I came to Aristotle’s Poetics through magic, which is not the path most people take to ancient Greek philosophy.
The route was indirect. I was reading Jamy Ian Swiss’s essay in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, an essay that starts with a card trick and ends up covering dramatic structure, the nature of surprise, film criticism, and the psychology of audience expectations. Somewhere in the middle of that essay, Swiss introduces a concept from Aristotle that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.
Aristotle, discussing tragedy, argues that the plot must unfold so that each event follows inevitably from the one before it. The ending must feel like the only possible conclusion, the natural result of everything that has happened. And yet — and this is the key — the ending must not be obvious. The audience should not see it coming while the story is being told. Only in retrospect, after the ending has arrived, should the audience think: of course. That is what had to happen.
Inevitable but not obvious.
When I read that phrase in a hotel room in Graz at two in the morning, I felt the particular electricity that comes from encountering an idea that reframes everything you thought you understood. Because inevitable but not obvious is the perfect description of what a great magic climax should be — and the perfect diagnosis of what is wrong with a bad one.
Two Types of Bad Climax
Armed with this framework, I went back and analyzed every routine in my working repertoire. I had six pieces at the time, performing them in various combinations at corporate keynotes and events across Austria. What I found was humbling.
Some of my climaxes were obvious but not inevitable. The audience could see them coming a mile away, but when they arrived, they felt disconnected from the preceding action. These were the routines where the buildup and the payoff were essentially unrelated — where the climax was impressive on its own but did not feel like it grew organically from the story I had been telling.
For example, I had a mentalism piece where I made a series of predictions. The predictions were revealed one by one, and each one matched. The climax was the final prediction, which was the most impressive. The problem? The audience saw the pattern by the second prediction. Prediction matches. Next prediction matches. The third will match. They knew what was coming. The inevitability had become obviousness, and by the time I reached the climax, the audience was ahead of me. Not in the delightful way I discussed in my previous post — not the anticipated surprise. In the bored way. The way you know how a formulaic movie ends because you have seen the pattern.
The other type of failure was the opposite: inevitable in a technical sense but completely non-obvious in a bad way. These were routines where the climax came out of nowhere. The audience was following along, engaged in one narrative, and then the ending arrived like a left turn into a wall. Surprising? Yes. But the surprise had no connection to the journey. The audience did not think “of course” — they thought “where did that come from?”
I had a routine like this that I was particularly proud of at the time. The ending was genuinely surprising and visually strong. But it bore almost no relationship to the premise I had established. The audience had been thinking about one thing, and the climax was about something else entirely. The disconnect was the kind of thing that magicians might find clever — the method was elegant, and the surprise was real — but the audience experienced it as a non sequitur. A random event. Impressive, perhaps, but emotionally empty.
The Maid in Manhattan Problem
Swiss illustrates the concept using films, and the comparison has stayed with me. He contrasts a formulaic romantic comedy — where the ending is painfully, excruciatingly obvious from the first scene — with Shakespeare in Love, where the ending is clearly inevitable but the path to it is so intricate and surprising that the audience remains engaged throughout.
Both films end the way they must. In the romantic comedy, the audience knows within minutes how it will end, and the remaining ninety minutes are just the mechanical execution of the formula. In Shakespeare in Love, the audience also senses where the story must end — Shakespeare will write Romeo and Juliet, and the film’s protagonists will play those roles — but the question of how this will happen, given all the obstacles, sustains tension and interest until the final act.
This is the distinction that matters. Inevitability without obviousness means the audience feels the pull of the conclusion without being able to see the mechanism. They sense that things are heading somewhere meaningful, but they cannot predict the exact route. And when the destination is reached, it feels right. It feels earned. It feels like the only place this journey could have ended.
The alternative — obviousness — is the magic equivalent of a formulaic romantic comedy. The audience knows the card will appear in the wallet. They know the prediction will match. They know the chosen card will end up on top. Not because these are bad effects, but because the structure of the routine has made the ending transparent. The journey is just the mechanical execution of a formula the audience has already decoded.
The Internal Logic of Magic
Swiss makes a subtle and important observation: even magic, which is by definition illogical, requires its own internal logic. A magic routine is a tiny world with its own rules, and those rules must be consistent even as the routine violates the rules of the real world.
This sounds abstract, so let me give a concrete example from my own experience.
