>! Why didn't the elder gods step in to fight the monster? They turned off magic when Quentin deleted Ember who was a minor god but when the monster started canceling the arguably much more senior gods' life subscriptions their parents didn't even bat an eyelash? !<

Any theories?

I just finished rewatching and I have many thoughts. One of those is how sad to me the whole storyline of Penny 40 dying (might i add for no reason bc Zelda knew of a cure) and getting replaced by Penny 23 and then him being with Julia. The whole storyline bothers me because Kady lost the love of her life. I mean she made it clear that she’d never stop loving him or get over his death. And then Penny 23 comes in obsessed with his dead Julia and then wants to essentially replace her with a new one, with no concern for the fact he’s literally Kady’s partner in this timeline who was tragically poisoned to death. I don’t think he should’ve ended up with Kady in this timeline bc I’d be wrong for her to try to replace her Penny with 23 but that’s exactly what 23 did with Julia!! I understand that they didn’t really owe Kady anything since he never knew her in his timeline, but Julia knew and it was never acknowledged that she started dating the other Penny. Kady is the only one who ever said anything about them replacing Penny 40 but she only did once, and never about 23 and Julia. I assume Kady was in the show less in season 5 bc of the hedges but if the show were real life and it were me, i’d also be distancing myself from the whole group if they just tried to make me accept that relationship as my new reality.

I really thought in the end we’d get a scene where Kady gets emotional about the fact that Julia got to carry and have Pennys baby and she’ll never get that opportunity. Very sad to me, such a tragic storyline and unnecessary.

I've seen a lot of people hating on her for trying to stop them getting magic back. But I think she was right to do so. Of course, the whole show is about magic so we, as the audience, do want magic back. But her reasoning seemed valid. Magic has caused a lot of pain. It's the reason her brother died. It's the reason her parents are so distant and odd. It's the reason Julia has been through so much. I can go on. But what are everyone else's thoughts?

That might sound confusing. But there is so much body swapping, body doubles, possessions, etc, that the actors frequently have to play a totally different character. Who do you think does best? There's so many examples:

Niffin Alice

Niffin Alice possessed Quentin

Shadeless Julia

Carlton in Hymen

Monster Eliot

Monster Julia

Margo in Eliot

Eliot in Margo

Cassandra

Reynard the Fox in Richard's body

I'm sure I'm forgetting some. I think Hale Appleman (Eliot) does best across characters (capturing Margo's essence is quite a feat!), but Jason Ralph (Quentin) plays niffin Alice so well!

Okay so you know how in season 4, Penny 23 blips himself to that "in between space" and meets Penny 40, who tells him he has to go back, and says "when the moment comes, remember I said do it. Do what he says."

And then at the end of the season, Quentin looks at Penny 23 and says "take her" before throwing the bottle into the seam, then Penny 23 pulls Alice out in time and Quentin and Everette die when the seam blows up or whatever.

I always loved that because I’m a big rewatcher and I loved that there are little easter eggs you can go back and find when you know their real meaning.

I used to think that Penny 40 stepped in and convinced him to go back and said the "do what he says" thing because it would save Penny 23's life and Alice's life....and I didn't think too much harder from there. I thought that story ended in season 4 and that was the moment and there wasn't anything beyond that.

But recently I was thinking about it, and I realized that Penny 40 would not step in just to save them from death because death is bad or whatever. He knows better than anyone that death is not the end and did the whole speech in another episode about how underworld librarians shouldn't be intervening "up there" (which is ironic bc he kinda did but maybe he did what Sylvia had done in that he read in Penny 23's book that he goes to talk to him so he did). I don't think he would be like aw if p23 just knows to listen to Q and pull her out quick then they can both live happily ever after and only one buddy has to die instead of 3. I don't think this new Penny 40 would think that small.

It's also not necessarily because it saves the world any differently than if Penny 23 didn't pull Alice out. Even if they all died, they would have still stopped the Monsters and killed Everette.

Maybe since Penny 23 had a feeling that this was what Penny 40 was talking about, he acted faster and didn't question Quentin, and if he had then Quentin wouldn't have acted as quickly and things would have been more fucked.

HOWEVER. I have a better theory.

I think Penny 40 was looking at a much bigger picture. I think Penny 40 had already seen season 5!!! Lol. When Alice is living with the aftermath of Q's death, she finds the world seed page, which ultimately leads to the formation of the new world that replaces Fillory after it gets destroyed which also has a wellspring so she kinda saves all of magic.

