The Magicians

To start off, I have not read the books, no did I know anything about the story before going into this. That said, let’s look at The Magicians.

The story is simple, magic exists and the gifted are herded into specialized schools to help them develop their gifts. Along with the protagonists, we are thrown into a new ‘magical’ world, ripe with shocking acts and visuals, sex and gore, drinking and drugs, insanity and addictions, and all of the most deranged things the dark side of magic exploration has to offer.

Visually, it’s okay, Narratively, it has a few hiccups when it comes to world building and plot establishment. The series tries really hard to be clever, though it comes across more as hipster.

Verdict? Undefined. Personally not my cup of tea, but it’s definitely different. So check it out if you like stories that take a slightly different perspective on magic schools.

    And now let’s turn to episode one and see what this new world has to offer.

The episode starts with the usual moping about, introducing the characters, their lives, their damage. We meet Julia, played by Stella Maeve, who is an ambitious young woman with a list of prestigious universities that she will most likely be accepted to. And Quentin, played by Jason Ralph, who is the outcast, the person with no aim or goal, possibly due to his obsession with children’s fairy tales about Fillary, which is ‘definitely not Narnia’.  He too, has plans about his future, but the interviewer for the school he wants to apply to turns up dead. To make things worse, he has a fight with his best friend Julia, who promptly tells him to grow up and leave the fairy tales alone.

Not a very exciting beginning, even as it attempts to show the horrors of growing up and moving away from the fantasies of childhood. Could have been done shorter and more subtle with more focus on the things happening in the world around the characters. Also, I took an instant dislike to Quentin and that didn’t change as the series progressed. ‘He’s meant to be disliked’, comments on the show and books say, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable. My problem with him was his utter lack of agency. He’s not an active character by any means. He hardly reacts to the events around him and whenever something does happen, needs to be done, or a decision made, he is quick to let someone else handle it. Which, I suppose, was the point to him. A passive, unexceptional protagonist trying to earn his place as a hero and ultimately failing. Only, that makes the long stretches of time we follow him ever more grating.

In comparison, Julia’s part is endlessly more interesting, but we hardly spend any time on her ‘adventures’.

So 13 minutes into the first episode things pick up as our protagonists are transported to the magic school. Or, should I say, univeristy. The theme certainly fits the ‘Harry Potter’ demographics as they move from high school to university.

At the school, with little to no explanation, the two are urged into an exam and baffled by everything happening, they just go with it. Still, I expected a little more freaking out and a little less dull surprise.

This brings me to the second problem. The world. It just isn’t well fleshed out. We do see more of it as the episodes go on, but overall, the focus is too much on the characters and the wacky, scandalous things they do, than on the story and the world. Which, again, is fine, but I expect a little more world building out of my fantasy series.

Regrettably, Julia fails the exam, and Quentin succeeds. And then things start getting a little bit hectic as her memory is erased and she’s thrown back into her daily life, while Quentin is rushed into a multitude of new experienced and acquaintances at the magic school. We also meet the rest of the cast but they are too insignificant at this point for us to care. In short, we have the bad boy, the troubled girl, the perfect student and the glamorous campus duo.

Julia, however, remembers what happened despite the memory wipe. On her own, she reads up and practices really hard until she finds out how to conjure sparkles. She calls Quentin, showing him her signs of magic and begging him to talk to the school.

He declines.

For some reason, her best friend won’t support her. In fact, he discourages her, telling her to forget about magic. Later on, as we learn more about their relationship, we understand it. He’s jealous. She always gets everything, he never does. But at this point in the story, it just isn’t established and he comes off as a complete asshole. The scene of their confrontation makes me want to join Julia on the dark side and murder him and his new friends. And, spoilers, if that didn’t become obvious when a shifty member of a secret coven approaches her, it does happen.

Which brings us back to Julia. The series go through her struggles at being shown a whole new world and then rejected and left to simmer in the knowledge that there’s so much more and she can’t participate. Being the active part of the duo, she tries anyway, seeking out knowledge and spells and other practitioners, and ultimately getting herself in the worst kind of trouble.

But all that comes later. In this episode, we focus on Quentin’s gang as they perform a ritual meant to contact the spirits of the dead. Instead, they summon a baddie from another world. The episode ends as the man, with moths for a head, gauges a few eyeballs out. As terrifying as he is, his presence hardly registers through the series. He shows on and off to scatter a few moths and rush our characters toward the climax, but nothing else.

On the other hand, Julia gets in some real trouble with a more tangible antagonist, the leader of a coven of rogue witches. Their main goal is to steal from the vast knowledge held at the school which brings them at odds with the students. But that’s a story of another episode.

   

The idea behind the series aren’t bad, the execution, however, is twitchy at best. Sometimes we are showered in establishment and spelled out exposition, while other times given nothing at all. Time passes for the characters, weeks, maybe months, but we don’t see it, we don’t get a feel of it. Episodes drift in and out and the eventual reveal raises more question than it answers. Supposedly, there will be a second season, but so far the first only managed to show us the characters and hint at the greater world without going in any depths.

Is The Magicians any good? Well, it’s not terrible, and it does try, but there’s just something ajar about it.