If Syfy's The ????? ?????Magicianswere a person, its love language would be gifts.
Its greatest moments were well-earned treats dispensed to an audience careful enough to pay attention, like Season 3's "A Life in the Day" episode that gave Quelliot shippers an entire episode of Quentin and Elliot's love, its infinitely gif-able pop culture references, and the show's many delightful musical numbers. Its weakest moments came when The Magicians failed to tie those moments together and wound up tangled in its own plot ribbon.
It makes sense, then, that the finale starts with a false Christmas. After our heroes are rescued from their latest heist by Santa Claus, the jolly old magician decorates their apartment with Christmas cheer and leaves each character a gift of some significance. It's not Christmas in the show, and the truncated gift-receiving scene highlights how sad it is that The Magicianswill never air a full holiday special, but the sentiment behind giving each character one last token set an apt tone for the beginning of the end.
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The sentiment behind giving each character one last token set an apt tone for the beginning of the end.
Julia and Penny 23 receive baby supplies, and later in the episode she gives birth to their daughter. There's some complicated magic surrounding the birth that doesn't really matter in the end — baby HQ's birth is really a gift for the audience, who gets to imagine what their life will look like as a family.
Margo gets a box pendant to hold her fairy eye whenever she feels like popping it out, a gesture at her transformation from The Magicians' resident ice queen into someone who would endure endless pain to protect the people she loves.
Alice gets a lesson that the magic, world-creating spell she thought came from Quentin's drawer was actually placed there by Santa, rewriting her journey this season as one of self-discovery instead of a woman chasing her dead boyfriend's dream. It's a gift for Alice fans who wished she were less defined by her relationship with Quentin (and yet it comes too late to fully explore that realization).
And Eliot gets a bracelet. His present is brushed off in the beginning of the episode but winds up being the finale's most significant. After the finale's main event re: the Fillorian apocalypse, Eliot learns that the bracelet allows him to perceive Charlton, the long-dead Fillorian whose conscience has been living inside Eliot's head all season, inside the body of the other long-dead magical pervert who surrendered his flesh to give Charlton a chance at having his own body (this show has always been a lot).
Finally able to touch and see each other, Charlton doesn't waste much time laying his cards on Eliot's table: "[I'm] a man who knows you well, is emotionally available, and plans to stick around."
The Eliot of any other season would say no or laugh him off. He's a character defined by disappointment, whose low expectations of the world primed him to think he deserves nothing. The Eliot of the finale visibly struggles with the weirdness of his former brain-roommate (actor Hale Appleman referred to Charlton as Eliot's "little Jiminy Cricket" in an interview with Mashable) wanting to be in a relationship with him but immediately accepts his offer to try.
The gift of seeing Eliot willing to try again with a good man is one of the finale's two best parting notions. The other is, of course, the magician's land.
That Fillory would explode by the end of The Magicianswas inevitable. Not only is it the climax of Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy of books upon which the show is (at this point, loosely) based, but the show could only mention the apocalypse so many times before following through on its underlying threat. Fillory blows up in the finale, but its characters get to go further.
There's one gift the show could never deliver.
Alice, Margo, Fen, and Josh are tasked with bringing the saved Fillorian population to a new land created by their own magic. Their land is formed in accordance with their latent wishes — there are knife trees for Fen and fields of crispy bacon for Alice — and the show ends with Margo hitting the button to bring humans into their new, peaceful magical realm. Each of those characters deserve a chance to start again, and their gift is an entire planet of possibilities the audience will never get to see.
"Fillory and Further" is a good finale forThe Magicians. It could have been better. Though the show came to an end one full season after the great misstep of killing Quentin Coldwater, it's difficult not to imagine every beat of the finale hitting harder if his character were still around. It is Quentin, after all, who creates a new land in Grossman's books and finds peace in the trilogy's final pages. What would Santa have left for him?
Losing Quentin before the finale ensures thatThe Magicians' ending will be forever short of satisfying. Some of it is nice fodder for fanfiction and the kind of dreamy speculation that keeps fan communities alive long after a show is gone. But the withheld possibility of every character getting their deserved ending feels like there's one gift the show could never deliver.