[Review] The Magicians : The Series

SPOILER ALERT : This article contains major spoilers for the entire Magicians series of books, the first episode of the series, and possibly the show as a whole

The Magicians is really important to me. When I first read it, I was at the lowest point in my life. I was suffering from crippling depression and anxiety, I had been kicked out of grad school, and I was basically a complete wreck. The Magicians spoke to me in a way that nothing else had. I can’t say that it fixed me, or even that I am fixed, but it definitely helped me gain a certain amount of insight. What’s more, it was a brilliant work of art on so many different levels : as both homage to and deconstruction of the Narnia series, a wonderful example of the Tom Brown’s School Days/Harry Potter boarding school genre, a story about the act of reading fiction in general, an examination of depression, happiness, and sense of self, and a damned good adventure story set in a compelling world.

I was naturally thrilled when I learned that The Magicians was going to be turned into a TV show. To be honest, I’m rarely as skeptical as I should be when the books I enjoy get put on the screen. I get swept up in the excitement, and then often get let down when the reality doesn’t live up to my expectations. With that in mind, how did the sneak peek of the first episode go?

Age Before Beauty

In the books, Brakebills is presented as a magical college - students attend it right after high school (with one or two exceptions). In the show, Brakebills is a graduate school - students attend after successful completion of an undergrad degree. Does that really matter? I’m leaning towards “Yeah, but not a whole lot”.

It’s made very clear in the books that in order to become a proper magician, one of the many traits you need is a certain unhappiness with the world. You have to be so out of tune with the status quo that magic is the only answer. Of the many magicians we meet, almost all are at least a little eccentric, and not in a good way. Many of them are seriously unstable or dysfunctional.

This extends to the main characters in the series, pretty much all of whom are deeply fucked up. It’s understandable that high school graduates, even very smart ones, would have all sorts of problems, but it seems less plausible that someone with that many issues could both successfully complete a four year degree, and not mature at all during the process. Can it happen? Absolutely. Hell, it happened to me. I just think it’s a lot more believable when the characters are younger.

So why did SyFy make this change? Maybe they were uncomfortable with the large amounts of underage sex, drinking, and drug use. But hell, The Vampire Diaries has got away with a lot worse, with younger characters. Will this make a big difference? Probably not, but I’d be happier if they stuck more closely to the book.

Extreme Home Makeover : Brakebills Edition

The impression I got of Brakebills from the books never seemed large enough. It was described, unless I’m very much mistaken, as a single building that was large enough to house a hundred students, assorted faculty, classrooms, offices, study areas, a library, and even a dining hall. I had a very hard time visualizing one building which could hold all that. Maybe that’s just my issue, though.

At any rate, the Brakebills depicted in the show doesn’t have that problem - I can easily believe that it could hold all those rooms. I just can’t believe that it’s Brakebills. In the book, Brakebills is an ancient building straight out of Tom Brown’s School Days - it was built and furnished as an conscious imitation of British schools from the 18th or 19th century, but it’s old enough to be considered a genuine heritage building, and hasn’t been touched since.

The show gets some of this right - the classrooms are done well. The library, on the other hand, is kind of awful. It’s a nice library, but it’s what you’d expect from a community library built in the early 2000s. The dorm rooms aren’t very good either. Not only are they relatively modern looking and generic, they’re double rooms - students have to share. It’s a departure from the book, and I have a very hard time picturing any grad student, or any other 22 year old, being willing to put up with that, even it was the only way to study magic. To be honest, it seems like a cheap way to introduce drama and conflict into the story.

The housing issue actually crops up again, which is kind of a bad sign. In the books, most (but not all) groups of students have their own clubhouses, which are used for studying, parties, and seminars. Towards the end of their time at Brakebills, Quentin and Alice informally move into a spare bedroom in their clubhouse. In the show, every group has a clubhouse, and every second year student moves into it. I’m not going to say that the show is dumbing it down, but this definitely seems like unnecessary streamlining.

