“The book was better.”Even without context, those four words almost work as a manifest truth, one I have immortalized on a lapel pin and engraved on my heart. The book, by virtue of its being a story’s inception point, the very first version of a narrative where nothing’s cut for time and no grand ideas are scuttled for budget, is almost always better than any of its adaptations. And when the SyFy network first announced they’d be adapting Lev Grossman ’s The Magicians trilogy, the show felt destined to become one more example of this truism. How could SyFy, with its mediocre budget and (at the time) critically undistinguished reputation, do justice to Grossman’s dark, fantastical treatise on suffering and selfhood?The answer: with panache. Origin StoryLev Grossman published The Magicians, the first book in his trilogy, a decade ago. Critics started calling it “ Harry Potter for grownups,” and sure, that’s an easy shorthand to discuss the books, which have 18-year-old Quentin Coldwater discovering he’s a magician and being recruited to a magical college called Brakebills. Quentin starts the series seven years older than Harry is when he learns he’s to matriculate at Hogwarts, and he’s already suffering many of the problems that Harry doesn’t even have to think about until the latter half of his own series: depression, unrequited love, inadequacy.

The Magicians Raises the Dead, Then Buries Itself Alive with an. Using his senator son’s demi-god magic. Unfortunately, Reynard emotionally broke his son, John Gaines, after butchering his.

So what makes the television series better than the novels, an almost sacrilegious statement among bookworm circles? Grossman writes Quentin with a remarkable amount of nuance and texture. Quentin’s a bit of a mopey asshole, yes, but he’s a wholly actualized character, rich with motivation and color.

He’s also the only character in the entire series we can describe that way. Everyone else is seen through Quentin’s myopic perspective, especially when it comes to the women in his life.

While Grossman attempts to give us peeks into Julia and Alice’s points of view, both are wan reflections of humanity next to the messy reality of Quentin. Josh, Eliot, Janet and Penny feel even less realized.

Julia, Quentin’s childhood friend and first love who isn’t accepted into Brakebills and therefore forges her own formidable path, is raped (by a trickster god, no less) in the second book of the series, The Magician King, and the rather pat way the author uses this trauma to define Julia for the rest of the series feels like an injustice to the character.Under show creators John McNamara and Sera Gamble, The Magicians is a true ensemble, peopled by complex and fascinating characters who carry every bit as much weight as Quentin, if not more. Jason Ralph is indisputably great in the lead role, carrying Quentin from his pitiful Nice Guys Finish Last years into something far more interesting, but he never steals focus from the women in his life, all of whom have their own lives, their own plans and inducements.

Stella Maeve is both dark and light as Julia, who never takes no for an answer, never accepts what she can confront, and while the show’s Julia also suffers sexual assault by Reynard the Fox, her story becomes about so much more. There’s a reckoning for Julia, and she makes choices that aren’t about her trauma but about her, what she wants, who she is, who she wants to be.Alice is the most well-written non-Quentin character in the books, but she’s still framed as his prize, his regret and his redemption, and on the show, she’s much more. She’s angry and focused, powerful, talented, vulnerable, good. Olivia Taylor Dudley has an internalized fierceness that never feels put-upon or performed, and she gives Alice an almost frightening strength at times. Janet’s a lot of nothing in the book, and in the series, she’s renamed as Margo (with a few winks to her source material name), and thanks to Summer Bishil, she’s reborn, too, as one of the best characters on television: loyal and terrifying, hilarious, brilliant, at once glamorous and foul-mouthed. Jade Tailor ’s Kady doesn’t even exist in the books, though her closest corollary is probably the two-dimensional Poppy, but on the show she’s crucial, the one person who understands Penny, who doesn’t buy into Brakebills and Fillory as the end-all and be-all of existence.Even the women who aren’t cast regulars offer more substance than even leading characters on other shows, like Kacey Rohl as Marina, and Mageina Tovah as The Librarian. And Hale Appleman’s Eliot, Arjun Gupta ’s Penny and Trevor Einhorn ’s Josh dance circles (sometimes literally) around their book counterparts.

