Peaches and Plums, Motherfucker, with a Side of Bacon

“What’ll you have for breakfast?”

“Peaches and plums, motherfucker, with a heaping plate of bacon.” 

The ‘breakfast of champions’ for The Magicians (and their fans).  Especially after the death of our beloved Quentin Coldwater.

And with it came the death of possibility for both Quelice and Queliot, or even Quelioce. 

El and Alice sitting together holding hands at Q’s memorial bonfire.

El and Alice standing together holding each other next to Q’s memorial in in Fillory facing the lake.

El and Bambi mournfully sipping martinis under a tree, lit cigarette dangling between El’s two fingers.

Stephanie telling Alice that she do whatever she needs to get through her grief, no matter how crazy.

In the scene from Season 4’s “Escape from the Happy Place” where Eliot finally confronts the memory he most fears to face, El tells Q after the latter proposes giving Queliot a try back in their own timeline, “Q, c’mon, I love you, but you have to know that that’s not me and it’s definitely not you, not when we have a choice”.

Just as the two of them had “proof of concept” that they could have a long term relationship Season 3’s “A Life in the Day”, so too did El have proof of concept for his words.  He and Q got together on the night of their first anniversary in past Fillory working on the mosaic, then Ariel showed up and Q ended up with her.

Of course, El’d also shut down Q’s attempt the morning after to address what’d happened between them that night.  “Let’s just save our overthinking for the puzzle, yeah?”  It was his way of running then, just like the scene of his worst memory.  But while what he said then did apply to Q, for El it was a different story entirely.

What he said to Bambi (Margo) when she compared her having to marry Prince Ess of Loria to El’s having to marry Fen proves that.  “This would only be equivalent if Ess was a girl and you found pussy, you know, interesting in a ‘sometimes you like Thai food’ kind of way.  And now it’s all Thai food, forever, until you die.”

El framed his words to Q in the aftermath of their past-Fillory adventure not because they were true for himself (they were decidedly not), but to keep from inflicting a guilt trip on someone he dearly loved about something over which he (Q) had no control.  He was, in effect, sharing the blame for what he at the time indicated were unlikely prospects of a relationship between them, because while it was Eliot, it had already been proven not to be Q, not when he had a choice.

Margo is Eliot’s Mary Austin (long-term companion of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury).  Even had El and Q become Queliot in the present in Timeline 40, El’s Bambi would have been closer to his heart, something Q would’ve accepted just as Josh has.  El and Q could’ve even married under Fillory’s laws and Fen would’ve accepted it. 

However, Alice isn’t built for that kind of accommodation, something of which Q and El were both aware and for which El, being El, would’ve sacrificed his own happiness in order to maintain that of two people he loved dearly.  So Quelioce was never really a possibility, and while Queliot in a life isolated from the rest of their lives succeeded, it could only happen there, under those circumstances, because El loved Q too much to let him sacrifice a relationship with the one he loved even more.

By the way, I’m not deliberately “side-effecting” the rest of the characters shown in the teaser for Season 5; it’s just that other than the ones that I included it’s unclear whether the characters are mourning Q.  Taking the brief (very brief) teaser along with the special sneak peak from San Diego’s Comic-Con, it looks like Season 5 is gonna be dope.  I can’t wait.