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cleolindaContent notes: We're going to discuss a couple of media portrayals of suicide, as well as the suicidal ideation I'm seeing out there in fandom, and similar thoughts I have experienced in the course of my own bipolar depression. I'm not used to discussing anything this raw, so, here's hoping we do okay with this. Please take care of yourselves.
Oh, and spoilers for The Magicians.
I'm going to try to write this out of love as well as anger.
The Magicians, if you have never watched it, is a raunchy, funny, disturbing, weird-ass fantasy show on the SyFy channel. Based on the Lev Grossman book trilogy, it has copious profanity, talking animals in ruffs, a sentient boat, oral sex performed on a door knob, multiple timelines, musical episodes, some genuinely upsetting scenes, and, at times, some really ill-advised happenings. When it is good, it's great, often in a What The Hell Did I Just Watch With My Own Eyes kind of way. The nutshell premise is that Our Heroes are graduate students studying magic at Shithole Off-Brand Hogwarts, where people die in horrible ways with some frequency, and then these students also discover that Off-Brand Narnia is real, except that it’s Shithole Narnia, and they take on the Sisyphean task of trying to fix it. Famous fantasy tropes turning out to be The Worst is a purposeful subversion, by the way; the idea that Everything Is Actually Terrible, but life is about pushing on regardless, is a big theme.
I watched this series in its entirety over the last 4-6 weeks or so. I didn't even spend three whole years with it, the way much of the fandom has. And yet, The Magicians killing off the main character, Quentin Coldwater, and the reasons why the producers did it, have fucked me up. Have been for a few days, are continuing to. People who read my blog anywhere between 2003-2016 will know that I wrote about Unfortunate Shit in Fictional Media a lot, and when I did, I tried to be as measured, thoughtful, and even-handed as possible. This is why I finally decided I needed to say something: this is real and this is serious and I can vouch for it.
I don't think I've ever straight-up called show runners out before, and, for that matter, I don't entirely know who I'm calling out, other than producers Sera Gamble, perhaps best known for Supernatural, and John McNamara. I don't know how high or low on the food chain this whole thing goes. I do know that it's not the cast's fault, because everyone who was not actually playing Quentin Coldwater was told two days before fans found out. They filmed dummy scenes and they were deceived. Tamaro606 (who watched the show with me, helped research the material below, and co-signs the spirit of this post) and I watched Arjun Gupta (Penny) try to reassure people on Twitter a week or two before the finale aired, not knowing what was actually going to air, and we watched him camp out in his mentions afterwards trying to comfort every single fan who replied to him. I'm sure Jason Ralph (Quentin), who I absolutely do not blame, is contractually forbidden from saying anything about it beyond official interviews. But I do know that he advocated for the Quentin/Eliot relationship, said it was important, and said it was real ("soulmates"; "a lifetime love"). I also know that it was important to Hale Appleman (Eliot), an openly queer actor, to play his character
and get this relationship on screen for people:
The various producers gave their big media interviews; these were posted shortly after the finale, and, in fairness, here's two of them, for full context. They mostly read as patronizing and self-congratulatory, but seemingly in the key of reasonable, until you hit the really discordant notes. I'll get to that.
The Hollywood Reporter: 'The Magicians' Creators Explain That Game-Changing Season 4 Finale Death
Vulture: The Magicians Writers Knew That Shocking Death Would Upset Fans. Here’s Why They Did It Anyway
The producers have been radio silent online ever since.
* * * * *
UPDATE: Sera Gamble decided, right as I was finalizing this post, to finally tweet a response to the fans, which reads in part, "Our intention's been to provide space for you to discuss and have feelings, without the writers intruding with explanation or trying to steer the conversation. [...] For those who've expressed personal pain, we empathize with you."
I will say simply that I am also aware of this 2017 article about the show:
* * * * *
The various cast members and the books' author gradually put out social-media statements of support/comfort for the fans, once it became abundantly clear that people were not coping well with the finale.
The Magicians Fans Are Really Upset About What Happened to Quentin
The Magicians Season 4 Finale Infuriates Fanbase
I’m Not Sure What I’m to Say; I’ll Say It Anyway: Responsibility and ‘The Magicians’
The Magicians' Season Finale Missed the Mark on a Huge Mental Health Issue
I'll tell you that I've personally checked out the tags on Tumblr, and there are a lot of vulnerable fans in pain out there, many in their teens and early twenties, who were dealing with enough in the world already and didn't need callous shit like this on top of it. And, quite frankly, I might be old enough to be their mom, but I'm one of those people too. It's a damn shame that I'm gonna have to lay this out like a court case to even explain why this has hurt people so much, but so be it. Because my first attempt at this post was a thousand words of blazing hellfire, and I don't think that's going to get anyone to listen.
And I want you to know, I understand that this could be a Jon Snow-style long con and the producers are lying their faces off and Quentin will be resurrected in season five! Surprise! I understand that we could all be making fools of ourselves, and I'm out here on this limb doing this anyway. And if that is the case: someone needs to come clean before this gets worse. What did you honestly think the reaction was going to be? Trending hashtags, emoji-laden Twitter Moments? Candlelight Tumblr memorial vigils? #Aesthetic photos of sad peaches on the 'gram? What were you thinking?
So. In return for the actors reaching out, there has been an outpouring of fan support, because God even knows how the rest of the cast felt about being told two days before the finale aired that all of this had been in the works for months behind their backs. And, as many others fans are out there are saying, I can't stand the idea that Hale Appleman in particular did such beautiful, meaningful work and might be sitting out there somewhere thinking that his advocacy hurt the people he wanted to help. I can't stand it. So Tamaro and I will chip in: It was beautiful, and we'll never forget it. Don't ever regret the work you did, any of you.