You’re A Wizard, Harry

One of the things that everyone seems to love about these books is that it presents magic as being really hard. Only a few hundred students every year even get the opportunity to take the Brakebills entrance exam, and only the top 20 are accepted. These are probably the 20 smartest people on the continent, at least in that age group, and yet even they have an incredibly hard time learning to do magic. This stands in stark contrast to Harry Potter, where magic is so easy that even Hagrid can do it.

I understand that the show can’t give us hours upon hours of classroom scenes, and no one wants to spend an entire episode watching Quentin practice moving his fingers, but so far The Magicians seems to be going too far in the other direction. In the first episode we get :

1. A character who can just naturally read minds
2. First year students who just sort of unintentionally float in the air while having sex
3. A bunch of first year students more-or-less successfully carrying out a very advanced, very dangerous ritual without any guidance from faculty.

“If You Want To Take Over The World, We Don’t Teach That, But Give It A Go”

I had to quote that line in its entirety because I have a huge problem with it. I grant that it doesn’t technically contradict the letter of the books, but it definitely contradicts their spirit.

On the face of it, Brakebills in the books teaches you how to do magic, and that’s it. There are no magical ethics classes (although there really should be), and the staff doesn’t make any effort to stop students from doing magic when they visit home.

However, and that’s a pretty big “however”, just because Brakebills doesn’t care if you try to take over the world, that doesn’t mean no one cares. While details about the rest of the mainstream magical world are pretty thin on the ground, a few things are made clear : there’s an entity called the Magicians’ Court which regulates magic very tightly, there are magicians who go around making sure that no regular people find out that magic exists, and a lot of magicians end up in covert public service projects that are predicated on protecting the world as it is, or gently nudging it into a better form.

Technically, the Dean’s statement is accurate while being incredibly deceptive. If he wanted to be honest, he’d have to say “If you want to take over the world, we don’t teach that, but give it a go. 90% of magical society will turn against you and immediately shut you down, and you’ll probably get killed, but it’s not actually against any school rules”. Either that or the writers just threw out a significant part of the world for the sake of a funny line.

“You Haven’t Been Depressed […] Everyone Medicates Out There…Here, We Hope You Won’t Need To”

You remember how I had a huge problem with that “taking over the world” line? I’m actually totally cool with it now, because it’s nowhere near as bad as this one. Mental health is in an absolute crisis throughout the first world - services are underfunded, victims are stigmatized, and people are often reluctant to take medication that they desperately need. Sending the message that a person who has been diagnosed with depression isn’t really depressed, and doesn’t need to take their meds, is a big fuckin’ deal.

Artistically, of course, there’s nothing wrong with what The Magicians has done here. It’s perfectly legitimate to show a character who has wrongfully been diagnosed with depression. Quentin’s case is actually even “better” than that - he really does have some emotional or personality problems, at least if he’s anything like the Quentin from the books, and the Dean’s speech sets up an unrealistic expectation that Brakebills will fix everything that’s wrong with him. Art, however, has to be careful to consider real world consequences, and the message sent by this episode is downright reckless.

I’d like to delve a bit deeper into this, because I think it touches on a theme that will definitely crop up later on. Brakebills certainly claims to be purely about teaching magic, but it also seems to serve a very important social role. Students are very thoroughly indoctrinated in the idea that magic is just a tool. You can use it to do some pretty wonderful things, but you shouldn’t expect too much from it. Most Brakebills students are at least a little fucked up, and they shouldn’t count on magic changing that. When they graduate, they either take up pointless hobbies full time, continue their studies, or work on very modest projects that don’t really tinker with the fabric of existence.

The same idea actually show up in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. There, Unseen University fulfills a similar purpose. Wizards who are left to their own devices almost always end up at full scale magical war with each other, threatening their entire world. Wizards at Unseen University end up arguing in committee meetings, or (at worst) poisoning each other.

