SummaryHigh school senior Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) secretly loves the fantasy novels about the adventures of five children in a magical land called Fillory. He soon is accepted into an exclusive, secret magicians university called Brakebills in upstate New York and discovers Fillory is a real place in this adaptation of Lev Grossman's t...
SummaryHigh school senior Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) secretly loves the fantasy novels about the adventures of five children in a magical land called Fillory. He soon is accepted into an exclusive, secret magicians university called Brakebills in upstate New York and discovers Fillory is a real place in this adaptation of Lev Grossman's t...
The writers blast all kinds of arcs in your face, and the fractals come at you with full force. But no matter how many layers of latex pile onto an actor's body so they can become an amphibious beast or a hircine god, the feelings are always real and the stakes are always high. The Magicians demands that its characters sacrifice love for magic, but I would never demand that The Magicians sacrifice energy for coherence.
The story is not so interesting and unfortunaltely most of the strong non-male characters are loosing momentum in this season. Room for impovement in the next season.
After the very good season 3, this one is kind of a deception. The plot was slow pace and seemed really stretched out. There was a very boring singing episode. The ending was very touching and I like it but in many respect, it was a rushed ending. Like they couldn't calculated how to balance it sooner. The acting was unequal. The story was making solutions on the go too often. Season 4 only resolved the ending of season 3, and didn't offer much to the lore. I give it a 60%. Kind of a useless season which you can watch a couple of episodes and be done with it (something Margot would say).
It knows itself. It tells episode-level stories well. Its biggest arcs make sense, and its smallest arcs are impressively effective. If the middle bits are a little foggy--how anything connects to anything else, the realm of the possible versus the impossible, what stage of a quest they’re on at any particular moment--it never seems to matter much. The Magicians charges ahead with gusto and style anyhow, staying both dark and effervescent.
The Magicians Season 4 reboots its characters in exciting ways without losing any of the charm and anarchy that makes the show so delightful. Impossibly, it’s a serialized, character-driven sci-fi series that shows no signs of slowing down, and is opening up compelling and refreshing new avenues of storytelling that are grounded in emotional truth and a willingness to get funky.
Season 4 has by far been my least favorite of the series. Season 3 had a lot of nice turns and development. Season 4 is just dragging. I don't care about the Monster possessing Elliot. His awkward creepy friend routine is sometimes funny, but not for a full season. This season also had the most blatant political messages shoehorned in. They have a whole episode about how it is wrong to have a "white male protagonist" point of view. They cap this off but killing Quentin off. They also go back to the prior years episode where Quentin and Elliot lived out their lives together to emphasize he was really into it and wanted to do it again in this timeline. They also decided to make Marina a lesbian out of left field. The issue is that these choices just seem forced in. It isn't a natural part of the story, it is like the writers sit around saying "how can we make this story more diverse" at every turn. They already made Quentin into much less of an interesting character than he was in the books. Now they bump him off. They already have FOUR female characters that they massively promote in the series as being more competent than the three male characters (Penny is solid, but Elliot is just used as a joke). God forbid you keep a straight white male character in the show. How would that fight the patriarchy? I get it writers, you are PC as can be and want to slam that down our throats. You win. Take an interesting character from a book, water him down, and kill him off.
The first half of the season starts strong, but then the plot gets drawn out to infinity and beyond. At the same time, all the side stories are really rushed and there are just too many of them. The last three episodes were horribly paced and the finale was a travesty. Everything happened extremely fast, not a single plot line was properly resolved (some not at all) and everything the season had promised at the start was dropped. It's one thing to surprise your audience, it's another to become completely unhinged. With an ending like that, season 5 will not have me watching.