For my money, the key work in question is a particular episode, 4.05, "Escape from the Happy Place," that honestly meant a lot more to me than I ever guessed a wackadoo SyFy show about Shithole Narnia could. It calls back to the third season's fifth installment, "A Life in the Day," which was the landmark "Quentin and Eliot are life partners raising a family for fifty years in a pocket time-loop" episode. Altogether, the two episodes got a lot of admiring press:
The Magicians Just Aired Its Most Magical Episode
‘The Magicians’ Excels At High Concept Stand-Alone Episodes
'The Magicians' confirmed the show's best ship and the show is better for it
The Magicians’ Queliot Episode Is a Landmark Moment For Slash Fandom
The Magicians Takes A Huge Step Forward For Queer Ships
That's why I started watching the show, in fact—when I heard how things stood after "Happy Place": a really great, loving, actually textual queer relationship. Not winky innuendo, not vague teasing, not Rowling-style "well but off the page we're thinking it." And then the Quentin/Eliot relationship turned out to be something really special unto itself—Tumblr's favorite and most accurate word for it is "soft"—that you don't get to see a whole lot. It's honestly the kind of relationship I would want. My one complaint is that I would have also really liked to see two women in an acknowledged romance on the show, but we take what we can get, don't we?
We always do. We always make do with what we can get hold of.
So, starting sometime in March, I burn through all four seasons at the rate of 2-3 episodes a night with Tamaro. Somehow, the math worked out that we got to 4.11 and 4.12 the night of the finale, and we figured we'd watch the finale the next night—after checking in on what happened, spoilers be damned, because my blood pressure is too high and life is too short. So, as we watched 4.12, she discovered that Magicians Finale Twitter was ablaze; she tells me that they're saying Quentin was killed off.
"Yeah," I said calmly, "I thought it'd be Eliot, with Quentin as an outside chance." Because this is a show where people are constantly being horribly killed and then brought right back with a spell or a time-travel fix or a timeline hop or a "lol jk we were previewing a possible future."
And then she said, "No... they just announced that Jason Ralph is actually leaving the show."
"Ohhhhhh fuuuuuuck," I said.
So, back to "Escape from the Happy Place," eight episodes previous. It has been pointed out that, after the climactic line, "Peaches and plums, motherfucker, I'm alive in here"—just trust me when I say that this is incredible in context—Quentin and the real Eliot never get to speak again. Eliot is fighting to say this, you see, in the few moments he has managed to wrest his body back from some sort of ancient bodysnatching monster-god who has been in possession of it since the season three finale (just go with it). The rest of the time the two actors are together in season four, it's Quentin placating and bargaining with the monster to not hurt Eliot's body while the monster [plot plot plot]. Quentin's entire motivation is (paraphrased), "I have to get Eliot back, because I still care for him, even though I asked him to give love a shot, in the real world this time, and he turned me down." Eliot, meanwhile, has to figure out his worst, most traumatic regret in order to break through the monster's possession-hold for even a few short moments. What was it? Turning Quentin down. The present version of Eliot, confronting his memory self, admits to the memory Quentin that he ran away, because he was afraid. And then he kisses that memory version of Quentin. "If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I'm braver, I learned it from you."
‘The Magicians’ Revisited Its Most Traumatic Episode, and Redefined Drama in the Process
SpoilerTV Staff Choice Most Outstanding Performer of February - Hale Appleman. It is really an incredible, three-pronged performance, and it will stick with you.
I don't know about you, but what I took away from this episode is that Eliot does, in fact, want to get out of there, get back to Quentin, and make up for his mistake. That must be where this narrative is going, right, or else why did we get this? I know I just started going here, but this is not a wild assumption, right?
‘The Magicians’ Finale Broke My Heart, and I’m Not Sure I Can Go Back: "But if everyone went into Season 4 knowing it would be Quentin’s last, then, respectfully: what the fuck was that?"
So, we get to the finale. Quentin dies without getting to speak to Eliot ever again. Eliot never gets to tell Quentin that he actually does love him. The whole thing is just... abandoned. Instead, Eliot gets to grieve Quentin with their friends over a slow-cooking a-ha singalong and a bonfire of mementos (peaches and plums, motherfucker). Because viewers having to watch queer characters grieving their lost loved ones is fresh and revolutionary.
TV Tropes: Bury Your Gays
LGBTQ Characters - Happiness is a Death Sentence (2016 post)
This is also why I get really angry that Sera Gamble frames this as "what all of that means for Eliot" in the next season. Particularly since we already went through this once, when the show forced him to kill his own boyfriend-gone-evil in the first season, and then spend the rest of it in an alcoholic downward spiral of grief and self-loathing. Or, you know. You could let Eliot see what it's like not to run away from happiness and not have to bury every man who loves him, I don't know. How do you not scream when you read Hale Appleman, who was not told what was going to happen, saying, "I want for Eliot, as much as anyone else, for him to see a happy relationship, and he’s about due for one"? You know, happiness, that thing the show had in the "fifty years raising a family and dying of old age" episode—a time loop that was promptly overwritten, the whole thing erased to be nothing but a dream-like memory. Is that all this show wants to be good at—erasing?
This is a show where a guy and a sloth, a literal actual sloth like you see in the zoo, get to have a happy romantic ending. Oh, and there was the teenage girl who ended up with a talking bear, after someone actually won an election on the promise of legal interspecies couplings. That was heterosexual bestiality, though, so sure, why not.
By the way, that cast singalong memorial is, apparently, also the ending of Deadpool 2.
Is the show... is it just fucking with us now?
Reviewers on Their Own Network Dot Com gave no quarter:
Was it queerbaiting? Or was it "queercatching"? "The goal is to attract queer fans, or even just general young fans, with the appearance of being socially aware and LGBT friendly, but not so LGBT friendly as to alienate straight fans and executives. It leaves them patting themselves on the back for representation, and is crawling for scraps."
For that matter, Quentin Coldwater Is Bisexual. Did Anyone Tell His Writers?: "[W]e all saw the episode this season where Quentin, you know, asks out his same-sex friend. I mean, we were there. Nor was 'Escape from the Happy Place' an isolated incident; it was the culmination of a long history of Quentin showing really obvious romantic and sexual interest in men. This is not a coded thing. Like, he has sex with men."
This happened. It was on the show. We saw it, and dialogue explicitly remarked on it, and in fact his sexuality is the one thing Quentin is not anxious about. Jason Ralph said of the "Life in a Day" episode, "[Quentin] fell in love with a woman and a man"; "He fell in love with his best friend."