I perform a routine where the audience makes a series of choices. Each choice is demonstrably free. At the end, something impossible has occurred as a result of those choices. The internal logic of the routine is: the audience controlled the process, and the outcome should therefore be random. The climax — that the outcome is anything but random — violates the external logic of probability, but it is consistent with the internal logic of the routine, which has positioned the audience as the decision-makers.
This consistency is what makes the climax feel inevitable. The audience agreed to the premise. They accepted the rules. They participated in the process. And the conclusion follows directly from that participation. It feels like the only possible ending because the internal logic of the routine demands it.
Now contrast this with a routine where the climax has no connection to the internal logic. Where the audience has been following one thread, and the ending is on a completely different thread. The climax might be impressive, but it does not feel inevitable because it does not follow from the rules the routine has established. It feels arbitrary. And arbitrary conclusions, no matter how impressive, do not produce the deep emotional satisfaction that inevitable conclusions produce.
Redesigning My Climaxes
The Aristotelian lens gave me a practical framework for evaluating and redesigning my routines. For each piece, I asked two questions:
First: could the audience predict this ending? If yes, the climax is too obvious. I need to add complexity, misdirection, or structural elements that obscure the destination while maintaining the journey’s coherence.
Second: does this ending follow logically from everything that preceded it? If no, the climax is not inevitable enough. I need to strengthen the internal logic of the routine, adding elements that retrospectively make the ending feel like the only possible conclusion.
The goal was to be able to answer “no” to the first question and “yes” to the second. No, the audience could not predict this ending while the routine was being performed. And yes, once the ending arrived, it felt like the only possible conclusion.
I spent weeks in hotel rooms across Austria — Linz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt — rewriting scripts and restructuring routines to meet these two criteria. Some pieces needed minor adjustments. Others needed complete reconstruction.
The prediction routine that had been too obvious — the one where the audience could see the pattern after two matches — was restructured so that the final prediction was qualitatively different from the first two. The first predictions established a pattern. The final prediction broke the pattern in a way that was surprising but, in retrospect, inevitable given the setup I had been building throughout. The audience’s expectation of “another match” was both confirmed and exceeded.
The routine with the disconnected climax — the impressive but arbitrary ending — was rewritten so that the climax grew directly from the premise. I will not describe the specifics, but the key change was ensuring that the elements introduced in the first minute of the routine were the same elements that produced the climax. Nothing came from outside. Everything was already on the table, already part of the story, already accepted by the audience as part of the world of the routine.
The Retrospective Test
I developed a simple test that I now apply to every routine. I call it the Retrospective Test: after the climax, can the audience mentally replay the routine and see how the ending was built into the beginning?
This does not mean the audience should be able to figure out the method. Methods should remain invisible. What it means is that the dramatic structure — the story being told, the choices being made, the premises being established — should create a clear path from beginning to end. The audience should be able to think, “Ah, that is why he asked me to do that. That is why that choice mattered. That is why that element was introduced.”
This retrospective clarity is what Aristotle means by inevitability. Looking backward, the ending is inevitable. Looking forward, it was not obvious. Both conditions must be satisfied simultaneously.
When I apply this test to my routines, the ones that pass are always the ones that produce the strongest reactions. And the ones that fail — the ones where the audience cannot retrospectively trace the path from beginning to end — are always the ones that produce puzzlement rather than wonder.
Beyond Magic
I use this framework in my consulting work too. Every strategy presentation I build, every keynote I deliver, every business case I construct follows the same principle: the conclusion must feel inevitable but not obvious.
If the conclusion of a business presentation is obvious from the first slide, the audience checks out. They have decoded the pattern and they are waiting for the presenter to catch up to what they already know. If the conclusion comes from nowhere — if the recommendation is surprising but disconnected from the analysis that preceded it — the audience does not trust it. It feels arbitrary, and arbitrary recommendations do not inspire action.
The best business presentations, like the best magic routines, take the audience on a journey where each step follows logically from the last, where the destination becomes clear only when it is reached, and where the audience thinks, looking back: of course. That is the only possible conclusion.
Aristotle wrote the Poetics around 335 BC. He was analyzing Greek tragedy. He could not have imagined that his principles would be applied to a mentalism routine performed at a technology conference in Graz in 2025. But the principles endure because they describe something fundamental about how human beings process stories, whether those stories are told by ancient playwrights, Hollywood screenwriters, or a strategy consultant standing on stage with a sealed envelope in his hand.
Inevitable but not obvious. That is what makes a climax land. Not the surprise. Not the impossibility. The feeling that this was where we were always heading, even though we could not see it until we arrived.