#info: interview

The Quest of the Seven Keys comes to a close (we think!) tonight as The Magicians wraps up its tremendously entertaining third season.

In the April 4 finale, Quentin (Jason Ralph) and his band of not-so-merry comrades storm The Castle at the End of the World to get magic turned back on.

Ahead of the big episode, we hit up showrunners Sera Gamble and John McNamara for a preview of what exactly the group will be facing. And from the sounds of it, things are about to get monstrous.

OK, so what are we walking into in the season finale? Where are our players at that point?

Sera Gamble: Well, at a certain point in the season finale, they are on the Muntjac with nothing to eat but leftover tacos. [Laughs]

John McNamara: Yeah it sort of replicates the feelings of being in The Magicians writers' room. The writers are obsessed with tacos. [Laughs]

Gamble: We're also, sort of headed towards the... well, we're sort of walking you into the next stage for Julia's (Stella Maeve) life. Which, as you know from Episode 12, she leveled up in a really major way. So in the finale, we talk about what that means.

And then, after a whole season of watching Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) really struggle to try to figure out who she is and what she wants to do, and whose side she's on, and whether she's on anyone's side, she will take some very significant steps for herself that affect everyone on the show.

When it's "significant," it's usually kind of bad.

Gamble:[Laughs] Yeah, well, it affects everyone! It was so important to us not to make things easy for Alice. Just in terms of the journey of her character. We talked a lot about what happens when you have a bit of a quarter-life crisis, you know? There may come a point where you look back at everything you went to school for and all the stuff that your parents prepared you for, and just maybe you reject all of it. We talked about our experiences with that and it's personal to some of the writers on the show. It's not something where you wake up having a crisis, and then, two or three days later, you're fine.

It was actually kind of uncomfortable to watch Olivia at times, because the torment in Alice was so clear and painful.

McNamara: Just you wait. [Laughs]

Julia's leveling up... is that kind of her reward for what she was put through in the first two seasons?

Gamble: I wish life worked like that.

McNamara: Yeah, be careful of rewards, because they tend to turn into something else.

Oh no.

McNamara: Yup. Dot dot dot... to be continued.

Gamble: So much of what we do with her character and with that storyline, has to do with these long conversations we have in the writers' room about trauma. And the effects a terrible event like hers cause. We try to be careful not to [say] there is a punishment or reward for something like that. With certain storylines like that, we're kind of assuming that, in one's adult life, a certain amount of s**t happens.

And in Julia's case, some very dramatically heinous and terrible s**t has happened. What we're interested in is exploring how people continue and go on, and how the terrible things that happen to you in your life affect you. But I don't think it can really be boiled down to everything that's going on with Julia is a consequence of this one terrible, terrible event. It affects her greatly, it has a lot to do with the circumstances that she's been wrestling with, but it's part of a greater maturing process. Always with our characters—especially on a show where a lot of very dark things happen to people—it's important to us to explore the idea that adult life is much more complicated than just a reaction to any one thing that happens to you.

You have planted the idea that getting the power turned back on—turning magic back on—will also come with negative side effects.

McNamara: Yes.

Will those stakes be made even more clear as we get closer to turning it back on?

McNamara: Oh yes.

Will things reverse?

Gamble: Put it this way, we've just spent three seasons kind of making it clear that magic is a mixed bag, at best. If you're a magician, you prefer to have it in your life more than not, and that's something that was really driven home for our characters this season. Not having magic was a good way to have them miss magic and realize how much they've been taking it for granted. But magic has never been an easy or straightforward force.

McNamara: And any version of how things go for them in the finale comes with a mixed bag of consequences. That'll just always be true on the show. We will always find the good and the bad in every new plot development.

How will Margo (Summer Bishil) fare as High Queen?

Gamble: The immediate consequence of her being High King, beyond it just being f**king awesome to see her in that crown...

Right?!

Gamble: None of it means a whole hell of a lot if they can't get magic back. Everybody's campaign promises—and also just her ability to rule effectively as a magician—depends on finishing the quest and having it work out in Fillory's favor. So really, the first thing she has to do is help her friends get magic turned back on or she cannot be the kind of High King she wants to be.