Honestly, part of the fan outcry that the Quentin/Eliot relationship was abandoned is simply DID WE IMAGINE THIS? WHY DO WE FEEL LIKE WE ARE LOSING OUR MINDS? I just watched this whole entire series, all of it, and you are not imagining this, okay? Everything I know, as a writer and reader, about narrative was pointing towards some kind of romantic catharsis, angsty or not, and then someone just wished the whole thing into the cornfield. I have no idea what to make of all this. I cannot explain it any better than you can. In fact, this Opposite Planet lurch seems to be the case for the entire finale. I did not actually come here today to litigate, uh, everything else, but since we're here: it feels like someone took the writers' room hostage and forced them to abandon or spit on every single plot line they had going.
An Open Letter to Sera Gamble and John McNamara: a long-form post that includes an in-depth discussion of that:
"The only character who gets second chances seems to be the pedophile writer who just.won’t.die." (Yes, that is also a thing on this show. Off-Brand Sex Offender C.S. Lewis gets multiple S4 episodes to complain that "no one sees you for who you are, only what you do." Can I just sit here for a moment and gesture wildly at the universe for even having to write this sentence?)
I would also like to point out that season four had a whole episode about Zelda, Fen, and Kady "taking back their stories," and Margo had an entire musical episode about her feminist rage. And yet, the finale still screwed all of those characters over. My favorite example is how, after the whole entire episode in which Margo's psyche manifested as a musical hallucination of her best friend Eliot, we hit the finale and Margo declines to go help rescue him. Instead, she wants to sit and stare at her new, off/on boyfriend-turned-cursed-fish at home (no, this one actually doesn't make sense in the show, either). What? What? I can't? How am I supposed to? I can't even begin to?
This show honestly built a whole season three episode around a song by noted heterosexuals [checks notes] Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, and then had the gall to come in last week and Bury Your Bisexual like they were doing the world a favor. They did that. "Love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves" and they fucking did that.
I feel like I'm losing my mind as well, yes. I have never had this kind of reaction to a TV show, much less one I consumed in one (1) month. Five days later and I still want to punch a wall. Actually, you know what really did me in? Not a mere plot development. It was the show runner interviews afterwards, and their apparent, total inability to understand exactly who Quentin was and what relevance the show had in the first place.
The Hollywood Reporter:
And Quentin still means even more than that. The funny thing is that I really disliked this character at the beginning of the series. Gradually, as Quentin was called out by the other characters over and over, he started to come into his own—in fact, one of the really great things about the show is watching how most of the characters genuinely grow and evolve. Then I realized that one of the reasons Quentin put me off was because he was a little too real for my comfort. He says that he's been hospitalized for depression and suicidal ideation; he mentions taking Abilify, which he takes for depression, but it is also prescribed for bipolar II, and framing Quentin that way rings true to me. One of the books uses the word "Asperger's," and Jason Ralph's portrayal shows it; I hadn't wanted to assume that characterization until I saw that post. You see, I discovered late in life, as many women have, that I'm on the spectrum myself. I am forty now, and I have spent my late thirties coming to terms with the fact that there was so much I didn't know about myself. It turns out that this whole time I was... well, most of the things Quentin is. But, you know, he's a White Male Protagonist™, so it's revolutionary to give him the boot. Even though multiple people have pointed out that viewers across all kinds of intersectional axes saw him as a White Male Protagonist second, and a fellow struggler in the world first.
Given those struggles, the last act of the finale was a bad move. Popsugar has one of the best callouts:
However, the statement that personally did me in was this line: "Quentin came in with a very specific purpose and a very specific set of life goals and challenges, and in a way, I'm not sure what we would have done with the character had he lived."
This character is what, in his early 20s? He's got no story left? He creates an entire new world at the end of the book trilogy, with Alice and Eliot at his side, and all the producers can think of for him to do in season four is die? He's bisexual and has people who want to love him, he's struggling with the challenges of mental illness, and you can't think of anything for him to do?
Once this idea really sank in, I started to think... one after the other, I came to realize that I'm bipolar, I'm bisexual, I'm on the spectrum. And I turned 40 last year. And it's taking me so long to recover from a spinal surgery more than a year ago that I've started to fear—these aches and pains and inabilities, will it never get any better for me? Do I have even less to live for than this poor kid in his twenties, who has so much to live for, but for whom these producers can't imagine more than death? He was "good and true," and he was brave, and brought everyone together, and even if he wasn't the best magician, it all still meant something—listen, let me get real with you here. Maybe people who have been in a place this raw need to know that other people have been, too. These are actual text messages I sent during one of the discussions Tamaro and I had, and if you're vulnerable right now, you may need to skip over them:
That was the story, Quentin's story, that I—and a lot of fans much younger and much more susceptible than me—watched unfold. It was why I came to really love him. He put himself out there for Eliot, and Eliot's single greatest most traumatic regret, we are told, is turning someone "good and true" down out of fear. And Quentin never got to hear, "If I'm braver now, it's because of you"—a statement about living. He only got to see "beautiful" grief.
It got me this bad—and not the kind of "bad" a show runner should be "proud" of—and I barely even go here.
But I want you to know: I am not in crisis. I'm an old hand at keeping my head above water somehow. The only reason I'm letting you see those texts is because I know that one thing I said in that fit of rage-despair is true: you can choose to be brave, and kind, and loving, even it feels like you have to rebuild your will to live from scratch every damn day. Choosing to live and to hang on by your fingernails with as much love as you can—that itself has value, and it has valor. It matters.
As "ambiguous" as the show runners wanted to leave Quentin's death—a choice that itself is irresponsible, what the hell—plenty of people are willing to explain how his fate reads more as a suicide than a necessary sacrifice; the most concise is this one on Tumblr.
On Fannishness, Intersectionality, & a Whole Other Grab-bag of Entitled Millennial Bullshit:
Let's go back to the executive producers' initial announcement:
"In real life, no one is safe," they say. Yeah, I think people in the vulnerable communities—queer, mentally ill, neurodivergent—who identified with Quentin have fucking noticed that, actually.
