If anything, there have been about 500 chapters since then. I would underscore what John was just saying, which is for those of us who have experienced death…my story with my dad didn’t end when he died. Jason has left the show, and Quentin is dead, and a lot of season five is about what happens next, just as when somebody dies in our lives, the next season of our life is about what happens. But the emotions will run incredibly deep. Certainly on The Magicians, people can be very sad and can also be singing power anthems from the ’80s, and having sex that will turn them into a werewolf, and making deals with fairies with no eyebrows, and be traveling inter-dimensionally, so it’s not a bummer. It is that Jason Ralph is no longer a series regular on the show, and Quentin Coldwater is dead on the show, and the story moving forward is about the aftermath of that. Gamble: It’s not that Quentin’s story is done on The Magicians. We realized that with Quentin, we could tell that story through all of our other characters. A true story from adulthood that we have not told adequately enough is the story of: how do you deal with a real death? How does a real loss change you? It’s something Lev deals with well in one of the later books, where Quentin’s father dies and it fundamentally changes his magic. So we were starting to feel that we risked the audience losing their faith in us if we just brought everyone back. The death was about him reacting to the fact that his body died, but he was still alive. The second time when we killed Penny, we deliberately held in his POV, so the death was not about his death. So we took her out of the recaps, we withheld her from the audience for an episode to let this settle with them and wonder if it was real, and then tried to bring her back in a way that was difficult and disturbing.

The first time we did it was with Alice, we knew she was going to be coming back - as in the books. Myers: We’ve killed major characters before on the show and we’ve always tried to approach them differently.

Magicians end