'The Magicians' Season 5 Episode 13 Review: One last goodbye for a series that wasn't ready to end
Spoilers for 'The Magicians' Season 5 Episode 13 'Fillory and Further'
It's clear that 'The Magicians' wasn't ready to end just yet. It's not that anything's been left unresolved exactly, nor was it like the cliffhanger ending of Season 3. It's just that there's too much potential, and too much set-up for a now never-to-be Season 6 finale to feel like the series is closer than it is. That being said, it's still a powerful ending, and there are a lot worse ways to have to say goodbye to such an original series.
In this episode, the worlds are saved, Fillory is destroyed and birthed anew both figuratively and somewhat literally by Fen (Brittany Curran), and with the help of a time loop and a loop-sensitive Dean Fogg (Rick Worthy), some more truly disastrous consequences are avoided. We're left just before we find out what happens when you evacuate an entire fantasy planet to an all-new, even better world. It's a world not unlike the one created in Lev Grossman's 'The Magician's Land,' and just like the book, we only get a glimpse of it before it all ends.
In some ways, it feels like the show peaked midseason, with the back-to-back moon heist and groundhog day episode. This finale has a lot of different elements coming together - Penny Adiyodi (Arjun Gupta) and Julia Wicker's (Stella Maeve) child, the destruction of the old Fillory and the creation of the new, the return of The Beast (Charles Mesure), Rupert Chatwin's (Sean Maguire) resolution, and more - and very little of it feels as emotionally resonant as it ought to be. There is, perhaps, a lot of undue pressure on a series finale that didn't know it was being filmed as such, but even taking that into account, there is perhaps a little too much going on.
Margo Hanson (Summer Bishil) and Fen (Brittany Curran) anchor the episode, giving it its strongest moments. For all its scattered storylines, the destruction of Fillory is haunting. Margo's brave, cheery attitude in the face of the Apocalypse, betrayed by the shining tears in her eyes, is Summer Bishil at her absolute best. The weight of that moment is in no way undone by her being saved at the very last second.
Fen gets her own breakout moment, in her heart-to-heart with the World Seed reminiscent of Quentin Coldwater's (Jason Ralph) own moment with the flower that would only bloom for those who love Fillory. Fen, as a Fillorian resident, is the ideal person to realize that Fillory was never perfect - and that they deserve a better world.
'The Magicians' has always been a chaotic show, and its final episode is true to its form. The glimpses of what Season 6 would have featured are tantalizing and will doubtless be the focus of much speculation and fan fiction for years to come. There is a lot of story left untold, but its end is as satisfying a goodbye as a fan could have hoped for.
This was the final episode of 'The Magicians.'