With Penny 23 (Arjun Gupta) sticking around, how will this impact Kady (Jade Tailor) and Julia's friendship?

Gamble: I have a hard time imagining the women on The Magicians getting all fired up about a guy, in that sort of classic, soap opera way. Everybody has too much s**t going on and, frankly, everyone is too OK with casual, polyamorous sex to really have those kinds of hair-pulling, 'don't touch my man,' kind of stuff. That's not really the show. I think these women are kinda beyond that.

What is The Castle at the End of the World like?

McNamara: Black. Very dark.

Gamble: There may be a monster or two in there.

McNamara: Maybe. [Laughs]

You have given us the dragon stuff, are you introducing new monsters?

Gamble: Oh yeah, dragons are harmless compared to this thing. Here's a tease about the Castle at the End of the World. I'm gonna try to just do a tease here. The thing to know is that, for Quentin this season, he is a quester who has been on a quest, who understands questers on quests. He is a reader of fantasy and science-fiction and he has read Joseph Campbell's 'Hero with a Thousand Faces.' He's an expert in this stuff.

OK.

Gamble: He talks about the kind of sacrifices one makes when one is on a quest, and the notion that, when you are on a journey like this, it changes you. So the person you are at the end is different than the person who set out on the quest to begin with. In fact, the person who set out would not have been able to finish the quest, right? So all of that comes to a head in the finale, and Quentin is very well aware of it. He knows it's not gonna be fun for him necessarily. So if he wants to be a hero of the quest, then he's gonna have to solve some problems to do with finding the Castle at the End of the World, getting in there, and what they do once they're inside. And the thing that you'll see in the finale is that Quentin is very ready to step up. He feels personally responsible to get this done, and in a way, that wasn't as true before. This feels like his problem, right?

This is his hero's journey.

Gamble: When we were facing the Beast, for example, there came a point where he had this realization that the best magician should be the one to face the Beast. And that wasn't him, that was Alice. And in this case, it really is about the person who steps up to face the consequences and pay the price. The hero is simply the one who pays the price and Quentin is the one who is willing to be the hero.

There has to be a sacrifice. Can you preview who might be in peril?

McNamara: All of them! Nobody is safe. There's no...

Gamble: Nobody is gonna walk off the last frame of the season finale and onto a lounge chair in Waikiki because everything went so f**king great for them. There will be... there are victories, and there are yet greater challenges. When things end, a bigger and more f**ked-up thing begins.

McNamara: Of course!

When it comes to the shows that hog all the attention in our era of peak TV, The Magicians is nowhere near the top of the list. Mainstream conversations about fantasy TV are often limited to the wild success of Game of Thrones, and The Magicians is nestled into an underrated corner of TV on the Syfy network. It’s easy for any series to get a little buried when there are 500+ shows and the Stark family around. But if we’re judging on ambition and inventiveness, The Magicians is one of the most notable shows on television — and its third season, which wraps up this week, proved that point over and over again. It’s a show that plays with story convention so consistently it blows up any boundaries that might hold it back.

Technically, The Magicians is built on the familiar. Based on Lev Grossman’s book series of the same name, the show began in 2015 as a sort of advanced-age Harry Potter meets Chronicles of Narnia. Unlike Hogwarts, the Magicians’ magic school — Brakebills — serves grad school students instead of children. When the characters discover and eventually become kings and queens of Fillory, their own version of Narnia, the escapist world operates as a Technicolor meditation on what it means to embrace adult responsibility. The series is also a direct descendant of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: It follows a group of ragtag young people as they repeatedly try to save the world. The characters fight through depression, sexual assault, addiction, and the general sense that things may never get easier. That’s all classic, well-trod territory. Which makes it all the more impressive that The Magicians inspires the feeling that it’s doing it all for the first time.

Here are just a few of the elements that make it stand out.

It’s one of the best ensemble shows about a group of twentysomethings.

From left: Stella Maeve as Julia, Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice, Appleman as Eliot, Bishil as Margo, Jason Ralph as Quentin, and Arjun Gupta as Penny in a promotional shot for The Magicians.

