JennyPop.com - Death Becomes Them? SyFy's The Magicians: Season the Fifth

... and then there were fewer.

Like a Star Trek Red Shirt, SyFy shows are being lost one by one, never making it back to the Mothership. Unlike variables as wide-ranging as inhospitable atmospheres, aggressive aliens or malfunctioning transporters, SyFy losses can be blamed largely on season-over-season, double-digit, low and consistently-declining ratings. Deadly Class (0.14 share / 0.396mil viewers), Krypton (0.11 /0 .408), Happy! (0.09 / 0.286mil) and Van Helsing (0.08 / 0.296mil) rank amongst the most recent cancellations. Although, Van Helsing was renewed, but slated to end, so not technically cancelled. Ditto for Killjoys (0.06 / 0.316mil): ended, not cancelled. The good news? The Magicians has been renewed for a fifth season. The bad news? There could be a half-dozen red shirts hanging somewhere on a wardrobe rack with a sign reading, The Magicians.

With current, cringe-worthy ratings of 0.15 / 0.09 / 0.11 for the first three episodes of 2020, respectively, S5 really needs to ... please, forgive me ... pull a rabbit of its hat. S5 ratings may be directly related to ... S4 SPOILER ALERT ... the death of Quentin Coldwater in the S4 finale. Like the death of many a beloved character, throughout TV history, the first reaction is, Why?. The writers' answers in the following season had better be damn good to calm the masses. (Just ask Downton Abbey creator, Julian Fellowes, about Matthew and that horrid S3 finale. Some of us are still unforgiving.) Thus far, The Magicians S5 is leaving a lot of Q-devotees scratching their heads and waiting to learn if that death plant was worth the payoff.

Untenable as it can be, life does trudge forward, under great duress and melancholia, after the death of a loved one; yet, that's not really a plot. The real quest for The Magicians' Quentin-free season, just as in real life, is to find a purpose. Julia (played spellbindingly by Stella Maeve) appears to be doing just that: pulling a Why? out of Q's death, seeking her true purpose - as long as the pig-men of New Fillory waddle out of her way. Alice (portrayed with painful empathy by Olivia Taylor Dudley) is doing exactly what psychologists say not to do after a great loss: making huge, irreversible decisions. She's making some very bad magic choices, but at least she's doing something, crazy. Margo (depicted forcefully by Summer Bishil) is bent on regaining total reign; whilst Eliot (played boozily by Hale Appleman) betrays the greatest shift of all in character: palpable, wooden apathy. As Polonius advised Laertes in Hamet, to thine own self be true. Save Eliot, clearly hiding his grief behind his new apathy, everyone has remained themselves, just devastated.

Mind you, as in real life, there's always other crap going on you can't avoid, no matter how sad you are. For our Magicians, it's the continued threat of a complete apocalypse due to magic surges quickly growing out of control. Yet, in between the tales of personal grief and the end of the world lies ... well, there's the rub. Tell us, fair writers, what be?

"It's all classic Magicians stuff, but by now the threat of an apocalypse stemming from issues with the flow of magic is old hat. Q dying should have completely changed the status quo. Season 5 treats it instead as something that happened before the world resumed its regularly scheduled chaos," observes Mashable's Alexis Nedd.

We like the foul-mouthed, Seinfeldian-quick quips, some of the uglier nods to ealry-1990s fashion, and Fen (played by Brittany Curran), perhaps unwittingly, channels a very likable Leah Remini, King of Queens Carrie Heffernan kind of likable. In the end though, someone might need to take the tree dwarf a snack, persuade him to turn back the clock, bake an immortality cake and force feed it to Quentin, like corn meal to a French goose. If not, The Magicians. S5 finale could take a weird wardrobe turn, to the Star Trek Red Shirt kiss of death.