They’re all so funny and tragic, wonderful and awful, and most importantly, they’re real. And not for nothing: just about every character is lily-white in Grossman’s books, while SyFy’s The Magicians boasts a beautifully diverse cast. Dean Fogg is described as portly, balding and quite pasty in Grossman’s world; in McNamara and Gamble’s, he’s played by the wildly compelling Rick Worthy. Everyone here is simply more interesting than they ever were on the page, Quentin included, and that’s nothing less than a triumph for a small screen adaptation of a beloved trilogy.The Tone. So much of The Magicians ’ success, outside of these performances and these characters, is due to tone. While there’s a wry deprecation running through Grossman’s books, they ultimately take themselves rather seriously, carrying a heavy weight that the television series shrugs off early on. The show is delightful and frothy but never flimsy.

Every episode is peppered with pop culture references, nods to its spiritual predecessors Buffy and Game of Thrones and even Battlestar Galactica that stand starkly against the classical fantasy backdrop of Fillory. There’s a moment in Season 3 where Margo and Eliot are speaking in code around a fairy queen (brilliantly cast as Candis Cayne ) who’s been spying on them, and the ease with which they drop earthly pop culture scenarios to describe their plight is worth about a dozen rewatches.This show is just so hugely funny, thanks to Eliot’s archness, Margo’s raunch, Josh’s debauchery, and the fantastical talking creatures and weirdo citizens of Fillory who drive our Earth friends bananas.

But it’s also deeply kind – to its characters and its viewers. Through Julia and Alice, the series examines trauma. Through Eliot and Quentin, it discusses depression. Grief and identity and guilt and love are all measured equally. Penny and Josh and Kady and Margo each humanize that all-too-real feeling of being forever on the outside, but The Magicians refuses to keep them on the outs. This story has too much compassion for its characters for anyone to feel like an outsider, like an other, for long.

All of these characters – villains, talking animals, victims of sexual assault and mopey assholes alike – are given the opportunity to be taken seriously, to be heard and felt and seen.It’s gorgeous, too, from Brakebills’ classicism to Fillory’s rainbow-drenched, outdoorsy whimsy. The series achieves a phenomenal amount of visual grace though lacking HBO’s budget, and the magic always feels like magic, from small tricks to dimension-shattering exploits. (And volumes could be written about Margo’s fashion as High Queen of Fillory.) The Magicians has its own weird alchemy where it looks and sounds and feels familiar, but also like nothing so much as itself. It created its own world and inhabits it so cozily that it feels like we’ve all been visiting there forever. Only the best fantasy does that – Narnia, Middle-earth, Mid-World, Hogwarts and now Fillory.The PathLike Game of Thrones before it, The Magicians became more interesting when it diverged from the path that created it.

While some of the currently airing fourth season is recognizable from the books, we’re on a new path now, a bold new quest where anything can happen and all bets are off. There’s one notable quality The Magicians shares with The Good Place (one of the other best shows on television), in that every season resets itself, wipes the slate clean and puts our characters in brand new scenarios that are shockingly disconnected from where they just were – but without ever losing the import of previous seasons. Everything has weight on The Magicians, even the stuff our characters can’t remember anymore, because we remember it, and the story remembers it. The writers treat us, treat their characters and treat this story with so much care and respect, taking episodes that could feel like a gimmick – a musical episode, an episode where a character is dead and trying to communicate with his still-living friends, the episode where we see Quentin and Eliot live an entire life together before bouncing back to the current timeline – and making them significant.

The Magicians celebrates and takes full advantage of the limitless possibilities inherent in fantasy storytelling, but always with one goal: to help these characters grow, learn, love and relate to one another, and to help us relate to them, too.Lev Grossman forged this world, and he did it beautifully. But McNamara and Gamble have shaped it into something boundless and ever-changing, a breathing and living gift to those of us who loved the books, and to those who never even heard of Fillory until it popped up on our TV sets fully formed one day.

