‘The Magicians’ Excels At High Concept Stand-Alone Episodes

Over the past few years, serialization has become the norm in television. Ongoing series are supposed to tell bigger stories, even in otherwise “unserious” genres like science fiction (Westworld), superhero shows (Legion), and fantasy (Game of Thrones). Though many of these shows appear on traditional networks, streaming has thrown gasoline on the fire of serialization, now that 12-hour seasons don’t need anything as pedestrian as keep an audience’s attention for the length of an “episode.” Even the Netflix shows designed to have discrete chunks, like Maniac‘s riffs on Lord of the Rings, gritty drug dramas, or ’80s Long Island, frequently blur together, beholden to the demands of a single season. There are benefits to that approach, but something else is lost: ridiculously high-concept, one-off episodes.

Consider something like a mirror universe episode of Star Trek, or the Supernatural time loop episode, where Dean spends years trying to prevent Sam from dying in a freak accident and ends up accidentally pitching Russian Doll. These cases are, often, the best examples of TV as a fractured medium where stories are delivered in discrete chunks, executing a single idea and seeing it through to a conclusion, without the need to keep viewers in a daze for the rest of the season. There’s a new Star Trek series and Supernatural is, admittedly, still chugging along in its 14th season—though in both cases, individual adventures are increasingly bent under the weight of continuity and trends toward longer stories.

Some other, surprising genres have been taken over by the one-off. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend recently pulled off an entire classic rom-com parody episode, complete with a deconstruction of the tropes of the romantic karaoke scene. Bojack Horseman has taken to doing an annual very special episode, like the one that became a silent movie or the one where Diane finds herself. But in classic genre space, we’re hard-pressed to find a show that really knows how to do an episode. Thankfully, we have The Magicians.

SyFy’s adaptation of Lev Grossman’s novels have spun outward from their baseline premise, which is something like “Harry Potter but everyone is depressed.” Partly, this is because of the series’ approach to its source material. Where Grossman’s novels riff on the expectations set by the Narnia and Harry Potter series and the ways people project themselves as the hero of their own story, The Magicians uses supernatural soap opera as the basis for its structure—The Vampire Diaries, Roswell, and especially Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Buffy, notably, effectively blended its season-length story arcs with singular episodes like the musical one, the silent one, and the one about Xander. The Magicians has figured out this balance, too, with episodes like the one where they have to rob a bank, the one where they all have to stage a performance of “Under Pressure,” and, especially, “A Life In The Day,” an episode from Season 3 in which Eliot (Hale Appleman) and Quentin (Jason Ralph) spend an entire lifetime trying to solve a fantasy puzzle in the middle of the woods.

“A Life In The Day” is notable not just because its central plot takes place largely in one location, or because the old-man makeup for Appleman and Ralph is delightfully cheesy, in the way you might expect from a similar episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It also captures how weird that kind of singular experience might be, and allows the memories to shape how Quentin and Eliot relate to each other going forward, a decision that pays off in last night’s almost as high-concept episode, “Escape From The Happy Place.”

Melding elements of a clip show, a therapy special, and the classic “trapped in your own subconscious” plot, “Escape From The Happy Place” finds Eliot attempting to regain control of his body from The Monster, the season’s current antagonist who has been using that body to blackmail Quentin and the rest of the cast into helping it kill gods. (The show gets complicated.) Eliot has to travel through his worst memories in order to find the door back to his own body. These memories, a blend of betrayals, daddy issues, and erectile dysfunction, calls back to some of the most poignant moments of the series—and especially “A Life In The Day.”

When Eliot finally finds the memory that lets him escape his mind, it’s not any of the traumatic experiences that shaped his childhood, or even any of the morbid moments from the series. Instead, it’s a conversation in which Quentin, on the heels of their life together, pitched the relationship for real, only for Eliot to flinch. There’s some truth to Eliot’s hesitance (Quentin is largely straight), but it’s framed as a real connection that he chose to run from rather than embracing—an emotional story that lands, even amid all of the insane magic stuff. Sometimes, bizarre experiences are just a weird thing that happened one time, but sometimes those experiences shape you in ways you couldn’t have possibly imagined. Isn’t that what you want out of your fantastical television?

Eric Thurm’s writing also appears in GQ, Esquire, Real Life, and eventually in a book about board games he is writing for the NYU Press and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the founder, producer, and host of Drunk Education, a comedic-academic event series that has absolutely nothing to do with TED.

Watch The Magicians Season 4 Episode 5 ("Escape From The Happy Place") on SyFy

Watch The Magicians Season 3 Episode 5 ("A Life In The Day") on Netflix