I’m Not Sure What I’m to Say; I’ll Say It Anyway: Responsibility and ‘The Magicians’:
People who have read my work know me as a rational, even-handed person who has written frequently, calmly, openly about mental health. I promised myself a long time ago that I would never harm myself. I made that promise. I've been distressed the last five days, but not in danger. But whenever I was in a bad place, sometimes for months on end, that I just had to... slog through, wait out, because I made that promise, that's the shape those thoughts took. Just... sat there with them. I don't need it dramatized. Putting it "beautifully" on screen is not empowering, uplifting, revolutionary, fresh. It collaborates with illness and pain.
Oh, but it's fine, you see:
IT'S NOT 'A BUMMER'? Are any of you people listening to yourselves?
Hey, you want to talk about the part that really sent me into the stratosphere?
This is the most irresponsible form of "just playing devil's advocate" I've ever seen in my entire life. Really get your head into the suicidal mindset and "bat around all the layers" of whether this kid just gave up on life or not? How safe do you think spending much time at that podium is going to be for your debate club? Do you think I'm not already arguing for the will to live with my brain on a near-daily basis? This isn't a fucking debate. This is our lives that we're fighting for, and if fucking talking about it was the solution I wouldn't have been paying a therapist for the last twenty years. I have been under a carefully calibrated regimen of medications and therapy since I was a teenager. I am doing everything "right." And this is still fucking me up. You know, at least 13 Reasons Why was openly about a girl dying of suicide, deeply irresponsible triggers and all. "Let's watch people be sorry that she's gone" was the premise. No one got hit with that after fifty-two episodes of crude fantasy shenanigans, while the actual narrative seemed to point towards some kind of positive catharsis. No, we got Quentin watching his friends grieve, while being assured that giving up his young life had been a cosmic good.
He was a Mender, and you didn't let him fix shit.
Are you ready for some magic? Here's the spell I'm going to cast:
Let there be shows with competent writers who can create genuine, high, dramatic stakes without cruelty. Let the creators of those shows flourish; let them get the good press, and may they deserve the trust they're given. Let there be vulnerable characters who aren't ripped away from people getting to see a reflection of themselves, at last. May there be creatives who fucking do better. You can be one of those people or you can get out of the way, whether you think that's "real" or "revolutionary" or not. The outpouring of this fandom is the Ghost of Television Present. Figure your shit out before Television Future shows up.
Oh, and spoilers for The Magicians.
I'm going to try to write this out of love as well as anger.
The Magicians, if you have never watched it, is a raunchy, funny, disturbing, weird-ass fantasy show on the SyFy channel. Based on the Lev Grossman book trilogy, it has copious profanity, talking animals in ruffs, a sentient boat, oral sex performed on a door knob, multiple timelines, musical episodes, some genuinely upsetting scenes, and, at times, some really ill-advised happenings. When it is good, it's great, often in a What The Hell Did I Just Watch With My Own Eyes kind of way. The nutshell premise is that Our Heroes are graduate students studying magic at Shithole Off-Brand Hogwarts, where people die in horrible ways with some frequency, and then these students also discover that Off-Brand Narnia is real, except that it’s Shithole Narnia, and they take on the Sisyphean task of trying to fix it. Famous fantasy tropes turning out to be The Worst is a purposeful subversion, by the way; the idea that Everything Is Actually Terrible, but life is about pushing on regardless, is a big theme.
I watched this series in its entirety over the last 4-6 weeks or so. I didn't even spend three whole years with it, the way much of the fandom has. And yet, The Magicians killing off the main character, Quentin Coldwater, and the reasons why the producers did it, have fucked me up. Have been for a few days, are continuing to. People who read my blog anywhere between 2003-2016 will know that I wrote about Unfortunate Shit in Fictional Media a lot, and when I did, I tried to be as measured, thoughtful, and even-handed as possible. This is why I finally decided I needed to say something: this is real and this is serious and I can vouch for it.
I don't think I've ever straight-up called show runners out before, and, for that matter, I don't entirely know who I'm calling out, other than producers Sera Gamble, perhaps best known for Supernatural, and John McNamara. I don't know how high or low on the food chain this whole thing goes. I do know that it's not the cast's fault, because everyone who was not actually playing Quentin Coldwater was told two days before fans found out. They filmed dummy scenes and they were deceived. Tamaro606 (who watched the show with me, helped research the material below, and co-signs the spirit of this post) and I watched Arjun Gupta (Penny) try to reassure people on Twitter a week or two before the finale aired, not knowing what was actually going to air, and we watched him camp out in his mentions afterwards trying to comfort every single fan who replied to him. I'm sure Jason Ralph (Quentin), who I absolutely do not blame, is contractually forbidden from saying anything about it beyond official interviews. But I do know that he advocated for the Quentin/Eliot relationship, said it was important, and said it was real ("soulmates"; "a lifetime love"). I also know that it was important to Hale Appleman (Eliot), an openly queer actor, to play his character
I'm just so incredibly grateful that I get to be part of the show at all. Honestly, it's not lost on me that it's a tremendous honor and also a tremendous responsibility to play this part because [Eliot] couldn't have existed on TV ten years ago
and get this relationship on screen for people:
There is a friendship. There is a romance. There is a soul connection. There is sexual fluidity. It's all there.
[...]
We definitely wanted it to sustain throughout the rest of the series.
The various producers gave their big media interviews; these were posted shortly after the finale, and, in fairness, here's two of them, for full context. They mostly read as patronizing and self-congratulatory, but seemingly in the key of reasonable, until you hit the really discordant notes. I'll get to that.
The Hollywood Reporter: 'The Magicians' Creators Explain That Game-Changing Season 4 Finale Death
Vulture: The Magicians Writers Knew That Shocking Death Would Upset Fans. Here’s Why They Did It Anyway
The producers have been radio silent online ever since.
* * * * *
UPDATE: Sera Gamble decided, right as I was finalizing this post, to finally tweet a response to the fans, which reads in part, "Our intention's been to provide space for you to discuss and have feelings, without the writers intruding with explanation or trying to steer the conversation. [...] For those who've expressed personal pain, we empathize with you."