The Magicians has always had a stellar cast of characters on its side — a group of friends brought together via Brakebills and overlapping heroes’ journeys. They’ve fought moth-faced villains and conquered gods, each character an integral part of a larger and pretty magnificent whole. Eliot (Hale Appleman) has a palpable regality in both his look and his soul; Margo (Summer Bishil) has blossomed as a brazen queen; Quentin (Jason Ralph) is steadfast and earnest, buoyed by Ralph’s deep pleasantness, an energy that’s completely transformed the character from what he was in the books. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg — Julia (Stella Maeve), Penny (Arjun Gupta), Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Kady (Jade Tailor), and Josh (Trevor Einhorn) are all worthy of their own odes. In a strange way, through them, The Magicians sits right alongside Insecure, New Girl, and Girls — it’s a sexy ensemble show about a twentysomething friend group. They muse on responsibility and the big life decisions you’re forced to make as you become a true grownup. They just do so while having hoversex, battling literal manifestations of their depression, and trying to run a kingdom or two.

And it has the kind of diversity that so many of the shows it riffs on lacked.

Beloved as Buffy may have been, it was also notoriously white. The Magicians, on the other hand, very much lives in a socially conscious 2018. A significant portion of its main cast is made up of people of color. Not only that, but every single one of them — from Maeve’s Julia, to Gupta’s Penny, to Bishil’s Margo — is the kind of complex, specific character you won’t find anywhere else on television.

A sizable portion of the characters also appears to be sexually fluid. Quentin, who on most shows would be the straightest white man on the planet, has a threesome with a man and a woman. He hooks up again with that same man in a later episode. There are no coming-out storylines, no hemming and hawing about labels — intimacies just happen to manifest in all types of ways on this show. On the one hand, there are always downsides to a lack of labels, including perpetuating the erasure of orientations like bisexuality. On the other, it’s kind of freeing to watch a show where it’s genuinely possible that anyone could sleep with anyone else and everyone treats that pretty casually. It goes well with part of what makes The Magicians so fun to watch: It actually does feel like anything could happen. The story options are wide open when everyone’s at least a little bit queer.

The Magicians’ third season has also heavily featured Candis Cayne, a trans actor who previously broke ground with her role on Dirty Sexy Money — the first time a trans actor had a recurring role playing a trans character on primetime television. Here, she plays the Fairy Queen, an intimidating force and a standout of the season. Another standout: Marlee Matlin’s Harriet — a deaf actor playing a deaf character who gets a beautiful moment in the spotlight with Season 3’s “Six Short Stories About Magic.”

What’s more, most of the show’s inclusivity goes unremarked upon on the show itself. Race, gender, and disability aren’t invisible to any of the core characters, but neither are they the focus. Characters will call out white supremacy and sexism without the show bragging about having a queen (and king!) of a magical realm be played by an actor of Mexican, Indian, and European heritage. Or a black man as the king of their neighboring kingdom. Or a mixed Native American woman on the path to becoming a goddess. And so on. Which is not to say The Magicians shouldn’t brag — if they want to spend all of Season 4 bragging about their magnificent ensemble, that would work too.

The show has a true sense of playfulness.

When Buffy aired its iconic musical episode in 2001, it had a ripple effect. Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, Psych, That ’70s Show, and even 7th Heaven all turned themselves into musicals for an episode. The Magicians, for its part, has been following in those same footsteps since its first season. Only instead of just one designated episode, they’ve peppered musical numbers into every season so far. In Season 1, Quentin sang Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” while trying to break out of a spell that had him trapped in a psychiatric hospital. “One Day More” from Les Misérables made a magnificent appearance in Season 2, as Eliot prepared for a duel to save his kingdom. (That one resembled what Game of Thrones might look like if Game of Thrones liked to party.) And this season, The Magicians did finally designate a full episode to several numbers. It culminated in the show’s main ensemble joining together in a rousing rendition of “Under Pressure.”

Integrated throughout the show, these moments stand as a declaration: This is just what The Magicians is, at its core. These scenes aren’t just an aside, a whim to break through the mundanity for a single episode — though The Magicians is also very good at that. With this show, narrative is twisted like a rubber band and then flung across the room. This is a series where talking sloths serve as top political advisers, party gods get banned from Instagram for posting too many shots of nipples, and messenger rabbits say things like “eat my ass.” It’s a blast.

And the fun they have with the story will also punch you in the heart (in a good way).