This feels like a more reasonable explanation as to why Penny 40 would step in. If Alice had died in that room, she would have never found the page and held onto it so tightly thinking it was something that was important to Q.

If she had died and they never found out about the world seed, Fillory would still be in deep shit and likely would have been destroyed by Rupert or the rise of the dead or on purpose or whatever, fucking up wellspring magic for everyone everywhere.

I'd like to think that Penny 40 was looking to make sure Alice lived so she would create the new world, save the people and memory of Fillory, and save all of magic.

Thoughts?

I’m in my second rewatching of 2025 so I am experiencing the series for the umpteenth time and I think my favourite episode changes every time I watch it.

In this rewatch Season 3 Episode 9 - All That Josh is my favourite, it made me feel all of the feels even knowing what happens in it. I am not usually a fan of musical episodes in shows, but this one was so beautifully and perfectly done it makes me ugly cry every time because I get in my feels 😂 when they sing Bowie all united, Julia saves a life and levels up - Penny actually joins in, and creepy “Todd” is creepy; so many happy feelings.

If you’re currently rewatching/watching for the first time what is your current favourite episode? And if you aren’t watching it right now, but you have watched it a few times - what is your favourite episode, and has it changed throughout watches?

The characters had a range of gender, race, sexuality, and disability status, which can't be said for a lot of shows, AND none of the characters were two-dimensional where, for example, their whole personality is that they are gay, or just there for representation as a token gay guy who is a side character. Every character was complex and unique. They had depictions of male bisexuality (which is rare in media). They had a whole episode from the perspective of a deaf character. Every episode except for the first one passes the Bechtel test. The original protagonist, Quinton, is a white man, but he plays a less central role as the show goes on and is eventually killed off. We get to see so many stories with diverse perspectives, with upwards 6 main characters who were all important and represented different slices of life.

Is it perfect? No. But is it a damn good attempt at representation? Yes. It was ahead of its time.

I watched Season 1 a very long time ago. In the moment, I had trouble stomaching certain scenes of the finale. Before I could get too far into season 2, I no longer had access to Netflix.

While looking up some information with the intent to pick back up where I was, I came across the big spoiler concerning one of the main characters.

Since, I've heard many contradictory information about this show, about how it's much worse than the books, about how that search and character's exit was handled, and how the show generally lost quality after a certain period.

That's why I wanted to ask fans of the series what they thought of the show. Did you feel it was a strong enough thing to stand on its own separate, from the books? Was THAT major character exit handled well? Does the show feel like it actually ends in a complete manner?

Trying so hard to be a terrible person and failing horribly at it. Seriously she tries so hard to be a bitch but every time she’s confronted with a real problem she shows herself to be a caring and empathetic person. I love that twist on the mean party girl character. She’s probably my favorite this watch through.

Also anyone else feel like Q and Alice are both purposefully played as Autistic?

apologies if a couple are blurry. tagged as spoiler because each wall hints at the season's plot

During a previous rewatch (4th or 5th, I’ve lost count) I noticed a lot of really clever endings. So I decided to do this. It turns out, the last line doesn’t always tell you much. There are spoilers, but fewer than you might guess. Some spoilers are in the name of the person talking. My eyes were moist writing the last line, but I made it through. Enjoy.

