The Magicians stars say goodbye to their characters

The series finale of The Magicians, “Fillory and Further,” airs tonight on Syfy. After five years of magic, sex, magic sex, talking animals, musical episodes and more, one of the longest-running shows on the network comes to an end.

The show is leaving a little prematurely, since it hasn’t quite adapted the entirety of Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, but this still seems like a decent place to stop, especially considering how comfortable the show had grown with forging its own path over the years. “I feel like we’ve been kind of chopping up and remixing all the stuff we love in the books for several seasons now, and we frequently talked about the heist that ended up being a musical on the show,” creator Sera Gamble told Den of Geek. “We also frequently talked about what happens to the land of Fillory in the books. So I think those were the greatest hits we were most interested in touching on this season.”

That said, tonight’s finale won’t tie up each and every loose end in a neat little bow. “There’s definitely some open threads!” Gamble said. But according to executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, that’s in keep with how the show has always worked:

"We work to split the difference between finding some kind of closure for people but also keeping a lot of plot threads open because that’s how we do on The Magicians. I feel like the finale is a pretty good example of that."

I know a lot of fans are looking forward to seeing their favorite characters in action one more time tonight, and The Magicians had a lot of characters, a true ensemble cast that allowed it to continue even after Jason Ralph (Quentin Coldwater) exited after season 4. “We had a firm philosophy writing this show that we didn’t want to treat any character as insignificant,” Gamble said. “Why do we make the assumptions that we do about who the hero is and who the monster is? And so because we were fortunate to get to tell this story over five seasons, we just kept pushing ourselves to keep asking those questions, and by the time we came out the other end, characters like Fen and like Zelda (who didn’t even have a name when we cast Mageina Tovah in the role; she was just called the Head Librarian) and Kady, who was actually killed in an early draft of the pilot. But it’s the nature of this story that it wants to continually churn through your concept of who the hero is.”

The characters were definitely the biggest strength of The Magicians. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, a bunch of the stars said goodbye to the people they’d been playing for years:

Yeah, why didn’t Alice ever get a unicorn?

But as fascinating as the characters themselves were, what producers like Gamble will miss most are the people. “For example, Magali [Guidasci], our costume designer has been with us since the pilot,” she said. “Without her, I don’t know that the show would have lasted this long. We needed somebody who was brilliant and could do it on a shoestring budget as soon as we actually walked into the magical world of Fillory because it could have been so cheesy that the show got canceled right then and there.”

It takes a village to make a magical kingdom, even if we never met a lot of the villagers. Thanks to everyone who worked on this show. The series finale airs tonight!

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