Wrapped up in all of its magical elements, The Magicians also happens to be wildly convoluted. Here, though, it’s at least in a way the show seems to truly delight in. As things grew more complex in Season 3, every week felt like the writers were taking the series’ classic fantasy tropes and conducting science experiments on them. Sometimes the effect is that aforementioned playfulness. But their characters are still on a variety of heroes’ journeys — which means this show is also willing to rip your heart out and tap dance all over it. Honestly? It feels great.

If there was one shining highlight of the season — and the show overall — it was the Feb. 7 episode, “A Life in the Day.” In it, Quentin and Eliot are tasked with completing a mosaic puzzle as part of a season-long quest to bring magic back to their world. To do so, they have to travel to a past version of Fillory. But unable to leave until they complete their mission, they wind up staying in the immediate vicinity of that puzzle for…well, the entire rest of their lives. The show plays this out in an extended montage. The two grow restless. They fight, they bond. They hook up. Quentin meets a local girl, settles down, has a son. When she’s gone, Quentin and Eliot spend the rest of their lives raising the kid and growing old together. Like the opening montage of Up, it’s the kind of sequence that really hits you with everything that it means to be human. It stays with you.

By the end of the episode, Quentin and Eliot had completed the puzzle and found their way back to their youths and their usual timeline. But the show made sure the impact of their time together was felt. These two characters had lived out an entire life as loving partners, side by side. It was an emotional beat that packed a hell of a wallop, and payoff has been sprinkled through the episodes that have followed. Sometimes it’s in small asides between the two characters; sometimes it’s just in knowing the way they look at each other. It’s hardly the first time characters in a genre show have lived out their entire lives in a separate timeline. But “A Life in the Day” was indicative of what The Magicians does best: It uses its magical setting and all-star cast to mold itself into different forms. Sometimes, like in that episode, it knocks you off your feet in the process.

In another episode, called “Six Short Stories About Magic,” the narrative is split into six vignettes sorted by character. The final one is centered on Harriet, a freedom of information activist and magician who runs a BuzzFeed spoof called FuzzBeat (hi, guys!). As Harriet is deaf, 10 minutes of the episode take place in silence. The segment includes some long-awaited exposition into Harriet’s backstory, which we get through her perspective before the series explodes back into sound in its final moments. The effect is stirring.

In “Be the Penny,” we get another play on perspective as Penny finds himself separated from his body with his friends believing him dead. We spend the episode with his astral self, watching people react to his death as he tries desperately to contact them. In both of these, the show plays with form to reveal depth. Penny doesn’t get a normal death, so it follows that the episode focusing on that would be just as off-kilter as the story itself — and just as sad. Penny watches his friends grieve, though not always to his satisfaction, and he can’t reach them to tell them that he’s still there.

“The Magicians” is never boring, and not just because it plays in the realm of fantasy. In fact, Syfy’s adaptation of the popular Lev Grossman novels never rests on its magical laurels — such as using strange mythical creatures or bizarre spells — as shortcuts to telling an intriguing story.

Instead, it constantly pushes itself to conjure up new ways to present its narrative, and the result is often as bewitching as it is bold. Take for example two episodes from earlier in the season. “Be the Penny” explores what it’s like for characters to mourn the loss of one of their own, but it’s told from the perspective of the deceased. The episode directly after, the poignant “A Life in a Day,” plays with the concept of time as two of the main characters literally spend a lifetime on what seems to be a hopeless task.

Six Short Stories

Wednesday’s upcoming episode “Six Short Stories About Magic,” written by co-creator Sera Gamble and David Reed, is split up into six sections, each told from the point of view of a different character. It begins with Penny (Arjun Gupta), who seeks out Benedict (Harvey Guile) in the Underworld and bluffs his way through fake “Game of Thrones” spoilers to achieve his goal. Take a look:

Penny’s task is related to the season’s big quest, finding the Seven Keys, which will somehow restore magic to both Earth and the Narnia-like world of Fillory. It’s this quest that prompted the series to push itself to new storytelling heights for this episode.

