Magicians Season 2: What You Need to Know

SyFy’s favorite group of foul-mouthed and hard drinking magical millenials are back as The Magicians starts its second season next Wednesday. Based on a trilogy of best-selling fantasy books by Lev Grossman, The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater and his graduate student friends as they explore realms of magic hidden in the real world.

You can catch up on The Magicians pretty easily as long as you have a Netflix account, but ComicBook.com is here to help if you don’t want to cram 13 hours in a single weekends. Here’s a rundown of the cast of The Magicians, what’s happened so far, and what we can expect in Season 2:

Sexy Harry Potter with a Dash of Narnia

The Magicians combines aspects of two of the most popular children’s fantasy stories of all time (the Harry Potter and Narnia series) and mixes them together with liberal amounts of booze and sex. At the heart of The Magicians are two secret and magical places.

The first is Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a secret university located in upstate New York dedicated to teaching graduate-aged students real magic. Brakebills tracks down potential students and tests them on their abilities before determining if they’re worth training. Once admitted, students discover their specialty in magic and learn how to use their powers for the benefit of others…or for their own profit.

Although it’s easy to compare Brakebills to Hogwarts, Brakebills is much more dangerous. It’s very easy to experiment at Brakebills, which leads to wild raves and horrific consequences from spells gone wrong. Fatalities are a sad reality at Brakebills and entire classes have gone missing due to mysterious circumstances. 

The other magic place in The Magicians is Fillory, a supposedly fictional land from a popular children’s book series not unlike CS Lewis’s Chronicle of Narnia. Similar to the Narnia books, the “Fillory and Further” books star three siblings from our world who explore Fillory and meets its cast of strange and dangerous creatures. While the “Fillory and Further” books are supposedly fiction, the Chatwins were real people, although two of the children disappeared before the books could be finished. 

Best Friends Turned Foes

The main characters of The Magicians are Quentin and Julia, childhood friends whose paths diverge after encountering real magic for the first time. Quentin and Julia are both invited to take Brakebills’s entrance exam, but only Quentin passes and is invited to study at the school. Quentin begins having vivid dreams of Fillory and eventually discovers that Fillory is real and ruled by a master magician named “the Beast”. Quentin eventually learns that the Beast is connected to the “Fillory and Further” novels and decides to travel to Fillory to stop him once and for all.

Julia’s path to magic is far darker and more dangerous than Quentin’s. Although her memories of Brakebills are wiped, she retains a vague recollection that magic is real and tries to learn magic on her own. After joining a group of self-taught hedge witches, she has a falling out with Quentin and nearly kills him with a spell trapping him in his own mind. Julia eventually joins up with a group of magicians trying to summon a god to rewrite the past. Instead, they summon an evil trickster god named Reynard the Fox who rapes Julia and kills all her friends. Afterwards, Julia has her memory wiped to forget that she ever encountered Reynard at all.

Julia and Quentin eventually reconcile and travel to Fillory together to obtain a god-killing blade to kill the Beast. But, when Julia’s memories are restored, she instead betrays Quentin, steals the blade, and sides with the Beast, who agrees to help her track down and kill Reynard.

Brakebills’s Other Students

Although Quentin and Julia are the central characters of The Magicians, it’s the supporting cast who really makes the show so fun to watch.

Quentin’s main love interest in the series is Alice, a repressed but powerful classmate who found Brakebills without an entrance exam. Alice has a natual aptitude for magic, but only came to Brakebills to discover what happened to her brother, who disappeared while studying at the school. Alice and Quentin share a strong connection and eventually become a couple, but Quentin quickly sabotages the relationship thanks to his own immaturity.

Most of the show’s humor comes from Eliot and Margo, two hedonistic upperclassmen who befriend Quentin and lead him down the road of debauchery. The pair joins Quentin’s quest to kill the Beast when the creature possesses his boyfriend Mike and goes on a killing spree through the school. Eliot kills Mike, which pushes him into an ever-deepening depression.

Quentin’s “destiny” also seems tied to Penny, an abrasive student with the dangerous ability to Travel between worlds. Although Penny and Quentin don’t like each other, Penny relies on Quentin’s deep knowledge of Fillory when he starts having visions of the Beast lurking in the fantasy world. The Beast cuts off one of Penny’s hands during Quentin’s fight with the Beast at the end of last season, robbing Penny of his ability to use magic. 

The final main cast member of The Magicians is Kady, a second generation magician with one foot in both sides of the magical community. Kady’s mother was a failed hedge witch whose experiments with magic put Kady in debt to the powerful hedge witch Marina. While having a complicated relationship with Penny, Kady smuggled mystical books and ingredients from Brakebills to Marina for months, until Marina killed Kady’s mother for trying to assist Julia in steal some of her spellbooks. Knowing that Brakebills would piece together how Marina got her spells, Kady fled Brakebills and ended up a part of Julia’s ill-fated summons of Reynard. Julia sacrificed herself to save Kady, and she hasn’t been seen since. 

So What Happens Next?

Season 2 opens with Quentin and his friends exploring the world of Fillory trying to find a new way to kill the Beast. Each of the characters should have their own set of challenges to face. Fillory’s magic is dying, which could spell an end to magic everywhere, one of Penny’s hands is missing, and Eliot learns that becoming the “high king of Fillory” (a title he inherited last year) comes with unexpected responsibilities. We should also see Julia go through even more lengths for revenge, along with her unexpected alliance with the Beast. 

If you want to watch The Magicians, new episodes air starting on Wednesday at 9 PM.