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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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The Magicians‘ first season played fast and loose with Lev Grossman’s bestselling books—for better and for worse—and it looks like we can expect more of the same from season two. Syfy’s new trailer has more spells, more ominous proclamations (“The fate of the world is in your hands!”) and, naturally, a few serious makeouts.

If you don’t want any potentially spoilery speculation, stop reading now!

The show’s first season incorporated quite a bit of plot from books one and two, so it shouldn’t be that surprising that we’re going straight to book three for part of this season’s story: that magic is dying. (I really hope this doesn’t mean the show skips all of Quentin’s very Voyage-of-the-Dawn-Treader-y adventures in book two, but I can see how those might be expensive to film.) But when magic was dying in Fillory in the books, the Beast was long gone … as is not the case here. What else is notable?

  • Penny has hands! Early in season one, Dean Fogg had his hands rebuilt, so this was somewhat expected. But how does he get them?
  • What is that glowing thing that looks like a manhole into the cosmos?
  • Eliot’s confidence that they’ll figure everything out is at once delightful and ridiculous, and thus totally in character.
  • Who are the guys doing really intense looking spells?
  • Alice with her eyes glowing really hints that her book-one story may still come to pass.
  • Is that Alice making out with Quentin in the shower, and Eliot and Margo in another scene? Eliot was gay in the books, but if they present him as bi here—which hasn’t been clear so far—that will go a long way to balancing out some of the seemingly peculiar choices in the show’s first season finale.
  • The trailer is edited to strongly suggest we’ll see both Alice and Julia facing off with the Beast at different times.
  • Is that Margo’s cacodemon, the big gray smoke monster? Please let them get their cacodemons. Her smile at the end of that moment is perfect.

The Magicians returns to Syfy on January 25, 2017. If you need to catch up on season one, the network will be showing the entire season on Saturday, November 12, starting at 9:30 am.

About the Author

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Molly Templeton

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Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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