Archive from 'The Magicians'

Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Magicians season 4 finale. Read at your own risk! 

One question has loomed over The Magicians since season 4’s seventh episode: Who is in the Underworld elevator? At the end of episode 7, titled “The Side Effect,” Penny-40 (Arjun Gupta), who was working for “Secrets Taken to the Grave,” greeted someone he knew as they got off the elevator, implying that one of the SYFY fantasy drama’s main characters was going to die in the near future. Well, we finally know it is…

In the season 4 finale, titled “No Better to be Safe Than Sorry,” the Brakebills gang successfully expelled the murderous ancient monsters from Julia (Stella Maeve) and Eliot’s (Hale Appleman) bodies and bottled them up. To permanently rid the world of the monsters, Quentin, Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), and Penny-23 had to travel to the mirror world and throw them in the Seam, the space between worlds. This is The Magicians, though, so there was obviously another twist waiting for them.

Below, EW chats with Ralph about Quentin’s death, keeping his exit from the series from the entire cast until this past weekend, and what he’ll miss about the show.

EW

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So are you actually leaving the show? 
JASON RALPH: Yes, this is the closing of Quentin Coldwater’s journey on The Magicians.

How did your exit come about? Was it your decision, the producers’, or a combination? 
It’s funny, it all felt kind of natural when we started talking about it before the season started. [The show] starts with this person who is really questioning his worth in the world and if life is even worth living. And the journey of him in the show, and in the books, is him coming to the realization that it is, just maybe not in the way that he always expected. It’s kind of a story about a person who always wanted to be the main character of the story [realizing] that he’s not and finding a way to be okay with that and finding his own place inside of the world, and [learning] there really are no heroes, not in the real world anyway and confronting the disappointing reality of that. That’s naturally where we ended up finding Quentin at the top of the season and engraining those lessons through it. READ FULL INTERVIEW

Below, showrunners John McNamara, Sera Gamble and Henry Alonso Myers talk about Quentin’s departure — his portrayer Jason Ralph will not return as a series regular in Season 5 — and what comes next for Q’s friends.

TV LINE

TVLINE | So this is the last we see of Quentin?
JOHN MCNAMARA | This is the last we see of Quentin, although you’ve seen The Magicians…
HENRY ALONSO MYERS | He may appear in other forms.
MCNAMARA | Yeah, but this is the last you will see of Jason playing Quentin. And I’m not being coy. As far as we’re concerned at the moment, it’s the last we’ll see of Quentin. READ FULL INTERVIEW

TV GUIDE

Before we began this season, we entered into a creative conversation that included the writers, executive producer and director Chris Fisher, Lev Grossman, our partners at UCP and SYFY, and Jason Ralph. The choice for Jason to leave the show was arrived at mutually, with much respect for the story, fans of the show, and a shared sense of deliberate, essential creative risk. We want The Magicians to visit strange and fascinating new places, and we know we can’t get there by treading the same garden path others have before us. So, we did the thing you’re not supposed to do — we killed the character who’s supposed to be ‘safe.’ In real life, none of us are safe.” READ FULL INTERVIEW

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

At what stage did you decide to kill Quentin?

The first The Magicians Season 4 teaser trailer has been released online, giving us our first comprehensive look at the new season of the Syfy series. The show’s third season found the characters working without magic, facing insurmountable odds until they finally turned that faucet back on—but at a cost. Those pesky folks at the Library opted to control the flow of magic themselves, so they erased the memories of our favorite magicians and put them back on Earth, without any knowledge of their abilities. Oh but there was just one problem: Eliot was now possessed by a monster who’d been locked in a castle for ages and was finally set free.

The show’s fourth season will find the magicians living very different lives, but they’ll have to find their way back to not only themselves, but each other, if they have any hope of defeating the monster. Alice (Olivia Taylor-Dudley) is the only one who still has her memories, so she’ll likely be the key.

This teaser is brief, but it’s full of everything that makes The Magicians so great: dirty jokes, magic, and Margo (Summer Bishil) being a badass. Moreover, the show is coming off its best season yet, so I’m mighty curious to see what the writers have in store for fans as the show continues to move beyond Lev Grossman’s source material as it carves out its own signature niche.

Check out the Magicians Season 4 teaser trailer below. The show returns on Syfy on January 23rd.

Back in July, Jason and some of him fellow “The Magicians” cast members attended the San Diego Comic-Con International. Below you can watch interviews from the event:
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At Comic-Con, the Syfy series’ co-creators and stars touched on each character’s new life this season.

“The Magicians” will have a difficult task ahead in Season 4, which was previewed at the Comic-Con panel on Saturday in San Diego. On hand to tease what comes next were co-creators Sera Gamble and John McNamara, stars Jason Ralph, Stella Maeve, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Hale Appleman, and Summer Bishil. Actress and ultimate geek girl Felicia Day, who has guest-starred on the Syfy series, moderated the panel.

The writers then got to “spitballing” ideas to dig themselves out of that narrative hole, and what resulted was the upcoming season. Apparently, in lieu of an actual trailer, the Syfy marketing department conceived of a video for Comic-Con that further confused matters while only spilling minor spoilers. Take a look at the “mockumentary” that even confused Felicia Day:

A gorgeous promotional photoshoot of the casting of The Magicians has been unveiled in order to promote the second season of the show. Our gallery has been updated with the shots, as well as with high-quality stills of the first episode, entitled ‘Night of Crowns’. The episode will air on Syfy on Jan. 25, at 9/8c – thank you Kaci (hugh-dancy.net) for sending these my way!

Syfy has just dropped a new trailer for the second season of The Magicians, revealing what Quentin and his friends will be up to when the show returns next year. The new season premieres Wednesday, Jan. 25, at 9/8c on Syfy. Check out the trailer below:

I have added high quality images of Jason attending Day 3 of New York Comic-Con with his The Magicians co-stars. Check them out in the gallery:

Entertainment Weekly posted a video as well as a portrait from Comic Con. You can view both below.

Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil, right, @rasonjalph @arjunguptabk & @halebofosho?! ??? #SDCC #TheMagicians #EWComicCon #ComicCon

A video posted by Entertainment Weekly (@entertainmentweekly) on Jul 23, 2016 at 1:09pm PDT