I will say simply that I am also aware of this 2017 article about the show:
“Writing deaths of beloved characters is not hard. None of them — honestly,” McNamara told Inverse earlier this month. Gamble agreed, admitting that emotionally crushing the audience is actually “delightful, truly the opposite of hard. I loved writing those deaths.”I'm going to need someone to address the discrepancy between these two mindsets before I take any response at face value.
* * * * *
The various cast members and the books' author gradually put out social-media statements of support/comfort for the fans, once it became abundantly clear that people were not coping well with the finale.
The Magicians Fans Are Really Upset About What Happened to Quentin
The Magicians Season 4 Finale Infuriates Fanbase
I’m Not Sure What I’m to Say; I’ll Say It Anyway: Responsibility and ‘The Magicians’
The Magicians' Season Finale Missed the Mark on a Huge Mental Health Issue
It's what comes next, though, that really drives home how much The Magicians left behind its long-standing ideals and lessons. In the Underworld, Quentin has an "exit interview" where he asks a devastating question: "Did I do something brave to save my friends? Or did I finally find a way to kill myself?" And that's where things go even further sideways.
I'll tell you that I've personally checked out the tags on Tumblr, and there are a lot of vulnerable fans in pain out there, many in their teens and early twenties, who were dealing with enough in the world already and didn't need callous shit like this on top of it. And, quite frankly, I might be old enough to be their mom, but I'm one of those people too. It's a damn shame that I'm gonna have to lay this out like a court case to even explain why this has hurt people so much, but so be it. Because my first attempt at this post was a thousand words of blazing hellfire, and I don't think that's going to get anyone to listen.
And I want you to know, I understand that this could be a Jon Snow-style long con and the producers are lying their faces off and Quentin will be resurrected in season five! Surprise! I understand that we could all be making fools of ourselves, and I'm out here on this limb doing this anyway. And if that is the case: someone needs to come clean before this gets worse. What did you honestly think the reaction was going to be? Trending hashtags, emoji-laden Twitter Moments? Candlelight Tumblr memorial vigils? #Aesthetic photos of sad peaches on the 'gram? What were you thinking?
So. In return for the actors reaching out, there has been an outpouring of fan support, because God even knows how the rest of the cast felt about being told two days before the finale aired that all of this had been in the works for months behind their backs. And, as many others fans are out there are saying, I can't stand the idea that Hale Appleman in particular did such beautiful, meaningful work and might be sitting out there somewhere thinking that his advocacy hurt the people he wanted to help. I can't stand it. So Tamaro and I will chip in: It was beautiful, and we'll never forget it. Don't ever regret the work you did, any of you.
For my money, the key work in question is a particular episode, 4.05, "Escape from the Happy Place," that honestly meant a lot more to me than I ever guessed a wackadoo SyFy show about Shithole Narnia could. It calls back to the third season's fifth installment, "A Life in the Day," which was the landmark "Quentin and Eliot are life partners raising a family for fifty years in a pocket time-loop" episode. Altogether, the two episodes got a lot of admiring press:
The Magicians Just Aired Its Most Magical Episode
‘The Magicians’ Excels At High Concept Stand-Alone Episodes
'The Magicians' confirmed the show's best ship and the show is better for it
The Magicians’ Queliot Episode Is a Landmark Moment For Slash Fandom
The Magicians Takes A Huge Step Forward For Queer Ships
That's why I started watching the show, in fact—when I heard how things stood after "Happy Place": a really great, loving, actually textual queer relationship. Not winky innuendo, not vague teasing, not Rowling-style "well but off the page we're thinking it." And then the Quentin/Eliot relationship turned out to be something really special unto itself—Tumblr's favorite and most accurate word for it is "soft"—that you don't get to see a whole lot. It's honestly the kind of relationship I would want. My one complaint is that I would have also really liked to see two women in an acknowledged romance on the show, but we take what we can get, don't we?
We always do. We always make do with what we can get hold of.
So, starting sometime in March, I burn through all four seasons at the rate of 2-3 episodes a night with Tamaro. Somehow, the math worked out that we got to 4.11 and 4.12 the night of the finale, and we figured we'd watch the finale the next night—after checking in on what happened, spoilers be damned, because my blood pressure is too high and life is too short. So, as we watched 4.12, she discovered that Magicians Finale Twitter was ablaze; she tells me that they're saying Quentin was killed off.
"Yeah," I said calmly, "I thought it'd be Eliot, with Quentin as an outside chance." Because this is a show where people are constantly being horribly killed and then brought right back with a spell or a time-travel fix or a timeline hop or a "lol jk we were previewing a possible future."
And then she said, "No... they just announced that Jason Ralph is actually leaving the show."
"Ohhhhhh fuuuuuuck," I said.
So, back to "Escape from the Happy Place," eight episodes previous. It has been pointed out that, after the climactic line, "Peaches and plums, motherfucker, I'm alive in here"—just trust me when I say that this is incredible in context—Quentin and the real Eliot never get to speak again. Eliot is fighting to say this, you see, in the few moments he has managed to wrest his body back from some sort of ancient bodysnatching monster-god who has been in possession of it since the season three finale (just go with it). The rest of the time the two actors are together in season four, it's Quentin placating and bargaining with the monster to not hurt Eliot's body while the monster [plot plot plot]. Quentin's entire motivation is (paraphrased), "I have to get Eliot back, because I still care for him, even though I asked him to give love a shot, in the real world this time, and he turned me down." Eliot, meanwhile, has to figure out his worst, most traumatic regret in order to break through the monster's possession-hold for even a few short moments. What was it? Turning Quentin down. The present version of Eliot, confronting his memory self, admits to the memory Quentin that he ran away, because he was afraid. And then he kisses that memory version of Quentin. "If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I'm braver, I learned it from you."
‘The Magicians’ Revisited Its Most Traumatic Episode, and Redefined Drama in the Process
SpoilerTV Staff Choice Most Outstanding Performer of February - Hale Appleman. It is really an incredible, three-pronged performance, and it will stick with you.