“We have this thing that was exacerbated by the structure of Season 3, which is a very classic fairy-tale quest structure in pursuit of something very well-defined: seven keys,” Gamble said in an interview with IndieWire. “You have an automatic cheat sheet as a viewer: either they’re going to succeed or they’re going to fail per episode and then also in the arc of the season. It became apparent to us that we had to really be extra creative with the structure of individual episodes because the last thing we want to do is bore you or become predictable.”

Therefore, David Reed came up with the idea to tell the story from six different characters’ perspectives. This is not quite “Rashomon,” though. The different perspectives are not contradictory nor ambiguously reliable. Rather, with each subsequent story that dovetails slightly with the one before, new layers of insights are added. What makes the episode truly groundbreaking, however, is the final storyline, which belongs to Harriet, played by Oscar-winning deaf actress Marlee Matlin.

The Sound of Silence

Harriet first appeared in Season 2 as the owner of Fuzzbeat, a website that specializes in cat videos and silly articles that turned out to be coded news for magicians. Since then, it’s been revealed that she’s an activist who wants the magical books and information from the Neitherworld Library to be free and accessible to all. Therefore, she’s called in when the gang dreams up a convoluted scheme to obtain one of the Seven Keys that involves knowledge of the library.

In this exclusive sneak peek from Wednesday’s episode, Harriet is trying to convince Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) to go along with the plan:

The scene above actually takes place during Alice’s story, which plays out fairly typically when it comes to production and sound. With Harriet’s story, however, viewers will be able to experience the action as if they are that character, both visually and auditorily. “The Magicians” created a full sequence that approximates for the audience what it’s like to move through the world if you’re deaf.

“David and I did a little research into hearing impairment,” said Gamble. “Not everybody who would identify themselves as deaf has 100 percent hearing loss. We tried to replicate the level of hearing impairment that we were being told and educated about, which does include being able to hear certain sounds in a very low register.”

Gamble will delve into the production of that scene further with IndieWire after the episode has aired on Wednesday.

Your Harriets Await

Beyond those production concerns, digging into Harriet’s story also required casting two other deaf actresses who would play younger versions of Harriet in her backstory. Casting directors Carrie Audino and Helen Geier broke down the process of finding the young actresses. Usually the casting department gets about a week’s notice per episode, but in this case, they were notified about a month earlier to give them more time for the search.

“We put out our breakdown first, which is what we do every episode to find actors, and we let the community know that we’re looking for actors that are deaf that need to match Marlee Matlin,” said Audino. “Then we see what you get back. Usually, if they have people if they’re represented by agents, they are usually people that we’re definitely going to take a look at because it usually means they’ve worked before. We start there, see what we get and then we expand the search.”

The search took place in both the United States and in Canada, where the series is shot, and through the usual talent agencies as well as those who specialize in actors who are hard of hearing. The deaf community, including deaf schools and theaters, were also contacted. Both actresses — one who would play Harriet as a child and one who would portray her as a teenager — were sought at the same time.

The role of the youngest version of Harriet went to newcomer Winter Sluyter-Obidos. “She had a brightness to her,” said Geier. “It really came across when she was doing the scene. You could see what she was doing, could see what she was thinking, but she wasn’t just kind of going through the motions.”

Landing the role of the teenager or young adult Harriet was Stephanie Nogueras, an experienced actress who had a recurring role as Natalie Pierce on “Switched at Birth,” the Freeform show that featured many deaf characters and actors.

Signing On

Casting deaf actors in roles written as such isn’t just good for representation and authenticity, but that also meant that they were already fluent in American Sign Language. That was a skill that two other cast members, Jade Tailor who plays Kady, and Mageina Tovah who plays the Librarian, had to acquire quickly for this episode.

Given Harriet’s strong feelings about the Neitherworld Library, it will come as no surprise that she has some sort of past history with it and knows the Librarian in some way. Hence, Tovah, who plays the bespectacled book curator, had to learn massive amounts of ASL and then perform it as fluently as possible.

“She didn’t come knowing she would have 14 pages of dialogue,” said Gamble. “We gave her the script early to practice.”

Tailor, whose character Kady often translates Harriet’s signing for the rest of the gang, had been learning ASL over the course of two seasons. And this is on top of having to use the particular brand of finger-tutting that the magicians use on the show to cast spells.

