This post contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of The Magicians, titled “Will You Play With Me?”

For fans of a certain age—and with certain taste—Syfy’s adaptation of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is like the fantasy equivalent of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Better yet, the series doesn’t have the political apathy or difficult associations that make Ready Player One such a hard pill to swallow for many viewers—and it’s also endowed with a winking self-awareness about the familiar story beats it’s treading. The always-great show transcended to new heights with its recently completed third season, thanks, in part, to moments that leaned heavily on inside references, such as a scene from the premiere in which two characters speak entirely in coded pop-culture inside jokes about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, and the show’s closest inspiration: Harry Potter.

But while savvy consumers of pop culture may have detected a direct nod to either Lost or Doctor Who in the Season 3 twist that leaves most of our heroes—Quentin, Julia, Margo, Josh, Kady, and Penny—with rebooted personalities and no memory of the magic they fought so hard to bring back into the world, executive producers Sera Gamble and John McNamara say for Season 4, their most consistent source of inspiration will likely be Grossman’s books themselves. This may come as a surprise to fans of the novels, who would likely call the TV adaptation “loose” at best. But while most adapted works grow less like their source material in later seasons (ahem, Game of Thrones), The Magicians will apparently be getting back to basics.

Speaking with Vanity Fair by phone, Gamble and McNamara hint at the by-the-book adaptation to come. Gamble re-reads the Grossman trilogy every year, and even McNamara—who confesses he hasn’t re-visited them since the show began—says he remembers getting especially entranced by the third book in the series, “really excitedly underlining, highlighting, dog-earring pages.” There is “so much” of Book 3 in the upcoming Season 4, he explains, and also in Season 5—because, as McNamara sees it, Grossman “brought everything to a chiseled, smashing completion. I’m really happy that we may be doing more of a strict adaptation this [next] year than ever before.”

Though this year’s finale seems comparable to Lost’s controversial Season 6 twist—in which the show’s heroes “flash sideways” into alternative lives and identities—Gamble and McNamara can honestly claim that the long-running ABC series didn’t guide them, for one very good reason: they’ve never seen Lost. (“I’m a friend of [Lost executive producer] Carlton Cuse,” McNamara laughs, “so please don’t tell him I said that.”) The pair has also never seen the British sci-fi mainstay Doctor Who, which back in 2008 similarly wiped the memory of popular character Donna Noble (Catherine Tate). That plotline is considered by many in the Who fandom as more poignant than any of the character deaths that preceded it: “The end of [Donna’s] story is deeply tragic,” series star David Tennant reflected to Vanity Fair nearly a decade later.

While McNamara and Gamble may not have been leaning on Who directly for this latest twist, that air of deep tragedy is precisely what they were aiming for in stripping the show’s hero magicians of all memory of magic. “Identity is so fragile,” McNamara explains. “It‘s ironic and cruel—two of my favorite words—to bring back that [magic] which defines these characters, then take away the knowledge that they can actually do it.” The cruelty seems to land hardest on Julia, who was drained of her godlike powers in the finale, and Margo—now cutely sporting her character’s book name, Janet)—is the most Donna-esque in her tumble from hard-won position of King of Fillory to the superficial mean girl she was in Season 1.