I don't know about you, but what I took away from this episode is that Eliot does, in fact, want to get out of there, get back to Quentin, and make up for his mistake. That must be where this narrative is going, right, or else why did we get this? I know I just started going here, but this is not a wild assumption, right?
‘The Magicians’ Finale Broke My Heart, and I’m Not Sure I Can Go Back: "But if everyone went into Season 4 knowing it would be Quentin’s last, then, respectfully: what the fuck was that?"
So, we get to the finale. Quentin dies without getting to speak to Eliot ever again. Eliot never gets to tell Quentin that he actually does love him. The whole thing is just... abandoned. Instead, Eliot gets to grieve Quentin with their friends over a slow-cooking a-ha singalong and a bonfire of mementos (peaches and plums, motherfucker). Because viewers having to watch queer characters grieving their lost loved ones is fresh and revolutionary.
TV Tropes: Bury Your Gays
LGBTQ Characters - Happiness is a Death Sentence (2016 post)
This is also why I get really angry that Sera Gamble frames this as "what all of that means for Eliot" in the next season. Particularly since we already went through this once, when the show forced him to kill his own boyfriend-gone-evil in the first season, and then spend the rest of it in an alcoholic downward spiral of grief and self-loathing. Or, you know. You could let Eliot see what it's like not to run away from happiness and not have to bury every man who loves him, I don't know. How do you not scream when you read Hale Appleman, who was not told what was going to happen, saying, "I want for Eliot, as much as anyone else, for him to see a happy relationship, and he’s about due for one"? You know, happiness, that thing the show had in the "fifty years raising a family and dying of old age" episode—a time loop that was promptly overwritten, the whole thing erased to be nothing but a dream-like memory. Is that all this show wants to be good at—erasing?
The Hollywood Reporter: After fighting all season to save Eliot, Quentin never actually gets to see him again. Given how central that relationship has been to the season, did you consider having them reunite before Quentin died?
McNamara: That's the interesting thing about death in real life — rarely, when someone close to you dies, do you get that kind of movie goodbye hospital scene. That almost never happens. I've lost my share of people, and I was not there for any of their deaths, and in most cases didn't think they were going to die when they died. That’s part of the pain of it, and I think had we given Quentin and Eliot a final scene, it would have had a kind of artificiality to it for me, and it would have lessened the impact that it is going to have on Eliot going forward.
This is a show where a guy and a sloth, a literal actual sloth like you see in the zoo, get to have a happy romantic ending. Oh, and there was the teenage girl who ended up with a talking bear, after someone actually won an election on the promise of legal interspecies couplings. That was heterosexual bestiality, though, so sure, why not.
By the way, that cast singalong memorial is, apparently, also the ending of Deadpool 2.
Is the show... is it just fucking with us now?
Reviewers on Their Own Network Dot Com gave no quarter:
Without [Quentin], we’re left asking what this show looks like. And not in a good way, the interesting way that feels progressive and bold and like the writers are taking risks that will pay off. More in the “it feels pointless to continue watching” way, which is such a sad thing to admit but it’s a feeling I can’t escape right now.
[...]
I can’t believe I’m about to say this but f*ck it: The Magicians queerbaited us, y’all. They queerbaited us all season and then killed off a major queer character. I’m struggling to accept that this is the same show we’ve come to love over the course of four seasons. [...] It’s almost offensive how quickly the show just wrote this pairing off, not to mention the pacing and writing in this finale felt sloppy and, dare I say, lazy? If you’re going for shock and awe, at least plot the story well.
Was it queerbaiting? Or was it "queercatching"? "The goal is to attract queer fans, or even just general young fans, with the appearance of being socially aware and LGBT friendly, but not so LGBT friendly as to alienate straight fans and executives. It leaves them patting themselves on the back for representation, and is crawling for scraps."
For that matter, Quentin Coldwater Is Bisexual. Did Anyone Tell His Writers?: "[W]e all saw the episode this season where Quentin, you know, asks out his same-sex friend. I mean, we were there. Nor was 'Escape from the Happy Place' an isolated incident; it was the culmination of a long history of Quentin showing really obvious romantic and sexual interest in men. This is not a coded thing. Like, he has sex with men."
This happened. It was on the show. We saw it, and dialogue explicitly remarked on it, and in fact his sexuality is the one thing Quentin is not anxious about. Jason Ralph said of the "Life in a Day" episode, "[Quentin] fell in love with a woman and a man"; "He fell in love with his best friend."
Honestly, part of the fan outcry that the Quentin/Eliot relationship was abandoned is simply DID WE IMAGINE THIS? WHY DO WE FEEL LIKE WE ARE LOSING OUR MINDS? I just watched this whole entire series, all of it, and you are not imagining this, okay? Everything I know, as a writer and reader, about narrative was pointing towards some kind of romantic catharsis, angsty or not, and then someone just wished the whole thing into the cornfield. I have no idea what to make of all this. I cannot explain it any better than you can. In fact, this Opposite Planet lurch seems to be the case for the entire finale. I did not actually come here today to litigate, uh, everything else, but since we're here: it feels like someone took the writers' room hostage and forced them to abandon or spit on every single plot line they had going.
An Open Letter to Sera Gamble and John McNamara: a long-form post that includes an in-depth discussion of that:
When 4.13 aired, it kind of felt like the episode existed in a vacuum. [...] Instead of a story about characters finding ways to forge their own futures despite what kind of predetermined destinies have been written for them, we get a story that railroads a character right into the destiny that was specifically averted earlier in the season. And the worst part is that, in order to write a story which ends with Quentin Coldwater’s death, so many other character’s stories were sabotaged along the way."Honestly? They didn’t just fuck over Q, they fucked over pretty much all of them."
"The only character who gets second chances seems to be the pedophile writer who just.won’t.die." (Yes, that is also a thing on this show. Off-Brand Sex Offender C.S. Lewis gets multiple S4 episodes to complain that "no one sees you for who you are, only what you do." Can I just sit here for a moment and gesture wildly at the universe for even having to write this sentence?)
