tragedy isn’t beautiful
content warnings: discussion of suicide, death and mental health issues. this will also include spoilers up to the finale of season four of the Magicians.
I’ve been stewing over Quentin Coldwater, the protagonist (at least for the first three seasons) of the tv show the Magicians, and his death for two days now. After I’d finally seen the episode, I sat in silence for an hour, inarguably triggered by the handling of Quentin’s journey. The finale shocked us all with the reveal that Quentin was the one in the elevator to the underworld, but also managed to sucker-punch us with the irresponsible depiction of his death and what follows.
The Magicians has never got mental health perfect; a narrative work never will. Mental health is more expansive and varied than anything else I know and yet the show often found a way for an audience to latch onto Quentin’s depression, as well as Julia’s trauma and PTSD. Quentin is introduced to us in the pilot as a pensive twentysomething who has admitted himself into hospital during a depressive episode and he exits the show as a suicidal man who has finally succeeded, regardless of the narrative the finale wants to pretend it accomplished.
Throughout season 4, it is inarguable that Quentin has been in the pit of a depressive spiral. His barely-there arc this season hinges on his desire to rescue Eliot from his possession, and we see him sink further and further into unhappiness when the solution drifts further and further away from his fingers. And no-one cares. The glaring issue of this season is that no one notices. No one asks him anything; they let him work himself to the bone and the writing feels ignorant of the fact that Quentin is on his last legs. The writers want Quentin’s sacrifice in the finale to not be a suicide; the entire second half of the episode is dedicated to debunking Quentin’s worry that he might have “finally found a way to kill [him]self”. He sees his loved ones around a campfire, singing in memory, and Penny asks why he would ever want to leave them. But I can’t divorce the finale’s secular narrative from 4x06, where Quentin says “strangle me, break my bones, too tired to care anymore” or when he almost jams his arm into a dangerous machine, barely thinking, because he’s in a rush to try and save Eliot. Or from the fact that there’s a shot in the final moments of his life, where he barely moves to try and escape his fate.
Quentin goes out in a contrived, sacrificial blaze of glory. His actual death scene is technically beautiful. Glowing magic disintegrates him, there’s a complete lack of diegetic sound and it’s all in slow motion. The show clearly wants his death to be beautiful. But it’s not. There’s nothing beautiful about a depressed, bisexual (regardless of what the writers believe) man sacrificing himself before he’s even thirty because the writers didn’t know where to go with his story. I’m a depressed, bisexual twentysomething too, is my story done? Is there nowhere for me to go next? As someone who on multiple levels relates to Quentin and his intersections, his death devastated me, the reasoning Sera Gamble and John McNamara gave afterwards shattered me.
There’s also nothing beautiful about the cold, clinical underworld the show has created. I struggle with the dissonance between Quentin’s “gorgeous” death and the grey silence of what’s next. He walks through nothingness into the afterlife. Quentin goes from an office with hot chocolate, to watching his loved ones sing around a campfire, to a silent, empty room with a sole archway that features nothing more than a void. The choice to display his martyrdom as poetic, his death and his friends’ grief as beautiful regardless of how sad, but the afterlife as quiet and desaturated and cold is contradictory and upsetting. If his death is beautiful, shouldn’t what comes after also be? If what comes after is dark and unknowable, his death should have been just as troubling. I’ve never struggled with existential crises about death and what comes after but having your main character, who has canonically attempted suicide multiple times in the past and has probably spent an exorbitant amount of time thinking about death, walk into the beyond like that left me empty.
There’s nothing beautiful about the finale. As much as the singing around the campfire while Quentin cries is sweet, it grows ugly the more you examine the message it’s really sending. Quentin grows satisfied with his “brave” decision once he sees that his friends love him and will go on without him. But there’s nothing more heartbreaking than the idea that someone’s death is worth it if you could see how well loved you were after the fact. Especially after a season of no-one at that bonfire making sure Quentin was alright. It’s beyond irresponsible to imply that no, Quentin didn’t commit suicide because of how well loved he was, but it’s okay that he’s dead because he’s had such an effect on everyone. Not to mention the ignorance of the fact that Quentin watching his friends mourn him at his memorial is a feature of suicidal ideation. There’s no end to the amount of suicidal people who imagine their funerals. Implying that you can come to terms with your journey ending if you have people who love you is irresponsible. Implying that Quentin had to die to realise how worthwhile his life was is downright unforgivable.
How am I supposed to watch “Do You Like Teeth?” knowing what happens? How can anyone watch Quentin go up against a literal depression monster, watch him yell about how he’s come up against it before and he has a black belt, knowing he eventually loses this fight? The finale sours so much of Quentin’s journey. He breaks out of a mental prison in season one, he grieves and grieves and grieves throughout season two, he has untold amounts of trauma and he has everything on his shoulders in season three. He fights through it all. The first three seasons decently balance his passion and gentleness with this constant want to lie down and die. And season four sets it on fire. It’s bleak. He hardly speaks. Jason Ralph as an actor is vastly underused and we’re forced to watch an entire season of Quentin flinching every time the monster touches him while in Eliot’s body. If the writers planned to have him die, the lack of care for Quentin’s health and mental state in season four is shocking. If he was always going to die, why have him deteriorate this way? He finally gets to yell it all out in the penultimate episode. He yells about how he was supposed to finally mean something in Fillory. And the next episode he only learns that he meant anything to anyone once he’s killed himself.
Season four had Quentin sink into the darkest pit we’ve seen him in and it ends with him killing himself. Regardless of the intent, regardless of what story the writers think they told, they told a story about a man so desperate to save his friend that he dies before he can even see if he succeeded. The writers wanted to write something subversive, to prove that the white male protagonist is no longer safe, but the bravest, most subversive thing they could have done is have Quentin get better.
Quentin, who got to live until he was in his eighties, have a son, a wife, a life-partner in a different timeline, dies at twentysomething in a sacrificial suicide. It wasn’t noble, or heroic, it was tragic. And there’s nothing beautiful about tragedy.