Julia’s prominence has been perhaps one of the most fundamentally important and smart choices made in this adaptation because it not only showcases the fallibility of the magical world (which the portions of the show at Brakebills have no qualms about also revealing), but also gives viewers a more tragic, sympathetic character at the heart of the show’s ensemble.And The Magicians has truly grown into fully taking advantage of that ensemble, even if the dual Quentin/Julia narratives are at the show’s heart. The Syfy series has made sure to give Eliot, Margo, Penny, and Alice the spotlights they deserve as they too are shaped and irrevocably changed by their steps into a magical world. Professor layton and the azran legacy puzzles free. One of the men in their group is set to become the High King of Fillory (only non-Fillorians can assume the throne), and he wants whoever that is to marry his daughter. That new High King just so happens to be Eliot, who has gone from drinking himself silly for fun to drinking himself half to death to escape after his disastrous Beast lackey Mike. It means never being with Margo again, a revelation played out in a beautiful scene that offers a wonderful distillation of Eliot and Margo’s relationship thanks to the work of Hale Appleman and Summer Bishil. Julia and Quentin follow that possible lead, heading off to summon Ember and Umber while the rest rescue Victoria, the traveler trapped by the Beast, and her fellow mystery captive.

They succeed, as do Quentin and Julia, who find Ember, the one remaining satyr-esque god of Fillory (his brother, Umber, unfortunately was decimated by the Beast). Ember is so impressed with Quentin’s undying faith in this magical land that he believes he may just be its savior, the One.

So he gives Quentin a jar of his essence to consume and therefore assume the god’s power. Unfortunately, that jar is a generous helping of Ember’s semen, which the two take back to the group to discover Victoria resting, as well as the other captive, Christopher Plover. Yes, Plover is indeed not the Beast, who is actually Martin Chatwin. Plover, still believing he and Martin are meant for each other (a disturbing revelation uncovered from Martin’s childhood earlier in the season), reveals that each day Martin heads off to the Wellspring of Fillory, the world’s source of magic. He drinks from it, robbing himself of his humanity while becoming all the more powerful. So while they have a better sense of their enemy, Ember’s gift came with another fracturing of the group as he unseals the mental block inside Julia’s mind first noticed by Eliza earlier in the episode. In doing so, he lets flood back into her consciousness the truth of her dealings with Our Lady Underground.And the truth is the god was not Our Lady at all but Reynard the Fox, a trickster of a god who wanted to be set free into the world, and Julia’s group gave him exactly that.

He repaid them by killing almost every member, save for Kady, who is able to flee thanks to Julia’s protection. Julia reveals all of this to Quentin, as well as what Reynard did to her. He tells her he chose her, and in doing so, he rapes Julia (during which Kady makes her escape).

The revelation of what happens to Julia in The Magician King is perhaps the series’ most harrowing sequence and one the show does not shy away from portraying. It’s a moment that drives the rest of her actions in the finale and will certainly continue to in season 2.

Julia chooses to handle the atrocities committed against her and her friends by calling upon Marina to block out her memory. (Unfortunately, while Julia briefly grapples with the act in the finale, we’ll have to wait until the next season to see whether the show fully addresses what has happened to Julia or whether the horrible act falls into the more trope-ish use of rape on TV that has seemed to occur more and more often in recent years. But the end card pointing viewers to a helpline at the very least underlines how seriously those behind the show take the subject.) As she tells Quentin, her only desire now is to find and kill Reynard.

Granted, their relationship isn’t at its best, considering Quentin’s threesome with Eliot and Margo, but Alice takes Quentin’s admission as genuine and drinks of Ember’s seed (which is still very, very gross) before they head off to the Wellspring.NEXT: A showdown with the BeastInside they find an approximation of Plover’s writing room, another clear sign Martin is haunted by his past. Martin almost immediately shows up, and Quentin works to distract their foe so that Alice can strike. He pretends to have a gift from Jane for her brother, but as Alice goes to use the blade, she finds it missing. Martin retaliates, causing Alice to bleed out (possibly to death, though that’s left murky), knocking Eliot and Margo aside, and slicing off Penny’s hands.