I would also like to point out that season four had a whole episode about Zelda, Fen, and Kady "taking back their stories," and Margo had an entire musical episode about her feminist rage. And yet, the finale still screwed all of those characters over. My favorite example is how, after the whole entire episode in which Margo's psyche manifested as a musical hallucination of her best friend Eliot, we hit the finale and Margo declines to go help rescue him. Instead, she wants to sit and stare at her new, off/on boyfriend-turned-cursed-fish at home (no, this one actually doesn't make sense in the show, either). What? What? I can't? How am I supposed to? I can't even begin to?
This show honestly built a whole season three episode around a song by noted heterosexuals [checks notes] Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, and then had the gall to come in last week and Bury Your Bisexual like they were doing the world a favor. They did that. "Love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves" and they fucking did that.
I feel like I'm losing my mind as well, yes. I have never had this kind of reaction to a TV show, much less one I consumed in one (1) month. Five days later and I still want to punch a wall. Actually, you know what really did me in? Not a mere plot development. It was the show runner interviews afterwards, and their apparent, total inability to understand exactly who Quentin was and what relevance the show had in the first place.
The Hollywood Reporter:
McNamara: And from a dramaturgical point of view, it's kind of great that at last, the white male lead on a show is no longer safe.Meanwhile, back two months ago, you've got Hale Appleman's understanding of Quentin: "It's refreshing to have a 'white male protagonist' who is blurring those lines a little bit in a way that you don't see very much, particularly in genre television, particularly in fantasy television." I keep going back to his interviews because he seems to be the one speaking for the trees here, the one who actually gets it.
And Quentin still means even more than that. The funny thing is that I really disliked this character at the beginning of the series. Gradually, as Quentin was called out by the other characters over and over, he started to come into his own—in fact, one of the really great things about the show is watching how most of the characters genuinely grow and evolve. Then I realized that one of the reasons Quentin put me off was because he was a little too real for my comfort. He says that he's been hospitalized for depression and suicidal ideation; he mentions taking Abilify, which he takes for depression, but it is also prescribed for bipolar II, and framing Quentin that way rings true to me. One of the books uses the word "Asperger's," and Jason Ralph's portrayal shows it; I hadn't wanted to assume that characterization until I saw that post. You see, I discovered late in life, as many women have, that I'm on the spectrum myself. I am forty now, and I have spent my late thirties coming to terms with the fact that there was so much I didn't know about myself. It turns out that this whole time I was... well, most of the things Quentin is. But, you know, he's a White Male Protagonist™, so it's revolutionary to give him the boot. Even though multiple people have pointed out that viewers across all kinds of intersectional axes saw him as a White Male Protagonist second, and a fellow struggler in the world first.
Given those struggles, the last act of the finale was a bad move. Popsugar has one of the best callouts:
In the same interview, McNamara draws a line between Q's death and finally realizing his life was worthwhile, as in, he had to die to realize that.
"It felt like the major question in his life is, 'Is my life truly worth living? Was it a good thing that I didn't succeed in killing myself at 15 or 18?' He now has that answer: he mattered to these other people, and their lives are never going to be the same for knowing him," he explained. To Vulture, he added, "There's a saying that a psychiatrist once said to me, which is that the subconscious always gets what it wants, and the conscious mind often never knows."
It's an unexpected — and dangerous — misstep for a show that's always been so cognizant when dealing with issues of mental health. To suggest that a kind, gentle, and, yes, depressed man only realizes his life is worthwhile after he dies, or that his journey had nowhere left to go? It's irresponsible and downright chilling. There is always a journey left to make, and life is worthwhile while we're still living it. Piling on top of that: Q gets to watch his friends memorialize him around a bonfire and see how much they miss him, which is a popular element of real-life suicidal ideation (i.e. "I bet they'll miss me when I'm gone"). The sequence is exquisitely, realistically filmed and acted — which makes it all the more frightening, or borderline triggering, to real viewers.
However, the statement that personally did me in was this line: "Quentin came in with a very specific purpose and a very specific set of life goals and challenges, and in a way, I'm not sure what we would have done with the character had he lived."
This character is what, in his early 20s? He's got no story left? He creates an entire new world at the end of the book trilogy, with Alice and Eliot at his side, and all the producers can think of for him to do in season four is die? He's bisexual and has people who want to love him, he's struggling with the challenges of mental illness, and you can't think of anything for him to do?
Once this idea really sank in, I started to think... one after the other, I came to realize that I'm bipolar, I'm bisexual, I'm on the spectrum. And I turned 40 last year. And it's taking me so long to recover from a spinal surgery more than a year ago that I've started to fear—these aches and pains and inabilities, will it never get any better for me? Do I have even less to live for than this poor kid in his twenties, who has so much to live for, but for whom these producers can't imagine more than death? He was "good and true," and he was brave, and brought everyone together, and even if he wasn't the best magician, it all still meant something—listen, let me get real with you here. Maybe people who have been in a place this raw need to know that other people have been, too. These are actual text messages I sent during one of the discussions Tamaro and I had, and if you're vulnerable right now, you may need to skip over them:
It’s also why the [well, what stories did we have to tell about him anyway] stuff hurts so much
[The story showed] how someone “not important” can be important because they’re brave and kind and loving, which is something you can choose to be even if you have no “talents” or “destiny”
Or something you can try to be even when your brain is trying to kill you
I have gone through a bad 2-3 years where I just felt dead inside for no reason and like I would never do anything useful in my life ever again
so you think, can I just try to hang in there until this passes? Can I just try to be good and kind and loving and support others even if I can’t support myself?
Yeah, you can do that [a story like this would seem to say], until finally you find the right moment to throw your life away and tell yourself that everyone misses you, at least
I have been under a doctor's guidance for 21 years, I am medicated from here to eternity, and I only watched this show for a month. And it got ME this bad?
That was the story, Quentin's story, that I—and a lot of fans much younger and much more susceptible than me—watched unfold. It was why I came to really love him. He put himself out there for Eliot, and Eliot's single greatest most traumatic regret, we are told, is turning someone "good and true" down out of fear. And Quentin never got to hear, "If I'm braver now, it's because of you"—a statement about living. He only got to see "beautiful" grief.
