Should I Watch the Magicians or Read the Book
The Magicians Is Your Side by side Cracking Escape
If you're looking for something to binge-watch, you won't regret diving into Syfy'southward darkly subversive fantasy series.
This story contains mild spoilers for Syfy's The Magicians.
When the get-go novel in Lev Grossman's popular Magicians trilogy was published in 2009, it introduced Quentin Coldwater, a white, whiny, Ivy League–bound Brooklynite. His trajectory as a protagonist sounded familiar: Quentin, who'd always felt similar a misfit, found out that he was really a wizard and wound up at Brakebills University, a training basis for posh mages. It was Hogwarts, U.S.A; he was Harry Potter with a sex life. Together with his school friends, Quentin later discovered that Fillory, a Narnia-esque globe he loved from babyhood books, was existent.
When the trilogy was adapted for Syfy, the bear witness could've doubled downwards on treating Quentin like an archetypal hero in the vein of Luke Skywalker or Male monarch Arthur. Instead, The Magicians fabricated Quentin a mere entry point into a series of ensemble-driven battles to save the magic of Globe and Fillory. The show became about a group of people honing their commonage and individual power. In fusing the nostalgia of fantasy stories and adult themes with cocky-awareness and whimsy, The Magicians speedily earned praise equally one of the all-time shows on Boob tube you aren't watching.
With so many people currently seeking out escapism in all its forms, Syfy'south The Magicians is a fantastic binge watch, an all-consuming feel with just plenty light to distract from the global pandemic. The series only wrapped its 5th and final season, and the outset iv seasons are available on Netflix. Fifty-fifty if you can't leave your house, you can retreat to realms populated past fairies, wannabe-overlord librarians, and a few dragons, via a show that relishes in juvenile sexual activity jokes, musical-theater interludes, and goofy geek-civilisation references. (For instance, when characters world-jump through a British phone box, they draw it, in a nod to Doctor Who, as a "vaguely TARDIS-looking portal.")
The Magicians is crass and corny; sometimes, it'due south horrific. Hands become sliced off. In cutaway glimpses, the show depicts its fictional multiverse equally Froot Loop–shaped worlds existence devoured by a black hole. Still, it successfully balances the silliness with these mortal stakes considering it's filled with characters complex enough to keep viewers invested in the whole, quirky matter. At a time when many of u.s.a. are feeling isolated and scared, information technology's a gift to sentry a grouping of friends fight to salve something as frivolous as magic and as vital as 1 another.
Quentin isn't the show'southward only protagonist, but the story crucially starts with him. As played past Jason Ralph, he is soulful and earnest. Quentin's childish wonder makes him an like shooting fish in a barrel target for ridicule but, as his classmate Margo (Summer Bishil) tells him, "that'due south because you lot're honest almost what you dearest." Despite a proclivity for existence an irritating twerp, Quentin'south the sort of character yous root for because his affection for magic and his friends becomes infectious. The airplane pilot forges the viewer'southward connection to Quentin and his classmates through tragedy: They accidentally open a door that unleashes The Brute, a storybook monster with a swarm of moths for a face up who crumples learned magicians like newspaper dolls. The students are unprepared to face such peachy evil, but their deportment set off a harrowing chain of events that continues for the residual of the series.
The prove takes time to flesh out the ensemble and their corresponding wounds in ways that allow for powerful emotional payoffs. Quentin is dogged by ennui, past the urge to notice secret doors and run away from his life. He recognizes, "I'grand in this amazing place. I take literal magic in my life, and I'yard still running. I'm still this person that I fucking hate." But the series as well digs into the ghosts that haunt his Brakebills friends. Penny (played by Arjun Gupta), a hothead who barely appears in the books, becomes a earth-leaping traveler with a knack for cocky-sacrifice who surfaces in multiple timelines. In the novels, a gay character named Eliot is rendered every bit shallow, sad, and one-dimensional, but in the show (as played by Hale Appleman), he becomes a scene-stealer who battles substance abuse and self-loathing. He demonstrates through his brief romantic threads that even magic can be meaningless without the courage to surrender oneself to beloved.