“Jade had the most scenes with [Marlee Matlin] and Jade had to be fluent,” co-creator John McNamara said. “One of the things that can set in on a show is ennui and predictability. When you suddenly cast a really highly regarded Oscar-winning actress and then say to the actors, ‘You have to learn this whole new skill and make it look like you’ve been doing it your whole life,’ it’s very good for the lifeblood of the show.”

Casting Outside the Box

Although “The Magicians” specifically cast actresses who are deaf to play a deaf character, the show attempts to cast marginalized actors regardless if the role is written that way or not.

Grier said, “Whenever there’s something that isn’t what your typical everyday professional actors necessarily has experience doing, that’s always a challenge and then more fun also because you get to kind of learn about the different worlds and be exposed to it and also think of them for future, not just things that they specifically are needed for.”

“I think as casting directors we always try to do that,” said Audino. “We always try and look for an idea that’s out of the box and try and put someone in the role that you wouldn’t necessarily think of them for, whether it’s because they have a disability or they’re a different ethnicity than was originally intended. That’s the fun part of our job.”

Gamble added, “I think it’s really good that this has been a conversation that has been in the media for the last couple of years because we all really needed to hear it. We really needed to hear that we’re the gatekeepers of opportunities and that we should be mindful about that. So we were all excited to just see a whole new group of actors who had never met before. When you have the opportunity to give a job to a great actor who might not get called in for quite as many auditions, that’s exciting.”

The show has already followed through with such casting. Candis Cayne, who was the first transgender actress to play a recurring transgender character in primetime on “Dirty Sexy Money,” doesn’t play a transgender character on “The Magicians,” but the role of Fillory’s Fairy Queen. And of course, Matlin came on to the show to play Harriet, whose character was not originally written to be deaf.

In each case, it was the actress’ skills as a performer (and that Matlin was a fan of the show) that informed the casting decision. And that, in turn, can affect the way the character is written.

“Something that Marlee brought to the role that we then started to write more and more towards is this hilarious, very dry sense of humor,” said Gamble. “The character was always very smart and plays her cards very close to the vest. You can tell that she’s a really formidable friend or adversary to anyone who comes and takes her out. But Marlee is just so fucking funny and so just watching her performance encouraged us to write more jokes for her.

“Some of that I think also come through in Episode 8, where David wrote a joke that was sort of at Kady’s expense, that Kady’s grammar as an interpreter is worse than Marlee’s grammar when she’s speaking.” The joke written by Reed, for whom we are eternally grateful, can be seen in the aforementioned exclusive clip above.

Welcome to The Magicians, Felicia Day.

On Wednesday, Day makes her debut on the Syfy drama as book character Poppy, a dragon expert from Brakebills who crosses paths with Quentin (Jason Ralph), who’s sailing the seas in search of the next key. Although Poppy initially presents herself as peppy person, we’ll soon find out that there’s more to her than meets the eye, Day tells EW.

“She initially seems like a very upbeat, very frank person, and then as the episode goes on, you peel back layer and layer and she is a little more twisted than you think,” says Day, who is slated to appear in the next three episodes. “She might not be the best person to have on your side in some ways. The twists and turns that she takes during the episode are delightful because she is so eternally upbeat.”

A longtime fan of the books (and friend of author Lev Grossman), Day landed her part on the show after mentioning in a meeting with Syfy that she would love to guest-star. It just so happened that the series was trying to cast this part, which ended up reuniting Day with executive producer Sera Gamble, who previously enlisted to play hacker-turned-hunter Charlie on Supernatural. While Poppy and Charlie are both cheerful characters, Day says their similarities end there.

“Poppy is a really confident character,” she says. “She’s more mature [than Charlie]. She has a lot more going on and she has a lot of agendas. Poppy is definitely out for herself in a way that Charlie would never be. It was very fun playing a much different character.”

Poppy’s self-centeredness, when combined with her cheerfulness, makes for an interesting dynamic with the broody Quentin. “It was so much fun to play the scenes with Jason because Poppy is a very different sort of character than has been on the show before. She says exactly what’s on her mind. She’s very upbeat and sort of forces the other person with her [in a scene] to be on her bandwidth,” Day says. “Seeing somebody so positive and chipper on the outside has a really interesting effect on Quentin. Our scenes together were very, very fun to play with because it throws Quentin off in a way that’s kind of new to audiences.”

