New The Magicians Season 2 Trailer Released

SyFy has released a new trailer for the second season of The Magicians.

This is the second trailer for the new season of The Magicians, which is based on the trilogy of fantasy novels by author Lev Grossman and reveals some interesting new details about how the season diverges in pretty significant ways from the source material.

Firstly, the Beast is very much still alive, and while Alice died in The Magician‘s first season finale, she’s alive once more in Season 2. That’s a huge departure from the original novel, which concluded with Alice sacrificing herself by using enough magical power to destroy the Beast on her own, but transformed into a niffin in the process.

From here other divergences are also made evident. Since she’s alive, Alice is now able to become a queen of Fillory. That position went to Julia in the novels, but Julia is more interested in seeking revenge on Reynard the Fox, the god who raped her in The Magicians Season 1. That quest for vengeance was undertaken by Asmodeus, revealed to be Kady in television series. While Kady is apparently still involved in the mission, Julia is clearly taking the lead.

Giving Julia more agency in her quest to avenge her own sexual assault – a plot point that was controversial even in Grossman’s original novels – is already an interesting step away from the source material. That The Magicians Season 2 trailer reveals Julia is seeking guidance from the Beast, easily the most powerful but also the evilest magician to appear on the show so far, is another step down a potentially very dark rabbit hole.

The Magicians Season 2 premieres Jan. 25, 2016 on Syfy.

More The Magicians: The Magicians Season 2 First Trailer / Exclusive: The Magicians Season 1 Gag Reel

Based upon Lev Grossman’s best-selling books, The Magicians stars Jason Ralph (A Most Violent Year, Aquarius) as Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant grad student who enrolls in Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a secret upstate New York university specializing in magic. He and his 20-something friends soon discover that the magical fantasy world they read about as children is all too real— and poses grave danger to humanity. Stella Maeve (Chicago P.D.), Hale Appleman (Teeth), Arjun Gupta (Nurse Jackie) and Summer Bishil (Towelhead, Lucky 7) also star in this one hour drama.

Groundswell Productions’ Michael London and Janice Williams (Milk) will executive produce. John McNamara (Aquarius) and Sera Gamble (Supernatural), writers of the pilot, will serve as executive producers.

Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy is an international sensation, published and widely praised in more than twenty countries. The epic conclusion to the series, The Magician’s Land, opened at #1 last summer on The New York Times Hardcover Best Seller’s list, and was widely acclaimed as one of the best books of the year.