Though the setting may be different, many of those particulars adhere to the book, but there’s one variable the show throws into play: Julia. Being raped by Reynard left her infused with the power of a god (via his ejaculation), and she uses it to threaten Martin with the blade. But rather than kill him, she wants to make a deal. Martin can deal with gods, as he did with Umber, and she has designs on Reynard in mind. The two disappear, leaving Quentin to watch two of his friends lying unconscious, another bleeding profusely from the wrists, and the last, the one he loves, possibly dead. And that’s how you do a maddening yet sensible cliffhanger.WANT MORE? Keep up with all the latest from last night’s television by subscribing to our newsletter.Season 1 of The Magicians ends on a note that leaves nearly every major player’s fate up in the air, but its suspension of their fates doesn’t cheat the viewer from a powerful and unique hour.

It is frustrating to not have some culmination of the story of the Beast because he has been the clear and present danger since episode 1. As far as recent television cliffhangers go, however, the Beast’s continued existence at least makes narrative sense considering Julia’s experiences and certainly has repercussions for every major character that should set the stage for the next season.

Of course season 1 has seen its fair share of cliffhangers. Golf with friends free. Almost every episode of The Magicians has felt different, taking on various tropes or styles, from dream sequences to haunted houses, while putting its characters through the ups and downs of the magical life. Not every episode has been a success. At times the show has been messy in its search of themes, characterization, and more.

But the fresh stylistic choices imbued into each episode have made it a ride worth seeing through to its powerful conclusion. And it’s a conclusion that hews so closely to the novels’ penchant for darkness. No one receives a fairy tale ending in season 1’s finale, and really, The Magicians has never been exactly interested in paving a happily ever after for its host of deeply flawed characters. This adaptation makes no attempts to hide both the good and bad facets of its characters. Quentin, the presumed protagonist you should love in any other story is here selfish, cynical, and, well, a bit of a dick.

Julia has been cast out by her best friend, but she allows the darkness in her to be brought out by fellow hedgewitches who help her to exact revenge that almost kills Quentin. Penny, despite his penchant for being curt and agitated, wants to do good and is, like all of his fellow students, trying to find his place in the world. It’s also an adaptation that adds a completely different paradigm to the showdown with the Beast in the first book in the series. ( Spoiler alert for those of you who haven’t read the book: The Beast is ultimately killed at the end of that book, which is obviously the most dramatic shift, but Julia’s presence completely alters the potential for where the next season can go, as well. There are certainly ways the show can play into The Magician King and its plot, especially with everyone finally having made it to Fillory, but the wildcard of Julia and the Beast allows the show’s writers plenty of potential to both utilize and subvert the narrative beats of the second novel. End Spoilers).

This adaptation’s other biggest top-down alteration is its focus on the ensemble rather than simply Quentin’s plight (or in the case of the season and the second book, the plights of Quentin and Julia.) “Cakes” offers every major character a chance to show off their light and dark sides, their desires to help one another and Fillory and yet to selfishly look out for themselves, as well. While characters like Eliot, Margo (Janet in the books), and Penny are certainly not simple caricatures in Grossman’s novels, the show’s needs, as opposed to those of a novel, have given life to beautiful character-building moments throughout. Meeting Alice’s parents, Margo revealing to Quentin her love of the Fillory books, Penny’s relationship with Kady, and Eliot’s transformation — they all build out the world of The Magicians while offering any number of examples of just how even in a world full of magic, there’s plenty, if not more, darkness, temptation, and questions of morality to reckon with.

Yet the transformation into more of an ensemble doesn’t take away from Quentin’s journey, either, particularly as he’s given the opportunity to grow in the finale. As Quentin tells Alice he’s not the protagonist of this tale, she tells him in kind that, while he may not be perfect, he’s a far better person than he believes he is.The season 1 finale is told from a future Quentin’s perspective as he writes down what happened to himself and his friends, regardless of who is at the heart of the story. The truth is, the story could not be told without all of them playing their roles — they’re all at the heart of this tale. Ensuring the vitality of each of its characters since the early episodes, The Magicians has made itself a powerful tale of how life, magical or not, requires the help of others to make it through the best and worst of times. Clearly, with his narrating position, Quentin makes it through long enough to survive these particularly horrible times, but everyone else’s fate remains up for grabs.

And with the touching work put in during this season, The Magicians offers plenty of reason to return to Fillory — and perhaps even go further.We wrote a react for this episode, which means we’ll just be checking in occasionally, but if this is a show you’d like to read about each week, please let us know! You can email with your feedback and suggestions.