'The Magicians' Season 4 Trailer and Release Date: "Great Ill Is Afoot!"

The first peek at The Magicians Season 4 resurrected a dead god … sort of … to sound the alarms and pet a bunch of really cute kittens at a dreamy version of Castle Whitespire. The Magicians remains as delightfully weird as ever.

During a Friday morning chat at New York Comic Con 2018 between The Magicians author Lev Grossman and showrunners Sera Gamble and John McNamara of Syfy’s television adaptation, they unveiled a sneak peek at Season 4 and a release date of January 23, 2019.

In the clip, Margo — now named “Janet” after her novel counterpart following a mind-wipe at the end of Season 3 — is summoned via a dreamscape to Castle Whitespire in Fillory, where she chats briefly with an “energetic emanation previously placed … by the great god Ember.” (Quentin killed Ember back in Season 2.) The emanation is “activated” by “a disturbance of great magnitude” to warn that “great ill is afoot!”

Some other fun bombshells in The Magicians universe?

Janet’s a high-profile fashion editor that’s slept with Banksy before, and she also sometimes does crazy drugs at Jeff Goldblum’s house — enough that she’s not really all that thrown by such a trippy experience.

The “great ill” that’s “afoot” obviously has something to do with some malevolent being at the end of Season 3 possessing Eliot and then wandering the multiverse looking for people to “play” with. The final scene of Season 3 saw the creature confronting Quentin, who, like the rest of the Magicians sans Alice, had his memory wiped by the Library. Alice kept her memory but was locked away in a cell.

In a conversation with Olivia Taylor Dudley, who plays Alice on The Magicians, shortly after the Season 3 finale, she told Inverse a little bit more about the monstrous new enemy in Season 4. “The only way it’s been described is an entity that just wants,” Dudley told Inverse. “I don’t even know what that means! It sounds terrifying. I think Hale [Appleman] is a perfect vessel for that. I’m assuming that’s our big bad. I’d love it if Alice went face-to-face with it eventually.”

According to Dudley, it’s up to Alice to set things right. “She’ll have to break out of jail and then try to save everybody,” Dudley said. “I would hope her first goal would be to track everybody down and fix this. She’s the only one that can help them.”

But it’s nice to see that Janet also has magical forces urging her in the right direction because the Magicians are going to need all the help they can get to access magic again and stop their new big bad.

The Magicians Season 4 will premiere on Syfy January 23, 2019.