Be aware there are spoilers for The Magicians through the Season 3 finale, 'Will You Play with Me?'

Praise be to Ember and Umber (RIP), The Magicians returns for its fourth season this week,and hoo boy, there is a lot of drama on the table after the insane Season 3 finale. Last year, The Magicians used the second book's quest for the seven keys as inspiration while blossoming into its own delightfully bizarre rhythm, sending the Brakebills gang on a stunning journey through Fillory and beyond that never stopped surprising.

With that in mind, it's perfectly understandable if you're still reeling from the insanity of the Season 3 finale (or just plan forgot the details in the months since it went off the air.) And who could blame you with all the back-stabbing, Worry not! We've got you covered with a full breakdown of all the need-to-know details of where we left things in Season 3 so you'll be fully primed for all the magical insanity to come.

Julia Horcruxed Her Goddess Power

Julia has arguably had the most transformative and engaging arc throughout the series. Rejected from Brakebills, left on her own in the underworld, and subject to a horrendous sexual assault (by a god, no less), Julia never let herself be the victim, choosing to become a survivor instead. Now, that doesn't mean she didn't make some dark, aggressive swings in her healing period, but she's grown and developed more than any character on the show (and Our Lady of the Trees certainly made up for her dark days when she got her Shade back.)

In Season 3, that growth manifested in her powers when Our Lady of the Underground gave Julia Reynard's spark of god magic as retribution for his crimes. Julia took that spark and became the flame, becoming a full-on goddess in the process. By the Season 3 finale, Julia could hear prayers and even create worlds if she wanted to, but ever the loyal friend, Julia returned to help in Quentin's time of need. After Alice decided humanity couldn't handle magic and destroyed the seven keys, Julia followed Prometheus' lead and horcrotched -- sorry, horcruxed her powers to create a new set of keys. We don't know if she's completely powerless now (though Prometheus' fate didn't bode well), but she did say didn't feel "connected to anything anymore" when the spell was finished. However, as Reynard told her, even without their powers, a god is hard to kill. Whatever comes her way, we know Julia is always going to be a power player, but what power remains in her beside that which she gives herself remains to be seen.

The Library Siphoned Magic (and Dean Fogg Helped)

The Library has always been somewhat ambiguous in their ethics (billion year contracts don't scream "these are the good guys,") but the mysterious magical organization made a major stride towards fascism in the Season 3 finale. With the help of Dean Fogg and Irene McAllister, the Library's forces arrived in Blackspire moments after the gang saved the day and siphoned all magic into the Library's control. As we saw in the final moments of 'Will You Play with Me?', they're not exactly generous with their allotments and they're keeping an iron grip on the purse strings. Now, the Library aren't quite the viscerally terrifying full-on villain a la The Beast, but they're definitely dabbling in lawful evil at this point, and there's no doubt they're going to be a major obstacle for our heroes in the season to come. How do you fight a corrupt organization when they hold all the (literal) power? Well, that's going to be a big focus in Season 4, and timely as ever, The Magicians is using the Library's narrative to broach real-world concerns.

The Fairy Queen Sacrificed Herself to Make a Key Deal

Of all the hideous deeds Irene McAllister has committed in her brief run on The Magicians, the most abhorrent and desperate was killing the Fairy Queen to use the power in her bones. Ok, maybe the worst thing was joining her family's black market fairy bone enterprise to begin with, but killing the Fairy Queen definitely made me hate her the most.

Working in league with the Library, Irene took a dangerous offer from the queen. "No fairy will be hunted by a non-fairy anywhere, ever. And this deal cannot be broken for any reason by any being, ever." That definitely doesn't sound like something Irene can control, but she agreed and used her powers to help the Library take control of the magic source. That means she's probably going to have some serious juice behind her in the magic-restricted world of Season 4, but the thing about fairy deals is that they tend to come at a price. "You made a deal you will regret," the Fairy Queen promised her, smirking even on her deathbed, went out like a boss reminding Irene, "I’ll die a queen, not some mediocre, power-hungry girl." Still, we can almost certainly expect to see some fallout from her death in Season 4. How does the fairy monarchy work? Does she have kids to take the throne given the fairy breeding problems? And just how is it going to bite Irene in the ass when someone, somewhere hurts a fairy one day?

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The Gang Had Their Memories Erased

Our heroes are not themselves. Not quite.Margot, Josh, Penny, Kady, Julia, Quentin and Eliot all had their memories erased thanks to Dean Fogg's experimental potion and they're living under entirely new identities back in the Earth world.