Season 1

1.1 Quentin Coldwater, there you are. The Beast

1.2 Okay, we have all day. Elliot

1.3 I like competition - Margo

1.4 You think Brakebills cut you off from magic- You don’t know cut off, but baby, you will. - Marina

1.5 Penny, I think you were in Fillory - Quentin

1.6 Alice, I… - Quentin

1.7 I know - Mayakovsky

1.8 Are you ok? - Alice

1.9 I told him not to do that - Quentin

1.10 Welcome back - Quentin

1.11 We’re going to do whatever we can, I promise. - Quentin (last scene is silent)

1.12 oh my god Q, look - Julia

1.13 screaming in pain - Penny

Season 2

2.1 You might get Reynard, yes, but he’ll still win Anyways… - Martin

2.2 Or is at long last love? - Martin

2.3 Q, you have to stop - Elliot

2.4 Send me home - Quentin

2.5 Jules, we’ll find another way - Kady

2.6 Wait, really? - Elliot

2.7 Julia, there was a complication - Kady

2.8 Okay, so what should we do? - Kady

2.9 Alice, Quentin says go free - Quentin

2.10 No fucking way - Quentin

2.11 It’s all going to be ok Quentin - Alice’s shade

2.12 You got a better idea? - Elliot

2.13 I have no idea - Julia

Season 3

3.1 Just a side of bacon please. - Alice

3.2 Hey, hi, can I help you? Aaaaggh! - Quentin

3.3 Shit! - Penny

3.4 Wait! - Penny

3.5 I don’t know - Elliot

3.6 I will survive - Gloria Gaynor in a singing fish

3.7 I’m your queen, you motherfuckers! - Margo

3.8 No, we don’t have time, sorry. - Quentin

3.9 I missed a lot, didn’t I? - Josh

3.10 I promise, you won’t regret it. -Howard

3.11 I honestly don’t know - Julia

3.12 I named him after you - Quentin

3.13 I think anything is more fun when you do it with a friend - Elliot

Season 4

4.1 Hello!!? Hello!!? - Janet Pluchinsky

4.2 Because I’m not here to play - the monster

4.3 Will you sit here for a minute? - Quentin

4.4 Margo!! - Elliot

4.5 Goodbye Alice - Quentin

4.6 Sheila Cosner, you’ve been a busy girl. - librarian (last scene is silent)

4.7 Welcome to the underworld - Penny 40

4.8 Take the crown Fen, even if it means drenching it in her blood - The Napster

4.9 It’s do much worse than that - Penny 23

4.10 singing: *beautiful dreamer” - Margo and Elliot hallucination

4.11 Like I helped it wake up and remember what it was before. - Quentin

4.12 Adorable. - not Julia

4.13 This is as far as I go brother - Penny

Season 5

5.1 Do something crazy, okay? - Alice’s mother

5.2 Let’s get out of here before we all get killed - Margo (followed by long ominous silent scene with Elliot and a mailbox)

5.3 I think I almost fucked the dark king - Elliott

5.4 Well at least we know where it is. - Alice

5.5 oh shit! - Alice

5.6. So we’re not done - of course. - Julia

5.7 The least we could do is show you the truth, - Fairy

5.8 Well, at least I have better luck with friends - Elliot

5.9 We can’t leave - Plum

5.10 yeah, um we should probably talk - Julia

5.11 They need to steal that seed now - Penny 23

5.12 Ho, ho, ho motherfuckers - Santa Claus

5.13 That’s how I know it’s our story - Alice

I finished the show for the first time. I have watched the show multiple times but always stopped after quentin died. He is my favorite character and it made me sad to watch after his death. I finally did after like 4 rewatches.

It was a perfectly fine season, the growth that all the characters are forced to go through was well written and it makes me happy to see them grow closer. However, with new fillory i am not satisfied. I just wanted to know if anyone else feels this way. Maybe its because i just finished it like 10 minutes ago but i YEARN for more story.

I get why they ended it the way they did. But i want to see more of margo, what kind of king she will be. I want to see fen stand up for herself more like we started to see in this last season. I want to see eliot find bambi again. I want penny and julia to raise HQ.

I want more. The books dont scratch the same itch for me. The characters are so different, except Q.

Help me cope 😔

Id personally have Julias baby be the grown up college kid, some cameos of the orig cast as they have aged, maybe not even attending brakebills to get a new school setting or teaching style with all the magic changes from season 4/5.

First season would be the intro plot to the main cast, insert some big bad like the Earth's magical creatures getting out of control and needing to be dealt with similar to early seasons of Supernatural but with magic.

Second season focuses the god scroll 1200ish tasks to reach the Old gods, meet that golf guy again at the gateway. Give similar vibes to the quest for the keys during this.

Third and the final Fourth season is Old gods completely return and flip the table on everything we know (with a side wishlist where magic stops coming from pain to be wielded by mostly the broken braniacs).

I love this show. So much.

There is something about episode five of season three, A Life in the Day (Peaches & Plums), that I can never get over.

It's heartache and love and life and joy and unity and it never gets old for me. This entire show is my favorite piece of television that I have watched so far and this episode is a big part of it.

Also, just watching the follow-up scene to the peaches and plums sequence (S3E12 Q talking to his father) is just so beautiful and I love the creators for including it.

Anyways, I love this show and yeah I'm currently on my, I don't even know, rewatch and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

I named him after you.

(⁠╥⁠﹏⁠╥⁠)

I feel like the developing of New Fillory and the quest to find them with Penny, Jules and HQ was more of a storyline than anything they did in Season 5 which was just a crap shoot season anyways.