The women drive the show with their motivations and distinct talents. Alice (Olivia Dudley) twitches with ability and is warped by it. Kady (Jade Tailor), a scrappy wizard character created for the bear witness, becomes the defender of apprentice hedge witches and evolves, through grief, to a mature stoicism. Margo starts out as a snobby party girl on the periphery in Flavor ane but evolves as a true leader; with Bishil's fire, she becomes so much more than than the icy manipulator she's based on in the novels. (She's also apt to interject expletives similar "Voldemont's clit!" and "Jesus-Helena-Bonham-Christ!" dressing upwards the show's prolific profanity.)
Though gear up in a fantastical world, the series navigates these characters' lasting traumas with deftness and realism. 1 course of hurting it explores is sexual assault: The series' approach to the subject, through a story line involving Quentin'southward childhood friend Julia (Stella Maeve), is abrupt and cruel. The show has been rightly critiqued for portraying how Julia's violation at the hands of a god imbues her with power—an antiquated and alarming trope lifted from Grossman'southward books. Only The Magicians worked to rectify those missteps past spending more a single flavour on the fallout. It goes on to show how Julia is fundamentally affected by the assail without letting it become the only matter that defines her.
Elsewhere, minor characters flow beyond the sidelines. In one cocky-aware scene in a pivotal episode, Penny asserts: "When you file people away as sidekicks, you lot don't realize their importance to the story, and this story belongs to a lot more than people than you lot think." The Magicians insists that even minor-seeming characters can become heroes or villains; nothing is static. Watching these friends come together then carve up into their dissever quests over and once more feels especially resonant right at present, when the most any of united states tin can do is isolate ourselves to protect our neighbors and communities. Our value for the collective has ready united states of america on some lonely paths, just like the magicians, we're in this together.
Quentin, called Q past his friends, embodies this interplay between retreating inwards and looking outward. Unlike well-nigh of his classmates, Quentin is such an unremarkable sorcerer that his specialty goes undetermined for years. His almost notable gift may be his fan-male child obsessiveness for the details of the Fillory books and his amore for the deadly reality of the world as it actually exists. ("The air there," Quentin notes, "is 0.02 percent opium, which is a pretty unfair trick to get you to honey a place.") His constant reference to kid-book minutiae makes him something of an immature dork, but it also helps him and his friends as they endeavor to survive in Fillory's strange kingdom. Q doesn't grow in power, just he develops a knack for agreement the relationship between characters in the Fillory stories and the real-life journeys that he and the other magicians are on.
Q'due south passion for those quests is eventually redirected toward his friends. In many ways, Quentin's great escape is from himself. Syfy's The Magicians is a love story of a young human learning to look beyond his own darkness and fantasies to devote himself to his friends—who are merely as worthy, and some, more worthy adventurers than he is. Sadly, this impulse to evenly rest the show on the shoulders of its deep cast contributed to issues that made the last flavour frustrating for some of the series' fans. (News of The Magicians' cancellation striking in early March.) The death of a major character skewed the show'southward balance. With a new gap in this advisedly knitted crew, much of the final season oscillated between mourning and apocalypse-hopping, with plot issues threatening to nip at the fabric between The Magicians' many worlds. But at its close, the series once again offered the promise that fifty-fifty subsequently smashing loss, a bit of magic can exist saved. The globe itself may be contradistinct forever, only those who are left volition offset anew.
It's a story made more powerful at present, given current circumstances. At a fourth dimension when many of the states are experiencing our ain moments of sadness and anxiety, The Magicians series can be the escape the Fillory books were for Quentin. If both the books and show teach that in some ways, magic consists of the doors we allow ourselves to walk through—whether to Fillory or other worlds—the series created fifty-fifty more doors. By concocting a fantasy realm sweet enough to save and friends dear enough to die for, the bear witness deepened the stories The Magicians could tell near who nosotros get thanks to the journey. Thanks to each other.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/the-magicians-syfy-binge-watch/609664/
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