If you’d asked us after the first episode of “The Magicians” whether The Beast was evil, we would have pretty definitively shouted, “YES, are you crazy?! He’s gouging out people’s eyes!! Of course he’s evil!” But Season 2 is going to make us question everything we thought we knew about the villain who has conquered Fillory and made it his own.
When the identity of The Beast was finally revealed in the Season 1 finale, it was quickly apparent that Martin Chatwin (Charles Mesure) hadn’t conquered Fillory because he was a power mad monster; he’d done it because he was terrified of going back to the real world where his rapist, Christopher Plover (Charles Shaughnessy) was always waiting for him. His home on earth had become a horror show, and staying in Fillory was his only escape.
When you look at it that way, it’s harder to see Martin as a villain. Instead, he comes off as an incredibly conflicted character, whose violent and psychotic methods now reek of panic and desperation.
That line between good and evil is about to get even blurrier in Season 2, according to the show’s stars.
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“So much of [Quentin’s] journey is about discovering and fighting the idea that there’s this black-and-white… There is no good and evil,” Jason Ralph says. “Even The Beast, our big bad… It turns out that he had a really horrific childhood, and his pursuit of trying to be in Fillory, and doing all the things that he’s done, is about self-preservation — just trying to survive, and staying in a place that he feels safe, even if it’s trying to expel him. Does that make you a bad guy, or does that make you just someone trying to survive and get what you need? Now, he does it at all costs, so that gets tricky, but morally it’s really hard to go, Kill the bad guy… Because he’s not really bad.”
It’s definitely hard to reconcile that traumatized little boy with the murderous Beast of Fillory, but that’s a journey we’re looking forward to taking in Season 2.
According to Stella Maeve, her character Julia will have a difficult time making the distinction between man and Beast: Not only will she be spending the most time with Martin (given how she betrayed the plan to kill him and instead took him hostage), but she’ll soon realize that she and Martin have more in common than she’d like to admit.
“It’s the beauty and the beast,” Maeve says. “You get to see our female heroine, who is kind of a broken warrior, a broken hero… This is a man who is a wounded soul himself. Even though you could look at these two people and say that they’re so different, they actually have so many similarities.”
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Those similarities will lead to some interesting and potentially dangerous places in Season 2 — but don’t be alarmed if you find yourself a little charmed by this new side of The Beast. The man we see in Season 2 is a less malevolent and more whimsical version than the one who tormented the students of Brakebills University in Season 1. With Julia keeping him in check, courtesy of the moonstone blade, we’ll get a better opportunity to see Martin’s personality — however warped it’s become over the years.
Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourselves whether you think there’s any sort of humanity left in him, but that kind of discussion is what makes “The Magicians” such an amazing story.
“So much of TV and movies is so black and white. This is the villain, this is the hero, and that’s it,” Maeve says. “[‘The Magicians’] is not black and white. Why is a person a villain? How do they become this way? Maybe it’s not something they did, maybe it’s something that was done to them — and how can we empathize with that? How can we understand that, and identify with it? I love that we get that perspective.”
“The Magicians” premieres Wednesday (Jan. 25) at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Syfy.
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