The parallels to Discworld show up even more clearly in The Magician Kings. A group of hedge magicians, who weren’t educated at Brakebills, are all deeply dissatisfied with magic, because they thought it would make them happy — something that a Brakebills magician wouldn’t expect. They decide to look for a deeper, more fundamental form of magic, because they think it will finally help them find happiness, and get themselves killed in the process, while triggering an apocalyptic event.

Her Hair Of Floating Sky Is Shimmering, Glimmering In The Sun

In the books, Julia goes through years of soul-crushing depression, with her life spiraling ever-downwards, before she discovers hedge magic, which she sort of lucks into because she’s incredibly smart and obsessive, and notices an odd pattern in the world around her. All of that happened because she noticed a slight inconsistency in the memories given to her to cover up her failed entrance exam at Brakebills.

In the show, Julia is somewhat depressed for a few months before a hedge magician tracks her down and stages a fake rape attempt, in order to bring out her latent magical potential. All of this happened because…she made a cut on her arm right before they wiped her memory, which made the memory spell not work, somehow.

I get that a certain degree of streamlining is necessary, but this change take Julia’s intelligence and agency largely out of the equation. It also introduces a fun new element of mock sexual violence, which is exactly what we need more of for our female characters.

The Boy Who Lived

Quentin Coldwater is kind of the Chosen One, or one of the Chosen Few, in the books. One of the most important plot threads in The Magicians is the secret war between Jane and the Beast. Jane is a hedge witch who can rewind time, a la The Edge of Tomorrow, or Groundhog Day, while the Beast is a powerful, cunning monster. Instead of confronting him directly, Jane subtly pushes a group of people together, sends them to Fillory, and lets them fight the Beast. If they fail, she turns back the clock so it’s as though nothing ever happened, and tries again with a different group, or even with the same group under slightly different conditions.

Jane has made hundreds, or even thousands of attempts to kill the Beast, until she finally succeeds with Quentin’s group. In the sense that they were the only ones who were able to get the job done, that does sort of make them the Chosen Few, but there’s nothing particularly special about them. As Diane Duane described a similar situation in her classic High Wizardry, they were just the right raw material for the job. Quentin’s only real contribution to the effort is repeatedly fucking up and making really spectacularly bad decisions, which somehow turn out all right in the end.

More importantly, we only learn at the very end of the book that they were even Chosen at all. They are never presented as anything other than normal students. Right from the very start, though, the show seems determined to depict Quentin as some kind of special snowflake with a destiny, the kind that comes in ALL CAPS.

Time Is On My Side

I have no idea how they’re going to handle the pacing on this show, and that worries me. I understand that the first season will be 12 episodes long, and that within the context of the show, the Brakebills curriculum has been cut from 5 years to 3.

In the very first episode, they seem to have raced through half of Quentin’s first year at Brakebills, and that doesn’t bode well. I know they have to front-load the exciting stuff in order to build an audience, and I really hope that’s the only reason they’re moving so fast.

The best case scenario would be having each season of the show cover a year at Brakebills, with the fourth season covering Fillory. That seems unlikely, though, since they’ve already introduced the Beast. Will audiences be willing to watch 3 seasons of Brakebills in order to get some payoff on the Beast plot line at the end of the fourth season? Will The Magicians even get a second season, much less a fourth?

On The Whole

I’m cautiously optimistic. There are only a few issues here that are genuinely bad, as opposed to possibly being bad signs of things to come, and they may well be limited to the pilot. Hell, some wonderful shows have had awful pilots. I’ll certainly keep watching, but my guess is that The Magicians will be better than Supergirl, but not as good as any of the other genre shows that I follow, and not nearly as good as Jessica Jones or Daredevil.

Part 2 of this review can be found here. Part 3 is here.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in my guide to purchasing knives, my article about ethical clothing, my reviews of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Supergirl, and Star Wars : The Force Awakens, my apologia for Harry Potter, my essay about Star Trek, my thoughts after reading every Discworld book, some general advice about life, my thoughts on the White Poppy Campaign, a quick biographical sketch of a Canadian hero, my opinion about New Year’s Resolutions, or The Sad, Strange Story of the Taliban’s Canadian Hostage.