The Magicians showrunners discuss the end of the show

On April 1, SyFy’s The Magicians will sign off forever, as the current fifth season is the show’s last. If you’re unfamiliar, the show is about a group of adult magicians who attend a magical school called Brakebills University. Yes, it’s a little like Harry Potter, but with far more sex, cursing and violence.

As a fan of the show, I felt it took a pretty big hit after last season’s divisive finale, which saw the death of the very-much-alive-in-the-books Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), a fan favorite. Might we see him again before the series finale?

“We will not see Jason Ralph again,” co-showrunner/executive producer Henry Alonso Myers told Entertainment Weekly, wasting no time in crushing my dreams. “We love Jason Ralph, but we’re not going to see him again this season.”

"[Co-showrunner/EP Sera Gamble] and I wrote the finale, and we tried to craft a finale that was both open to possible futures but also closed off some story lines. We tried very much to wrap up some character stuff while keeping some plot stuff going just so that the show could be satisfying both ways. I think we ended up doing a pretty good job of coming up with a thing that will feel both final and hopefully looking toward the future when people finally get a chance to see it."

For her part, Gamble explained that each season was a guessing game when it came to whether  the show would get picked up for a new season. However, they knew something was brewing this year, which is why the season 5 finale is written like a series finale.

"Well, there was a bit of a fight still to have. These things are complicated processes and every show is a little bit different. Getting into the weeds of the business side of this would be incredibly boring, so just as a blanket statement I will say: There are amazing things about the TV landscape right now and then there are also things that are tricky to navigate and those things can take time. We all came from the same place — that we love the show and we wanted to make sure we were fighting for the show — and then there came a moment that we realized what we really wanted to do was tell our audience that this was happening so that they would have a chance to really enjoy the last run of episodes knowing we were saying goodbye."

THE MAGICIANS — “The Wrath of the Time Bees” Episode 502 — Pictured: Rizwan Manji as Tick Pickwick — (Photo by: Eric Milner/SYFY)

“We’re used to it, though, because we never presume we’re gonna get a pick-up for another season,” Gamble continued. “Our philosophy as writers has always been to tell the story that we want to tell right now and never assume that there will be another chance. So, we’re pretty well-drilled in that. This one, it felt so exciting that this show has made to five seasons and that the characters have matured so much in front of everyone’s eyes, that we’ve been on this journey with them together because there was just so much meaty stuff for Henry and I to talk about as we were writing this episode and to talk about with the whole room as we were breaking the episode about what we really wanted to say about where they are at this point in their lives.”

If you’re a fan of the books, then Myers says you’ll be happy with the final episodes, as they will lean into the third and final book in author Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy: The Magicians Land.

Also, there’s going to be a dragon burning down a throne, continuing the show’s long history of Game of Thrones references. “Spoiler: I think one of our best scenes is when the dragon burns the throne” said producer John McNamara. “It’s incredibly cool and original. I think the fans will go crazy for it.”

Laughing, Gamble chimed in: “Yeah, we were going to do all of this character stuff but Henry is weirdly obsessed with dragons and he was like, ‘Look, we only have so much money for digital effects, so we’re just going to burn this f—ing thing down literally.'”

THE MAGICIANS — “Oops!… I did It Again” Episode 506 — Pictured: Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice Quinn — (Photo by: Eric Milner/SYFY)

Now, before you go and start a petition to get The Magicians renewed on Netflix or HBO Max or whatever, there’s something you should know: The showrunners have already explored that avenue and it’s not happening. “None of them seemed in the end like a perfect financial or creative fit,” McNamara told TV Insider. “And so we reluctantly just decided, ‘Well at least we have this season finale that was crafted to also be a series finale.’ It was kind of always going to pull double duty.”

"Obviously, neither Sera nor myself will be like, “Boo, no, forget it!” I kind of feel the DNA of this show has always been a kind of happy surprise that resulted from a kind of a happy accident. You probably know the story, Damian, of how we came to even be aware of the books being available. I was doing Trumbo, the movie with [producer] Michael London and I wanted Michael to meet Sera because I always wanted Michael to get into television. I told him the great thing about TV when it works is that it’s like you’re in a family for however long the show runs. Anyway, he met Sera, he really liked her and didn’t like any of our ideas. [Laughs] She leaves and then he pulls out the book The Magicians and said, “Oh my God, I forgot to mention this. It was in development at another studio and the rights just became available and I have a really good relationship with Lev Grossman.” I had no… I couldn’t have had less interest. Zero, like none. I think I literally rolled my eyes.And then I called Sera and she started screaming. “I love those books!” “There’s more than one book!” “They’re amazing, we have to do this!” It was literally because Michael and Sera were so excited that I was like, “OK, fine.” And the story that is sort of a bit of a fable but it happens to be true is that Michael and Sera and I each wrote not huge but not small checks to option the books with our own money. And then we wrote the pilot on spec.So there’s a part of me that didn’t really know that this thing was starting when it started. I thought it was just like another fun, weird thing to do with Sera and Michael. I don’t know what the future is going to be. So that’s a long answer to your question about what if the fans get traction. We never operated from a place of thinking we know what’s going to happen next. We just don’t. We kind of have to accept, again, the idea that television can be kind of analogous to life: It can be really unfair but it can also be incredibly surprising. So we just like wait and see what happens."

