The Magicians is back for Season 3, but its world is without magic. How is a show about magicians supposed to be interesting if there’s no magic? Well, maybe there’s still a little magic around. Outside of the glimmer of magic left within Julia (Stella Maeve), the magicians are left without their power, but there are other natural sources which still exist.

With the fairies secretly controlling Fillory and the magical vacuum left at the end of last season, Eliot (Hale Appleman) sets out with his friends to find a way to restore the magic that’s been lost by collecting a series of keys. The first one, however, is in a location only reached by sea, and thus he will board a boat, the Muntjac, on his journey.

Collider visited The Magicians set and toured the impressive and detailed Muntjac interiors last year, and we got the scoop on this magical new set which book readers will no doubt be eager to see in action. Executive Producer Sera Gamble, Producer Chris Fisher and Production Designer Margot Ready revealed details about the differing types of magic, what magic still exists, the sentient tree which powers the Muntjac, the design features of the boat and more.

Magic May Be Gone, But It’s Not ALL Gone

SERA GAMBLE: Long story short, when you don't have magic and you're magicians and everything about your life and your world requires magic, you might be inclined to go on a quest to get it back. To that end, they need a very, very special mode of transportation.

The Wellspring of Magic has been shut off, but magical creatures still exist in our world because that's not like a magical current. Their DNA is just different than ours. And because of that, certain magical creatures still have properties that are, to you and I, a little bit magical. One of those magical creatures is sentient trees in Fillory. And that's what the boat is made out of. So, it's a very special and unusual boat. It's the kind of boat from the outside, it looks like a small pretty boat, and from the inside it looks as big as a sound stage.

The Muntjac Is an Actual Boat

CHRIS FISHER: First things first, we had to find a boat and buy a boat. That was most of our hiatus: boat hunting, find a big ol’ ship that we can buy and turn into an actual magic ship. There is an actual boat, a practical boat, we used for outside shots.

We found this beautiful boat and we had to come up with an idea of what the boat looked like on the inside. I think it was John [McNamara] and Sera [Gamble] from the get-go, they were like “the inside of the boat should be magical, it can be as big as you guys want it to be.”

But… The Muntjac Is Also a Set

FISHER: We knocked down Julia’s apartment [set], pushed the [Muntjac] set to the very, very edges of what we can do [on our stages]. … If you take a look at the steps, they take you up to the top of a real boat. When we’re shooting on the boat out in the sea, or wherever we take it, we’re shooting with drones, and hand-to-hand, or even platforms, ship-to-ship with cranes and stuff.

All of a sudden, the characters will come downstairs, you see them practically go down, open this tiny door I can’t even fit in, and all of a sudden you come down these stairs and boom. You’re in this place. It sells the magic of the show and that anything is possible, and through even the smallest doors in life they can open big adventures. Some of the big meta things about our show are really epitomized by this set.

The Boat Is Magical

MARGOT READY: What I think is really fun about this is we knew from the outset that doing a boat for The Magicians is not going to be just a boat. It’s going to be a boat that’s very magical, and creative, and also totally original.

In the spirit of our show, Fillory being a magical place, as well, this boat is actually a living creature. This tree, we call The Heartwood, is referred to as a she. It creates the boat, so very much the challenge of the design was to always be aware that this is always a living entity, as well as, a boat. It’s a functional boat and it’s a tree with a spirit.

The Muntjac Has “Moods”

READY: The tree has a core and has a heart to it that the light changes and pulses with the mood of the boat. And we've seen it a couple times when the boat gets excited and it communicates. It's not like a sort of “Close Encounters” experience where you know what the tree is saying, but at times people get the sense of the mood of the tree.

 

The Heartwood Roots Itself Throughout the Boat

READY: And the design thought was to always evoke the tree, as well as, the boat. We know it’s made of wood, so sure, it’s a tree but also the roots are going into the floor and these curlicues kind of represent energy coming from the roots to make the boat.

The branches actually kind of arc down into these ribs, and then we have a floral pattern down the ribs. The idea being that closer to the tree is the most tree-like and that kind of dissipates into the rest of the boat, but you still have an arch here that reminds you that it’s breaking out into a tree again.

READY: The tree itself is meant to be sort of altar-like, so we don't have any dressing around it. It's just sort of a sacred area around the tree.

The Magicians Rules Inspired the Design

FISHER: We set these really strict rules of how this fantasy works. We know this year, of course, magic is dead, so the magicians can't use magic, but magical creatures still possess magical powers because their magic doesn't come from any source. It's part of them.

This ship is a sentient, a magical creature, you'll see that's why the Heartwood glows. That was a fun thing we got to play with, how our rules inspire our design, and then that circles back. One of the big concerns from a director and DP (Director of Photography) standpoint is that this is going to be without magic, so how does this boat-- how do we light this set? How do we see? We couldn't use electricity, because there's no electricity in Fillory. We couldn't use magic, because magic is dead. We created these cool portholes. The portholes don't match the size of the portholes on the boat either, but we have these beautiful streams of light here with atmosphere. It looks so incredible.

We came up with these flickering candles. This flickering light is supposed to sell fire light. It was a big challenge. Imagine this is a big wooden box, which is a DP nightmare, because we don't light our sets from above, it's one of our rules of lighting the show. We don't set up a big grid lighting. We light the characters. We don't light the sets.

With actors moving around, it became difficult. So what you'll see when you watch it on TV, as the ship turns, the sun will turn and the beams of light will shift and pattern through here. It was a huge problem we faced and the solution came up being something truly magical.

The Magicians airs Wednesday nights at 9pm ET on Syfy.