writers don't seem to want to let the audience absorb what just happened.
In the vein of writing problems, the writers also have the luxury of making the rules be whatever they want at any moment - it's all magic, right? Stuff that wasn't mentioned for the last three seasons suddenly becomes a convenient way to deal with this plot point right now. They do OK with remembering rules once set - lots of things seen in early seasons repeatedly appear later on - but it does feel a bit like those Star Trek episodes where they'd suddenly introduce a new capability or technology because it fit that moment.
Finally, the writers have a bad habit of just dropping stuff, leaving you to say "Wait, what about... ?" One of the big moments comes when Quentin - the central character for the first four seasons - reveals magic to his father, who is dying of cancer. And then Dad just disappears and is unremarked-on for a long time. Like, how did he take it? What about... ? Nope, sorry, didn't interest the writers or something - move along!
With all that, why keep watching? Partly it's that the series hooks into several good tropes. It is substantially about the main characters' arcs. Growth, backsliding, development, death, and more for each of the seven main character, and several important supporting characters. That's no mean feat.
There are no throwaway characters, no one who doesn't have a story of some level of depth. The writers continually play with your expectations, like when the hot chick pairs up with the nerdy guy... and through that relationship learns to come to terms with a big chunk of herself she's been avoiding for years. She's not his trophy; he's not just another notch on her bedpost. It's written well and they sell it superbly. And that brings me to point 2.
The cast are very good-to-excellent. Most of them are not big names, though they've done theater pieces and other (mostly TV) work before. The scripts call for them to express all of these changes and emotions, and also to play multiple selves. Through story mechanisms of time travel, bodily possession, parallel universes and more magic, each of the main characters becomes something other than their main persona and has to be that other being, convincing people in the world and sitting staring at the screen.
They sell you on this misfit band of not-heroes and get you invested in their stories. They're all good-looking but with the exception of Jade Taylor/Kady none of them actually trades on their looks. Kady, particularly early on, has a backstory and she's using what another character aptly calls "beautiful but damaged" to cover it.
Hale Appleman (Eliot) is also easy on the eyes and probably the most actor's-actor of the lot. Eliot is also queer and his queerness is an important point throughout the seasons. He meets and relates to other queer people throughout and he serves as an important foil to show modern acceptance of homosexuality contrasted with past mistreatment of it. One of the most poignant episodes involves Eliot, Quentin, and a woman living through a decades long alternate reality in which they love, marry, have kids, and grow old together.
Quentin (Jason Ralph) is good at being the still-nerdy young adult, struggling with his own mental health as his reality is torn down and rebuilt and torn down again around him. The character's ending arc is also amazingly satisfying in a way that very little else in the show is. Watch it and tell me if you don't agree.
There are other bits worth mentioning - I loved that they got Marlee Matlin to play a Deaf character who communicates in Sign and F those that don't understand it. I like how it centers characters who have sex, but the sex isn't centered except where it really matters. I like how the two main characters are conventionally attractive heterosexual young man/young woman and they never stray into sexual territory. I kept thinking they were going to go there but the show allowed them to love each other emotionally and not physically.
Bottom line - I think The Magicians is worth your time if you don't mind (or like) having conventional fantasy tropes subverted and contorted. And if you're OK with getting hit with the hard things and the emotional whiplash.
Please read the content note below before going into the spoilers section.
The Magicians asks: what if magic wasn't born out of fairies and rainbow-sprinkle unicorns, but rather it came from pain and suffering? What if fairies were vindictive homicidal creatures? What if you had a school for magic but it was run by a burnt-out drunkard and kept most of the people who could be magicians outside its gates? What if gods were real, but seriously messed up, and monsters were real and could kill you with a flick of their wrist, and thought it was funny to do so?
As imagined by this series, The Magicians is something of a soap opera - or more properly a telenovela. It has more twists and turns than you can imagine. So many that at several points its characters remark "could we just have one world-ending crisis at a time please?" and that's not breaking any fourth walls. First out of necessity, then out of desire, the main cast become world-saving... people. Not heroes - not even a little. Just people, with abilities and flaws and stories. Oh, so many stories. did I mention this was a soap opera?
Content notes for the rest of this review - discussion of abuse of children, rape, trauma, misogyny, and mutilation/self-harm.
I almost stopped watching at several points, notably early on when one of the characters is raped by a non-human attacker who has already horribly mutilated several other people. And he gets away with it.
