SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers for the first two season of The Magicians. Due to the topic, I might be bouncing around the show in a slightly non-linear fashion.
Tonight, The Magicians begins its third season in a quest to bring magic back.
I’d heard of the show sometime in the last year or so (probably around the time when the first season went on Netflix). It was relegated to my “I’ll get around to it eventually” list.
That is, until they made the announcement that Felicia Day will be a major character in this new season. I can’t help but take this opportunity to gush about one of my personal heroes. Becausem while she may be Queen of the Nerds, she surprisingly doesn’t have a lot of time travel on her IMDb page.
Armed with that knowledge, I sat down to watch the first two seasons to be prepared for tonight’s premiere. I found an odd fascination for the show. Despite The Magicians containing a large amount of foul language and raunchy references.
The Magicians is a show that is difficult to explain. Quinten Coldwater is accepted to college called Brakebills that specializes in magic. Magic is all around–and not just at Brakebills but out in the world where people known as Hedge Witches practice with what little they can. Brakebills and schools like it seem to keep a lock on magical knoweldge.
Season One is where the bulk of the temporal activity exists, but because of what happens there, there’s a bit in season two. Honestly, this show has such a convoluted temporal puzzle that it took me a few minutes to figure out how to unravel it for y’all. Do I do it in the order it appears on the show? The actual timeline?
Back when I did the article on time travel in the Santa Clause universe, I briefly referenced the difference between magical temporal theory and scientific temporal theory. It’s not often that you see the two combined and that’s one fascinating thing about this show.
Around the time of World War 2, a man named Christopher Plover wrote a series of books set in the magical world of Fillory. Think Narnia but with a slightly darker twist.
Fast forward to the present day. Quentin begins his journey at Brakebills. He grew up fascinated with the Fillory novels. When he begins to get hints Fillory might be real, he’s driven to find it. Along with his classmates, Penny and Alice, and upperclassmen Eliot and Margo, Quentin ends up head-first in this mystery–at least, after a creature called The Beast breaks into Brakebills and seriously injures the Dean.
They don’t find what they expected.
It turns out that the Fillory books are more real than one would think. It is well-known that Plover wrote the kids in the Fillory books based on his neighbors, who Plover took in for a time. It turns out that all three kids went in and out of Fillory until it started to reject the oldest son. Adding to the drama, Plover wasn’t the greatest adoptive guardian and it messed up the kids.
The middle, a girl named Jane Chatwin, manages to escape, bouncing between Fillory and Earth while violating the first law of time. Or, rather, two violate the first law of time. See, one is the Jane Chatwin that is going in and out of Fillory in the books. The other is a mysterious character known as The Watcherwoman. It turns out adult Jane comes back, it’s almost paradoxical in nature.
She’s also been working to stop The Beast using Quentin and his friends. Before we meet them in the pilot, they’ve tried 39 times and failed. Jane Chatwin found a way to create a time loop around a set amount of time, just shy of a year if my calculations are correct. Each time she resets the loop, she changes one thing.
About halfway through season one, The Beast kills Jane thus making this the last time they can go through this. Along with Jane, one other person knows about the time loop. It’s not clear how, but Dean Fogg can tell he’s been in a time loop thus knows to an extent what’s worked and what hasn’t. He confirms Jane is Jane Chatwin and that it’s a time loop.
It’s up to them to find a way into Fillory. Penny is a traveler, in theory he’s capable of traveling anywhere on Earth and to other places as well. But with Penny being new to this form of magic, he has to figure out how to get there. Penny gets trapped in a place called the Neitherlands. It’s a collection of fountains that act as portals to other worlds. The problem is that time is really wonky in the Neitherlands. When he gets trapped there, he thinks it’s only six hours but on Earth it’s been six months.
Penny finds his way back, thanks to an organization called The Library which holds not only knowledge on pretty much any and every subject and has these books on various people. (Which isn’t nearly as wonderful as the Library from The Librarians, but that’s beside the point.)
Getting back to Earth, the gang tries to figure out the best chance they have to face the Beast. Dean Fogg has made it clear that it is their destiny. They realize the only chance they have is to go to Fillory and face him there. The gang goes to the Neitherlands with Penny and over the course of things Quentin gets separated from the group and ends up back on Earth.
And here we discover what it was that Jane changed this time around. Quentin had a friend from his childhood, Julia. When he was tested for Brakebills, she was tested as well and didn’t make it in. It turns out she made it in the other 39 times. This time, Jane put her outside of Brakebills, forcing her to become a hedge witch and fuel her thirst for magic in a way that it wasn’t challenged before.
Quentin comes back for her and they end up in Fillory using a more science-based version of time travel. Apparently, there’s a rare mineral that no longer exists. It links to one specific point in time (depends on the device). A group of students built it in an attempt to go back in time and kill Hitler. It turns out this particular device will send Julia and Quentin back 48 hours before Jane uses a portal to Fillory in one of the books. Once there, they help out that time’s Jane and then run into the future version. She sends them to Fillory that matches up to their time. From there, Quentin and Julia are able to meet up with their friends.
I find it fascinating that there’s a mix of magical time travel (the poof-you’ve-travelled-70-years type) and then there’s a more complex version. I guess it’s similar to the fact that in other universe, different people have different methods. One works on Earth and the other in Fillory?
The biggest use of time travel in season 2 is the distortion between Fillory, Earth, and the Neitherlands. As I said before, the two seasons play off of each other.
There’s no telling if they’re using anything outside the time distortion as time moves forward. Do other realms, planets, places have new and distinct forms?
Maybe I need to check out the book.
Tune in tonight at 9/8C on SyFy for the season premiere of The Magicians!
Latest posts by Mary Helen Norris (see all)
- The Hybrid Fanzine Celebrates The Twelfth Doctor - October 12, 2018
- The Thirteenth Doctor Arrives In “The Woman Who Fell To Earth” - October 9, 2018
- Manifest Lands With A Spectacular Pilot - September 28, 2018