Is Jason Ralph leaving The Magicians after season 4 finale?
Following tonight’s The Magicians season 4 finale, is Jason Ralph leaving the show? It’s a shocking subject, but we gotta address it now … and we come bearing some pretty bad news.
Given that Quentin was such a foundational character to The Magicians — his point of view was there from the very onset of this series — he’s the sort of person you would expect to stick around. Unfortunately, the character (or at least the version played by Ralph) is saying goodbye. Speaking via TVLine, executive producer John McNamara confirmed the actor’s departure, explaining that there was a conversation with Jason that took place long ago that led to this point in the story:
We actually had a very open and kind of great conversation at the end of Season 3. We always want to talk to the actors. “How did you feel about the season? What were your favorite things? What do you want to do next season?” We had a feeling that Jason was beginning to sense that he’d explored a lot of that character and had grown a tremendous amount in terms of how that character’s journey unfolded. [We had a] discussion with him on Skype. It just became really clear to Sera, myself and Jason that the best next step for this character would be the kind of death that we had laid out for him that eventually formed this climax. So it was an oddly drama-free, very much mutual, totally creative decision. It was just: How do we best serve this character’s journey, and how do we best continue to shock and surprise our audience? And the answer turned out to be this one thing. He was onboard from jump street.
McNamara did confirm that the character of Quentin could return in some other forms in the future — which seems possible just because this is The Magicians we’re talking about here. We just have to cross our fingers and hope that if the man comes back, it happens in a way that doesn’t feel disrespectful to the sacrifice that Quentin made. Even with shows where there are supernatural tinges, death does have to have a certain meaning to it. Otherwise, the show loses a lot of its spark and you just find yourself wondering if anything really matters.
Creatively, this is a big move that does unsettle the entire foundation for The Magicians. It does create a genuine nobody-is-safe atmosphere, and it does give us some reasons to be intrigued by what’s coming up. The risk of course, though, is that you lose viewers who were invested in Jason’s story … but we do think that there is such a rich tapestry across the board here that there are many other characters who are still worth watching and checking out.