alibi_shop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alibi_shop) wrote2019-04-23 09:48 am
alibi_shop) wrote2019-04-23 09:48 am
TV: The Magicians, season 4 (Syfy, 2019)
It took me a while to warm up to this show; by the end of the first season I was at "OK, it's fun, let's give it a chance" but it wasn't until the end of the second that I was fully on board. I should mention that Lev Grossman's books are very dear to me and I think they're great just the way they are (I understand why some people are like "I don't like these people and Quentin is a drag", but that's just not how I see them), so I wasn't crazy about the way the first season fast-forwarded through the setup (glossing over nearly all of the experience of learning magic), nor the sort of bright and cheesy tone it settled on for the fantasy-land sequences. And the land of Fillory is still my least favorite part of the show, although they've built it out so that it's at least highly confusing and has some more scary things in it, which helps.
But I could see from the start that they were on to something with the casting, and the character writing has gotten really solid. Eliot (Hale Appleman) has always been good, but this season gives the actor some new things to do by having him also play an all-powerful childish demon possessing Eliot's body, which is both hilarious and actually disturbing. Margo a.k.a. Janet (Summer Bishil) still has a cartoonish persona but they've figured out more about who's under there. Penny (Arjun Gupta) is now two characters, both interesting. Jason Ralph, whose Quentin is the most faithful to the book characters along with Eliot, just keeps quietly doing very good work; the show figured out pretty early that Quentin couldn't be the main character in the way that he was in the books, but they've kept Grossman's conception of him as a depressive kid trying hard to grow up while being aware that he's not the greatest magician, and that pays off beautifully at the end of the season. There's nothing here that has the startling emotional force of last year's episode "A Life in the Day", but it gets close.
I also like the approach they've settled on for depicting magic. The visual effects have always been a little hit or miss, and those have gotten better; but there's now more of a sense of ease in just showing stuff happening and trusting the audience to get it, and the extremely variable tone of the show helps in that regard. There are two episodes this season featuring musical interludes sung by the actors, and in the first, there's kind of a flimsy plot justification but it's obviously just so they can do this thing for fun, and it comes off as basically an homage to Buffy—which certainly is one side of the show. The second time is different: something sad has happened, and the characters decide they want to be able to sing a song for the occasion and to have some musical accompaniment, so they very briefly do some magic to make that happen; they don't say any of that, they just do it, and you get it, and it's really focused and sweet. This is a shaggy and often campy show that has the magical ability to stand still and be serious.
But I could see from the start that they were on to something with the casting, and the character writing has gotten really solid. Eliot (Hale Appleman) has always been good, but this season gives the actor some new things to do by having him also play an all-powerful childish demon possessing Eliot's body, which is both hilarious and actually disturbing. Margo a.k.a. Janet (Summer Bishil) still has a cartoonish persona but they've figured out more about who's under there. Penny (Arjun Gupta) is now two characters, both interesting. Jason Ralph, whose Quentin is the most faithful to the book characters along with Eliot, just keeps quietly doing very good work; the show figured out pretty early that Quentin couldn't be the main character in the way that he was in the books, but they've kept Grossman's conception of him as a depressive kid trying hard to grow up while being aware that he's not the greatest magician, and that pays off beautifully at the end of the season. There's nothing here that has the startling emotional force of last year's episode "A Life in the Day", but it gets close.
I also like the approach they've settled on for depicting magic. The visual effects have always been a little hit or miss, and those have gotten better; but there's now more of a sense of ease in just showing stuff happening and trusting the audience to get it, and the extremely variable tone of the show helps in that regard. There are two episodes this season featuring musical interludes sung by the actors, and in the first, there's kind of a flimsy plot justification but it's obviously just so they can do this thing for fun, and it comes off as basically an homage to Buffy—which certainly is one side of the show. The second time is different: something sad has happened, and the characters decide they want to be able to sing a song for the occasion and to have some musical accompaniment, so they very briefly do some magic to make that happen; they don't say any of that, they just do it, and you get it, and it's really focused and sweet. This is a shaggy and often campy show that has the magical ability to stand still and be serious.