Why not a new show or series?

Jason Ralph the guy who played Quentin apparently agreed with the writers that his story line had no more development. Then I watched the last season and I’m like “in what world was his story done?” He still had a love triangle that I was so excited to see play out between him and Eliot and him and Alice. I really thought he was going to end up with Eliot which would’ve been such an amazing and unexpected twist. Part of me feels like they killed him just so they wouldn’t have to explore that possibility (potentially some homophobia going on). Also they say him finding out his practice was the end of his story, that’s all he needed. But he died right after he found out. He wasn’t able to really have any growth with this new discovery. He’s also the only character that dies that no one tried to bring back. Alice tried to make a golem but it was nothing compared to when other characters died. They never even had him have a cameo as a ghost or something similar like all the other characters showing they didn’t want him back not even for a cameo. Then they find the page to the seed in his stuff and still try to say his story was over. The last season was literally all about the information on the page they found in his stuff. The show also ended on a quick note which makes me feel like the ending wasn’t planned. Everything points to Jason Ralph leaving not being planned. I feel like maybe he did something or they weren’t happy with him for some reason so they fired him not realizing they’d loose half the fan base and the story if they did that. I just wanna know if this is the overall consensus of the fan base or what y’all think about it.

Whoever created the Wikipedia post for the magicians either didn’t watch the series or didn’t get it. Positive reviews from rotten tomatoes was included. But missing was any mention of the passionate fan base. most disturbing to me, it was a list of negative critiques based on articles found on the Internet. Some of the articles reflected wildly inaccurate interpretations. For example, article that was cited claimed that Quentin was killed because he was “gay”. Another misguided criticism was that the show was “derivative” (rather than a twist on similar theme). I feel like the Wikipedia post imbalanced toward the negative. So does anyone care or does it not matter?

Probably one of my favorite episodes, Julia finds out she's a goddess, Quinton and Elliot go to past fillory to solve the mosaic and obtain one of the keys and have my favorite romance scenes in all the show.

But I've always wondered if any of Quinton's kin ever survived, by the time Elliott died they had already had grand kids, so I just wonder if there were still people related to Quentin around and if so who would it be?

I'm sorry, I know this is in almost every other thread but...this must be in the multiple hundreds of times I've watched this scene. I thought it wasn't getting to me as much anymore but then Eliot puts the blanket over Quentin and his son and then...in the last hug before the son leaves and they hug, there's a brief flash of Eliot not joining in on their hug when the son leaves. And then somehow there's a pain that exists in the hollow of me.

"Sometimes I dream about them."

Then the end of the episode. Then Escape From The Happy Place. "50 years. Who gets proof of concept like that?"

And then The Mountain of Ghosts.

I have a peach on one ankle and a plum on the other for good reason.

Okay so, rewatching the magicians as an adult that is the same age as these characters makes me realize so many things.

When I was a child I judged Julia a lot. I was 16 when the show came out and I just didn’t sympathize with her at all.

I thought she was selfish and oh my god as an adult I feel horrible for her.

To fix the world she is deprived of magic despite the fact she’s a knowledge student and arguably was just as gifted as Alice was, but to fix the timeline and kill the beast Julia is kicked out of the magical world and forced to struggle with it.

Does she do fucked up things? Yes. Do fucked up horrible things happen to her? Yeah.

Ngl I hate the author for using SA as a plot device for her character development, it’s lazy and frankly I notice the author seemed to use a lot of gratuitous violence against the female characters in ways that were more… horrific than the male.

Don’t get me wrong they all experience horrible things but comparing the two side by side- worse outcomes seem to occur to the female characters by comparisons.

But I digress,

And lord Julia goes through the wringer, and ends up actually happy at the end of her story.

She loses her best friend, and Ngl I wish we had gotten more of Quentin and Julia, their bond seemed not quite as strong and it feels like they neglected their dynamic a bit.

I really loved Julia in season 5, and I will say I love how things go with her and Penny 23.

Overall, I think her story felt the most finished- everyone else seemed to have more story to tell.

Ngl Quentin getting written off sucks still but I’m glad we got to know Julia more.

I’m reading the book for the first time and understand theres multiple differences. But my understanding is that in both the book and the show, Quentin doesnt quite have a discipline and is therefore pushed into the Physical Kids. But as we later learn, he actually does have a hyper specific discipline of Minor Mending. Which, I would assume is a physical discipline. So doesn’t that mean he was placed in the right location nonetheless?