At first I thought this was going to be a particularly nasty incarnation of the using-rape-as-a-motivation misogyny trope. They avoid that, in substantial part by letting the target of the rape be a focus. We see her struggle to regain agency, her trauma and aftermath. We see her and some of the crew plan to kill this being, not because he did this one heinous act but because he is a much bigger threat. The series writing problem isn't that.
The biggest problem is that the writers insist on having multiple threads going on in every episode. Ensemble cast writing is hard and this series makes something of a big deal out of character roulette. Through various contrivances, characters end up shuffling pairings off and on every season. And some of the pairings are funny and played for laughs.
The problem is that the show keeps cutting back and forth between them. We'll have a scene of someone being mutilated, and then a scene of silly people doing funny things. Emotional whiplash doesn't begin to cover it.
I understand that they didn't want to make the show unremittingly dark. It deals well with some pretty horrible events. Early on the characters discover that the author of their favorite children's books, from which they all got to love magic, was a pedophile. This man repeatedly raped a young boy, who grows up to be a powerful monster in his own right, committing ever-greater atrocities.
But there's a long way between omg dark and slapstick. I found it disconcerting that the writers don't seem to want to let the audience absorb what just happened.
In the vein of writing problems, the writers also have the luxury of making the rules be whatever they want at any moment - it's all magic, right? Stuff that wasn't mentioned for the last three seasons suddenly becomes a convenient way to deal with this plot point right now. They do OK with remembering rules once set - lots of things seen in early seasons repeatedly appear later on - but it does feel a bit like those Star Trek episodes where they'd suddenly introduce a new capability or technology because it fit that moment.
Finally, the writers have a bad habit of just dropping stuff, leaving you to say "Wait, what about... ?" One of the big moments comes when Quentin - the central character for the first four seasons - reveals magic to his father, who is dying of cancer. And then Dad just disappears and is unremarked-on for a long time. Like, how did he take it? What about... ? Nope, sorry, didn't interest the writers or something - move along!
With all that, why keep watching? Partly it's that the series hooks into several good tropes. It is substantially about the main characters' arcs. Growth, backsliding, development, death, and more for each of the seven main character, and several important supporting characters. That's no mean feat.
There are no throwaway characters, no one who doesn't have a story of some level of depth. The writers continually play with your expectations, like when the hot chick pairs up with the nerdy guy... and through that relationship learns to come to terms with a big chunk of herself she's been avoiding for years. She's not his trophy; he's not just another notch on her bedpost. It's written well and they sell it superbly. And that brings me to point 2.
The cast are very good-to-excellent. Most of them are not big names, though they've done theater pieces and other (mostly TV) work before. The scripts call for them to express all of these changes and emotions, and also to play multiple selves. Through story mechanisms of time travel, bodily possession, parallel universes and more magic, each of the main characters becomes something other than their main persona and has to be that other being, convincing people in the world and sitting staring at the screen.
They sell you on this misfit band of not-heroes and get you invested in their stories. They're all good-looking but with the exception of Jade Taylor/Kady none of them actually trades on their looks. Kady, particularly early on, has a backstory and she's using what another character aptly calls "beautiful but damaged" to cover it.
Hale Appleman (Eliot) is also easy on the eyes and probably the most actor's-actor of the lot. Eliot is also queer and his queerness is an important point throughout the seasons. He meets and relates to other queer people throughout and he serves as an important foil to show modern acceptance of homosexuality contrasted with past mistreatment of it. One of the most poignant episodes involves Eliot, Quentin, and a woman living through a decades long alternate reality in which they love, marry, have kids, and grow old together.
Quentin (Jason Ralph) is good at being the still-nerdy young adult, struggling with his own mental health as his reality is torn down and rebuilt and torn down again around him. The character's ending arc is also amazingly satisfying in a way that very little else in the show is. Watch it and tell me if you don't agree.
There are other bits worth mentioning - I loved that they got Marlee Matlin to play a Deaf character who communicates in Sign and F those that don't understand it. I like how it centers characters who have sex, but the sex isn't centered except where it really matters. I like how the two main characters are conventionally attractive heterosexual young man/young woman and they never stray into sexual territory. I kept thinking they were going to go there but the show allowed them to love each other emotionally and not physically.
Bottom line - I think The Magicians is worth your time if you don't mind (or like) having conventional fantasy tropes subverted and contorted. And if you're OK with getting hit with the hard things and the emotional whiplash.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-05 03:56 pm (UTC)