Over the last five seasons of its run on Syfy, The Magicians has had a number of standout episodes. They were either musical in nature, or had some crazy bottle-episode premise, or involved a major character’s death. But the third episode of Season 5 is special for a very different reason, and I wanted to speak with the co-showrunner and the episode’s writer, Sera Gamble, about how it all came together. Over these first few episodes of Season 5, the Magicians characters have been dealing with the fallout of Quentin’s (Jason Ralph) death at the …

Ever since the Season 3 episode “A Life in a Day,” fans of the Syfy series The Magicians have been eager to see how the show might address—or seize upon, even—the idea of a relationship between Quentin (Jason Ralph) and Eliot (Hale Appleman). The notion of that relationship ever happening went out the window at the end of Season 4, when Quentin sacrificed his life for his friends and Ralph exited the show, leaving Eliot despondent over losing the chance to ever explore a relationship with Quentin. That’s no doubt why Quentin’s death hit especially hard …

For the past five years, actor Hale Appleman has had the opportunity—and the challenge—of playing one of the most complex characters on the terrific Syfy series The Magicians. And for The Magicians, a show full of complicated people, that’s saying something. The journey of Eliot Waugh has been one riddled with extreme ups and downs. Eliot is at once the most charismatic person in the room, and also one of the saddest. He has been a strident heroic force of good, and a vessel for a literal monster. Introduced as the “life of the party,” Appleman has …