THE MAGICIANS — “Magicians Anonymous” Episode 504 — Pictured: Stella Maeve as Julia Wicker — (Photo by: Eric Milner/SYFY)

As far as what to expect in the actual final episode, Gamble revealed about as much as she could without divulging any spoilers. “We really spent a lot of time and care in talking not just about how to complete the arc of Season 5, but also asking a lot of questions like, ‘Where was Julia (Stella Maeve) in episode 1? Where was she in episode 2?’ and what do we want to say about that? Where she is in this episode? And so where you see the characters, especially in the final episode, I feel it really says what we wanted to say about their journey into adulthood.”

"Was there more gas in the tank? I mean, I think the show itself sort of speaks to the endless capacity to create with all our partners. The world that Lev Grossman created in his books is so rich, I think there’s like a thousand shows inside of those books. And I only became more convinced when we kind of ran out of plot [from the novels], we have done most of the stories of those three books.But the world is so real that I’m not going to lie, we could go off and tell lots of stories about these characters. But to put some kind of punctuation at the end of the sentence of this particular show and the journey we’ve been going on with our audience for the last five seasons, we feel pretty good about the season finale. I feel like it is very much in keeping with the spirit of the show."

THE MAGICIANS — “Apocalypse? Now?!” Episode 505 — Pictured: (l-r) Arjun Gupta as Penny Adiyodi, Trevor Einhorn as Josh Hoberman — (Photo by: Eric Milner/SYFY)

As far as what happens to the other characters in the finale, Gamble said that “Josh makes the best sandwich he’s ever made. I’m giving you like the least spoilery thing I could think of! [Laughs].”

"But I think some of it you can probably extrapolate from what you’ve been seeing all season. I’ll just say, for example, Eliot (Hale Appelman), it’s been a season of so much growth for Eliot. And it’s clear that he’s arcing towards truly being able to step into a different place in his life, if he chooses to. So we’ll pose some decisions for him to make by the end of the season that will feel, I think, hard-earned. And then, I don’t know, is there anything else we can actually say about the finale, John? Right now?"

According to McNamara, the penultimate episode will combine a musical with a heist! “I co-wrote it with Elle Lipson and I’ve got to say, it was a bitch to plot,” he said. “It was so awful plotting it. At one point, I literally had to make an intricate architectural diagram of the place where the heist takes place and we then made little cardboard cutouts of each character and where they were and what they were singing and why they were singing and when they were singing. And at one point I thought, ‘I have lost my mind.’ I can’t believe I’m 57 years old and this is what I do all day.”

“But I think it came out okay,” McNamara continued. “We just watched the playback of it last week and at the end of it, Sera—who is very nice about letting me do these, but I wouldn’t say that she’s in the front row cheering, ‘Yay, another musical!’—goes, ‘That was the most bonkers musical we’ve ever done.'”

"Every song in the musical episode comes out of some kind of emotional inner turmoil and really drives the plot and the characters forward. So they’re not just numbers that you could easily drop or cut. They’re all integrated into the story. And looking at the finale, the last time I watched the musical’s cut, I’m was like, “Wow, that really feels like we were moving toward this with intent.” We’re moving towards epiphanies, if you will, and climaxes. There’s just some incredible kind of character surprises and growth right up till I think the very last scene, it’s pretty surprising."

The finale of The Magicians airs on Wednesday, April 1, which is a…suspicious day to air this kind of episode. “If this was all an elaborate April Fools’ joke, we’d be the biggest assholes that ever lived,” McNamara said. “I don’t want to speak for the fans, but as a confirmed Fillorian, I have to say that this is one of those ‘Don’t be sad it’s over, be happy it happened’ shows. You guys should be so proud of how these stories and characters touched so many lives. You gave people a show to connect with, new actors to love, something that we’ll be able to keep with us going forward.”

But we have a while to go before then. The next episode, “Purgatory,” airs Wednesday, March 11 on SyFy.

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