Adds Day, “As the episode goes on, she definitely steers the ship in very unexpected ways, [which] leads to some emotional stuff for Quentin I think people are really going to enjoy.”

The gang's quest "to retrieve magic from the evil plumber gods," as Jason Ralph calls it, continues tonight on The Magicians's loveliest episode so far.

Armed with the enchanted book that recounts the Tale of the Seven Keys, the Brakebills students have been slowly collecting the items needed to restore power to their beloved Fillory and further beyond its borders. "Each time we solve a puzzle and find a key, the book sort of shows us a new chapter [that leads to a new key]," continues Ralph. "It's like Escape the Room, Magicians-style." Of course, because the book calls the shots, the who, when and where of these journeys are never the same, which winds up throwing together players who may not usually team up.

In the aptly-titled "A Life in the Day," a freshly-revealed clue sends Ralph's Quentin Coldwater and High King of Fillory Eliot (Hale Appleman) on a time-bending mission to build a mosaic that proves easier said than done—but worth every hour, month and decade they share tackling the task.

"Hale and I have this really beautiful [story] of a lifetime spent together," explains Ralph, fully aware that the twist touches on the sweetly affectionate connection Q and Eliot have shared ever since their potion-triggered threesome with Margo (Summer Bishil) back in Season 1. "That [scene] was nice, because it kind of laid out the idea of a spectrum. Things can happen between people and that doesn't equal everything they are."

Whether "things" happen again in tonight's outing is not for us to spoil, but suffice it to say that the emotional hour (featuring heartbreaking work by Ralph and Appleman) does what The Magicians has always done best: It defies and exceeds expectations by going deeper into the souls of its characters. It's all done through fantastical means that deliver developments that feel more earned than if they were just about the Physical Kids getting physical.

"The episode explores the relationship between Quentin and Eliot and doesn't try to explain itself," agrees Appleman, echoing his co-star's take on things. "It's really beautiful."

We all knew it was coming. On this week’s episode of The Magicians, fan favorites Eliot (Hale Appleman) and Margo (Summer Bishil) had to bid each other farewell — at least temporarily — so Eliot could board the Muntjac and set sail to After Island to begin the epic, Big Cock-advised quest to find the first of the Seven Keys that will unlock magic.

“I just love that they kept the kiss in. That was important to us, and that wasn’t in the script,” Bishil tells Yahoo Entertainment. “They do share intimacy that transcends sexuality or traditional constructs of relationships, and you don’t really see it that often, but it does happen. So I like that that remained, that there was some physical closeness. Because she’s wishing her friend success on his journey, but also, there’s no real certainty that he’ll come back.��

“The subtext is, ‘Don’t die,‘” Appleman says.

“Because there are unknown variables — you’re going on a quest, and who knows what you’re gonna encounter,” Bishil continues. “And then I’m being left as a prisoner [of the Fairy Queen], essentially.”

The pair filmed the emotional scene at a challenging time. “It was the last scene of my week after shooting, I think, 17 hours every day, right after Comic-Con weekend,” Appleman says. “It had been a really tumultuous time for me personally. I was really tired and I was really down, and Summer came really prepared, and the scene was about her comforting me and supporting me on the send-off, and I really felt that from her and needed that from her in that moment. I think that the scene lives and dies on Summer’s performance, in the sense that I was kind of s**t for brains at that point. So I’m grateful to her for carrying me through that moment.”

Aboard the Muntjac, Eliot is surrounded by two other women — wife Fen (Brittany Curran) and teen daughter Fray (Madeleine Arthur). “Madeleine makes fascinating choices. I wish that we had more writing together. I think that the relationship between Eliot and Fray could be developed into a very fascinating placeholder for a father-daughter, or older brother-younger sister situation,” Appleman says. “And throwing Brittany in the mix with us, too, as well, is great because Fen is losing her marbles, and Brittany does a particular brand of crazy very well, and her nagging, mothering, smothering instincts around Madeleine are spot on, and it’s really fun to watch that play out. So it’s a really fun dynamic; one that Eliot would have rather left behind, but that’s what adds to the conflict and the humor in those early episodes [of Season 3].”