Showrunner John McNamara promised that the identities we saw at the end of the Season 3 aren't quite the reality of the lives our heroes are really leaving, telling fans, "We’ve only shown you a sliver of who or what they are, and that sliver is misleading." But just for a quick update, last we saw Margot was still a boss bitch fashionista, Josh was her driver, Penny was a DJ in a bumpin' club, Kady was dealing drugs, Julia was giving a presentation for an arts, Quentin was cheerfully wandering through a book shop, and Eliot.... well, we'll get to him. But there's one more of our questing heroes you may notice is missing.

Alice Is Locked up In The Library

Alice wasn't like the rest of the gang -- and not just because she tried to end magic for good by destroying the keys. Alice broke a deal with The Library when she refused to put the siphon on the magic fountain, and now she's locked up tight in a Library prison with no one to scream at but Dean Fogg. She's also the only one who knows about the monster the gang set loose, and you can bet that's what she's screaming about the most. "I saw it, I felt it, even the gods are afraid of it," she shouts at the Dean. If there's one thing we know about Alice, it's that she's capable of the extraordinary (destroying those keys was incredible even if it was the worst), so if she's screaming about that monster, we can pretty much assume she's working on some brilliant plan to try to stop him. Speaking of which...

Eliot Is a Monster

So, big oopsie here. You member that nameless monster? The one who Calypso strictly warned could never, ever, definitely not be allowed to escape the prison she built for it? Well, yeah, he escaped. And he's taken up residence in Eliot's body.

"The gods made something that simply wants. So it has to know one secure place and constant love," the knight warned Quentin, "if it’s appetites go unfed and it’s unleashed, not even the gods can stop it." With that in mind, Quentin set out to fulfill his duty as the quester, to take the knight's place has the monster's companion, but Eliot was obviously not up for that. With Margot's help, he stole the god-killing bullet and fired it right into the creature. Big mistake, because that monster is a body-hopper, and once it escaped the prison, it crawled right into the body of the man who tried to kill it.

Everybody's favorite ex-High King of Fillory is walking around with a deadly childlike creature inside him. We still don't know exactly what this monster's powers are, but we do know that he killed all the other monsters and godly mistakes he was locked up with. Gulp.

Oh, and he's holding Quentin hostage.

Quentin Is in Deep Trouble

About that. Quentin has no memory of his real identity, no access to magic, and he's in the hands of a literal monster. It's safe to say that, once again, Quentin Coldwater has landed himself in some... hot water. (Apologies, I'll show myself out.) Last we saw Quentin, he was wandering out of a New York book store, looking more happy-go-lucky than ever, until he ran into Monster Eliot. "Will you play with me?" the extra creepy (but obviously still dapper) new Eliot asked. Something gives me the feeling, Quentin's not going to have a choice.

Penny Is in the Underworld (But Penny-23 Lives!)

Whoever Penny is under Dean Fogg's spell, he's definitely not the Penny we got to know and love in the first two seasons. He's pretty close though. Remember those 40 timelines Jane Chatwin created in her quest to stop her brother? We've always followed the 40th and last timeline-- the one where they finally defeated The Beast -- but Season 3 took a visit to one of the others and came back with some hitchhikers.

In the episode 'Twenty-Three', Julia and Josh travelled to the 23rd timeline -- the same one glimpsed when Alice-23 appeared in the Tesla Fluxion to help Quentin find her shade -- in search of a key. They did come back with the key, as well as a disturbing glimpse at how inter-timeline communication can cause a nightmare, but they also came back with New Marina and New Penny. Bad news for Cady since her Penny is still trapped in the underworld, and given the fact that the last time we saw him he was munching on an underworld cupcake (a big no-no if you've read your mythology), he's probably not going to make it back to the world of the living any time soon. Turns out Penny-23 never met Cady, but he shared a bond with Julia in his timeline, something that could stir up some interesting tension between Julia, Kady, and Penny-23 down the line; though knowing The Magicians, it won't be in any of the basic bitch love-triangle ways we'd expect.

One more thing about the 23rd timeline to remember -- Josh also met his counterpart there, who was living in terror, dreading something called "The Quickening," which apparently had something to do with the fact that he slept with a werewolf. Who would be wild enough to do that in two timelines? Josh, that's who. Whatever the quickening is, whatever was going to happen to Josh in the 23rd timeline, might be coming for him in this one too.

Fen Is Running Fillory

With High King Margot, King Eliot and all the other kings and queens of Fillory out of the equation, dear sweet Fen is left to rule over Fillory in their absence. No doubt things are bound to be a bit crazy in Fillory with magic on lock down, but as we saw in the Season 3 finale, Fen isn't the naive girl we once knew. Sure, she says "please" and "sorry" too much, but as the Fairy Queen counseled her, her "power comes from High King Margot, but it flows through [her]." Who knows how long the memory spell will last and how long it will be before the rest of Fillorian royalty makes it back to the magical land? Until then, Fen is staged for some lovely character growth, a perfect next step in the the journey toward inter-species empathy she took in Season 3.