The Magicians season 5 will have “’80s cocaine-level magic”

Yep, you read that title correctly: When The Magicians returns for its fifth season on SyFy, the Earth will have been flooded with magic. How much magic is that? Well, according to co-showrunner John McNamara, “there’s more magic on Earth than there was cocaine on Wall Street in the ‘80s.”

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, McNamara explained why and how magic will flood Earth in season 5. If you watched the season 4 finale, then you know Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) sacrificed himself to stop the leader of the Librarian Order, Everett, from becoming a god. Everett had drained and ingested an entire reservoir of magic called the Secret Sea.

When Quentin stopped Everett by shattering the mirror world they were in, Everett — along with poor Quentin — disintegrated, and all that magical energy had to go somewhere. It flowed through mirrors on Earth. Before the final credits rolled, we saw Dean Fogg at Brakebills with his magical globe lit up like a Christmas tree, meaning magic was going bonkers. “That starts to cause problems as there are some infusions of essentially too much magic, and that needs to be contended with,” said co-showrunner Sera Gamble. “Too much of a good thing is also a problem. “We joke that if we’re on the air long enough, we may eventually do a season where there’s just exactly the right amount of music.”

In previous seasons, Magicians and Hedge Witches have had to tap into different sources to use magic, but it sounds like season 5 is basically going to be a free-for-all. Henry Alonso Myers, yet another co-showrunners, explained the team’s strategy for season 5:

"We’re approaching magic in a completely different way from any way that we have approached it on the show prior to this. Every season, magic has shifted in some massive way and our characters have had to struggle in order to deal with those changes and that continues to happen in season 5."

McNamara also talked about where we last saw Eliot and Margo in the season 4 finale: the magical kingdom of Fillory, 300 years in the future, where their friends High King Fen and Fresh Prince Josh have been replaced by a Dark King. “You gotta know that Fillory 300 years in the future is not going to be a fun place,” he said. “It’s incredibly fun to torture the characters who are having to deal with it.”

Season 4 began with the main cast having their memory wiped and magic being controlled by the Library. According to Myers, the writers had no idea how they were going to write the season, which is apparently how they approach every season. “We have a philosophy in the writers’ room, which is that we like to write ourselves into a corner that we do not know how we’re going to get out of. The only way to make sure the audience is surprised is that we’re surprised.”

So how do the writers think they’ll write themselves out of a corner that features a magically flooded Earth, characters dealing with the death of a beloved friend, and a futuristic Fillory? “When we wrote that, we had no idea how we’re going to get out of it. We actually spent this week untangling that web. I can say with a lot of confidence that there is an interesting and difficult way out that I’m excited to get to share with the world.”

Gamble summed things up by describing what the writers and showrunners strive to bring to each episode. “We wanted to make sure that the show, fundamentally every week, was set up to bring you stuff that was deep and emotional, but also not a f—ing bummer.”

"We think you can talk about anything on The Magicians. You can go to a lot of places that are very vulnerable and sensitive inside of the human condition. But we also want sexually transmitted lycanthropy, saucy fairies, and ‘80s cocaine-level magic. We find that if we give ourselves a good dose of crazy magic, then we’ll find ways to talk about the other stuff that feels deep but not so dark that you want to just crawl under your bed and hibernate."

The Magicians season 5 debuts on SyFy sometime in 2020.

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