The Magicians (TV Series, Season 1)
Sep. 15th, 2017 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroHarry Potter starring depressed millennial grad students instead of children. And boy oh boy, it’s another adventure in terrible life choices. Every character is like Barry Allen.
Jethrien tells me that in the original book, they were 18-year-old college freshmen, and a lot of these plotlines and actions would make much more sense (and be much more understandable from a character standpoint) if that were the case here as well. I wouldn't tolerate a lot of this frat-hazing, tough-love boarding school traditions nonsense when I was 22, because I had already been through college.
The fourth episode (in which Quentin wakes up in a mental hospital and it turns out to be a spell, blah blah blah) seems oddly placed. That's the sort of plot we'd expect for the back half of the first season, after we'd spent a bit more time getting to know the characters and accept the setting.
For that matter, they introduce Quentin's father with brain cancer, Quentin is super broken up about it for that episode, and then it's never mentioned again. They waste no time dragging out plotlines, certainly. And they cram together a lot of subplots that, tonally, don't really jive. (Well, except for the “everybody bangs” episode.) Really, I would have expected the show to have slower pacing and more filler (not that I’m complaining about that!)
I think the writing improves as the season goes on, and 1x10 (“Homecoming”) is a very good example of that. There’s witty dialogue from early on (and Penny is a consistent delight), but it gets better once the show finds its feet.
Things that randomly bug me: How much Alice needs her glasses is glossed over an awful lot. She’ll go whole episodes without them. (I do find it amusing that, as they've assigned her the “nerdy girl” archetype, the costume designers give her the most boring bras in the various scenes she undresses in. They're the bras an ex-girlfriend of mine described as “the orthopedic shoes of underwear.” Which is all the more amusing when we meet her parents.)
For the record, I don’t think I realized that SyFy shows were allowed to drop f-bombs. Who knew? And I suspect that if they could (if they were, say, HBO), there would be more nudity to go with all the bloody violence.
I have a theory that most of the cliffhangers from the season finale will be resolved early in the second season—I’ll be rather disappointed if Julia doesn’t stab a certain someone, and Jethrien filled me in on a bunch of book events that make it seem like they could be back on the rails fairly quickly if they wanted to.
Overall: If you like “superpowered characters making extremely poor life choices” as a genre, this is one of the purest examples I think I’ve seen.
Jethrien tells me that in the original book, they were 18-year-old college freshmen, and a lot of these plotlines and actions would make much more sense (and be much more understandable from a character standpoint) if that were the case here as well. I wouldn't tolerate a lot of this frat-hazing, tough-love boarding school traditions nonsense when I was 22, because I had already been through college.
The fourth episode (in which Quentin wakes up in a mental hospital and it turns out to be a spell, blah blah blah) seems oddly placed. That's the sort of plot we'd expect for the back half of the first season, after we'd spent a bit more time getting to know the characters and accept the setting.
For that matter, they introduce Quentin's father with brain cancer, Quentin is super broken up about it for that episode, and then it's never mentioned again. They waste no time dragging out plotlines, certainly. And they cram together a lot of subplots that, tonally, don't really jive. (Well, except for the “everybody bangs” episode.) Really, I would have expected the show to have slower pacing and more filler (not that I’m complaining about that!)
I think the writing improves as the season goes on, and 1x10 (“Homecoming”) is a very good example of that. There’s witty dialogue from early on (and Penny is a consistent delight), but it gets better once the show finds its feet.
Things that randomly bug me: How much Alice needs her glasses is glossed over an awful lot. She’ll go whole episodes without them. (I do find it amusing that, as they've assigned her the “nerdy girl” archetype, the costume designers give her the most boring bras in the various scenes she undresses in. They're the bras an ex-girlfriend of mine described as “the orthopedic shoes of underwear.” Which is all the more amusing when we meet her parents.)
For the record, I don’t think I realized that SyFy shows were allowed to drop f-bombs. Who knew? And I suspect that if they could (if they were, say, HBO), there would be more nudity to go with all the bloody violence.
I have a theory that most of the cliffhangers from the season finale will be resolved early in the second season—I’ll be rather disappointed if Julia doesn’t stab a certain someone, and Jethrien filled me in on a bunch of book events that make it seem like they could be back on the rails fairly quickly if they wanted to.
Overall: If you like “superpowered characters making extremely poor life choices” as a genre, this is one of the purest examples I think I’ve seen.
