MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The construct of the “personal apocalypse” is used throughout varying discourse traditions—including literary, filmic, sociological, and theological—and refers to a personal tragedy, whether a death, the diagnosis of a terminal illness, the loss of creative will, or even loss of faith. The concept of the personal apocalypse—despite the varying discourses that toss about the term—is the destructive alteration of the self, so that the sufferer, like a place devastated by an apocalyptic event, would become irrevocably changed.

The SyFy adaptation of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy offers a different take on the personal apocalypse. In the adaptation of The Magicians, a group of magical college students are placed into a time loop in order to halt an impending disaster. Every time they fail to kill the Beast, who seeks to destroy the world of magic, the loop starts again, with some aspect altered, in order to try again. The young magicians do manage to avert impending disaster, but they do so by ultimately—and inadvertently—bringing about the very “apocalypse” that had sought to impede, rendering magic non-existent. This is viewed by the characters as an “end-of-the-world” event—when, in reality, the world as we know it continues to exist, and even the characters have only reverted to their pre-magic existence at worst, living with family, working at jobs, etc. Though the book series itself lacks the apocalyptic vision of both the world without magic and the world as it is, in the adaptation of the trilogy, the personal “apocalypse” becomes a global catastrophe, creating a response that mirrors a more significant event. This essay will explore the means through the discourse of the “personal apocalypse” is distorted and manipulated by the television series, and examine why and how—rhetorically, psychosocially and theologically—a personal setback is depicted through the lens of a global catastrophe.