It got me this bad—and not the kind of "bad" a show runner should be "proud" of—and I barely even go here.
But I want you to know: I am not in crisis. I'm an old hand at keeping my head above water somehow. The only reason I'm letting you see those texts is because I know that one thing I said in that fit of rage-despair is true: you can choose to be brave, and kind, and loving, even it feels like you have to rebuild your will to live from scratch every damn day. Choosing to live and to hang on by your fingernails with as much love as you can—that itself has value, and it has valor. It matters.
As "ambiguous" as the show runners wanted to leave Quentin's death—a choice that itself is irresponsible, what the hell—plenty of people are willing to explain how his fate reads more as a suicide than a necessary sacrifice; the most concise is this one on Tumblr.
On Fannishness, Intersectionality, & a Whole Other Grab-bag of Entitled Millennial Bullshit:
But in a lot of ways, the worst part of 4x13 was that you then spent, in fact, so much time having Quentin be encouraged to buy into The Big Lie of suicidal thinking: that your death will help the people you love. [...] You wanted to tell a story about the dominant perspective making way for new voices. Instead you told a story about a traumatized queer kid with chronic mental illness killing himself in the way that glorified the actual disordered thinking of actual queer mentally-ill people, when that little, terrifying part of ourselves that wants to kill us is in the process of overwhelming the much bigger parts of us that are fighting, desperately, every day, not to die.
Let's go back to the executive producers' initial announcement:
We want The Magicians to visit strange and fascinating new places, and we know we can’t get there by treading the same garden path others have before us. So, we did the thing you’re not supposed to do — we killed the character who’s supposed to be ‘safe.’ In real life, none of us are safe. When we first met Quentin Coldwater, he was in a mental hospital, contending with painful questions of life and death. This season, we saw the rare opportunity to complete his arc, bringing him to a real understanding of the incalculable value of his own life. Quentin, and we, got to see the truth: there is no such thing as a Minor Mending. The smallest action can ripple out in powerful ways we may never fully know.
"In real life, no one is safe," they say. Yeah, I think people in the vulnerable communities—queer, mentally ill, neurodivergent—who identified with Quentin have fucking noticed that, actually.
I’m Not Sure What I’m to Say; I’ll Say It Anyway: Responsibility and ‘The Magicians’:
I cannot stress this enough, despite what Sera Gamble and her team may believe and have repeated over and over to the press: we do not need this message. It is dangerous to push a message that after you are gone, people will miss you – it is a part of the fantasy. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “maybe they’ll finally care about me when I’m gone; maybe they’ll even be better off.”
People who have read my work know me as a rational, even-handed person who has written frequently, calmly, openly about mental health. I promised myself a long time ago that I would never harm myself. I made that promise. I've been distressed the last five days, but not in danger. But whenever I was in a bad place, sometimes for months on end, that I just had to... slog through, wait out, because I made that promise, that's the shape those thoughts took. Just... sat there with them. I don't need it dramatized. Putting it "beautifully" on screen is not empowering, uplifting, revolutionary, fresh. It collaborates with illness and pain.
Oh, but it's fine, you see:
Sera Gamble: [...] Quentin Coldwater is dead on the show, and the story moving forward is about the aftermath of that. Certainly on The Magicians, people can be very sad and can also be singing power anthems from the '80s, and having sex that will turn them into a werewolf, and making deals with fairies with no eyebrows, and be traveling inter-dimensionally, so it's not a bummer.
IT'S NOT 'A BUMMER'? Are any of you people listening to yourselves?
Hey, you want to talk about the part that really sent me into the stratosphere?
Vulture: After his death, Quentin wrestles with the question of whether his decision was about saving his friends, or was really him figuring out a way to kill himself. The funeral scene feels like an answer to that question, but did you mean it to be? Or did you mean for there to still be ambiguity?
John McNamara: I think that exact question will hopefully fuel debate and discussion and possibly be the source of a few academic papers at institutions of higher learning. I think it is ambiguous.
[...]
Vulture: Are you at all worried that someone might read this episode as suggesting that suicide is an act of bravery?
John McNamara: I definitely don’t want to write pro-suicide television. It’s irresponsible, and it’s too simplistic, frankly. Someone being incredibly heroic in the moment, and also having subconscious self-destructive tendencies, makes drama interesting and not cartoonish. For anybody who wants to just really bat around all the layers of what Quentin did, the best way to do that is to not kill yourself. Stay alive and debate that issue.
This is the most irresponsible form of "just playing devil's advocate" I've ever seen in my entire life. Really get your head into the suicidal mindset and "bat around all the layers" of whether this kid just gave up on life or not? How safe do you think spending much time at that podium is going to be for your debate club? Do you think I'm not already arguing for the will to live with my brain on a near-daily basis? This isn't a fucking debate. This is our lives that we're fighting for, and if fucking talking about it was the solution I wouldn't have been paying a therapist for the last twenty years. I have been under a carefully calibrated regimen of medications and therapy since I was a teenager. I am doing everything "right." And this is still fucking me up. You know, at least 13 Reasons Why was openly about a girl dying of suicide, deeply irresponsible triggers and all. "Let's watch people be sorry that she's gone" was the premise. No one got hit with that after fifty-two episodes of crude fantasy shenanigans, while the actual narrative seemed to point towards some kind of positive catharsis. No, we got Quentin watching his friends grieve, while being assured that giving up his young life had been a cosmic good.
He was a Mender, and you didn't let him fix shit.
Are you ready for some magic? Here's the spell I'm going to cast:
Let there be shows with competent writers who can create genuine, high, dramatic stakes without cruelty. Let the creators of those shows flourish; let them get the good press, and may they deserve the trust they're given. Let there be vulnerable characters who aren't ripped away from people getting to see a reflection of themselves, at last. May there be creatives who fucking do better. You can be one of those people or you can get out of the way, whether you think that's "real" or "revolutionary" or not. The outpouring of this fandom is the Ghost of Television Present. Figure your shit out before Television Future shows up.
