#magnus protocol speculation/analysis | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tmagpposting · 1 year ago

Text

Alice’s Attitude

and why I don’t think it’s going to save her.

I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about the implication of Alice's attitude towards the incidents and horror elements so far, so I’m going to. Someone else may have already made a post about this, but I haven’t found anything yet, and I couldn’t find a way to get this out of my mind without writing it down. Naturally, I’m also going to inflict this long-winded and potentially needless analysis on all of you, since I spent 2 hours typing it out (sorry in advance). TW for blatant overuse of parentheticals and politics towards the end. This draws on content from TMAGP episodes 1-3 and TMA overall, particularly the series finale.

I feel like a lot of us going into TMAGP and having listened to TMA already were probably pleasantly surprised by Alice’s attitude of “The Horrors? Just say no!” since a lot of TMA revolved around the idea that curiosity and investigation of the fears usually doomed people to be consumed by one of them, as we saw with a lot of the Archive staff, particularly Jon. I certainly was. Though her ideas about how to deal with the incident reports are definitely somewhat callous, in the context of TMA, they feel very pragmatic, and I found myself thinking, “finally, a character who knows what genre she’s in and refuses to surrender to it.” I’ve been seeing a couple people agree with this, and say that her approach might even help her stay afloat when things start to escalate as the conflicts of TMAGP develop in the coming episodes. I thought that too, at least for a while.

After thinking about it for several days, I don’t think this is the case. Given TMA’s themes and propensity for tragedy, and Jonny’s approach to tackling social issues, I don’t think Alice’s apathy is going to save her. In fact, I think it’s potentially going to be the character flaw that will doom her in the first place.

1. Alice already cares (not about the horrors, but about people)

To start with, I’d like to point out that Alice will only be able to maintain her apathy to a limited extent, and when people she cares about start being harmed, she is going to get involved. In fact, we can already see this happening. Ep 3 notably starts and ends with Alice making a plan to get Central IT involved in looking into their computers, when she tries to mention them to Colin in the first scene, and when she asks Sam to call them on her behalf in the final scene. I’d argue that the issue comes up because she’s concerned about Colin more than fixing the OIAR’s computers. She tells Sam it’s because Colin may not be able to handle FR3-D1 as well as he thinks he can since he’s been working on it forever with very little positive progress, but given the additional context of the starting scene, I think it’s reasonable to assume she also wants to meddle for Colin’s sake. In the first scene of ep 3, she seemingly talks more softly/slowly than usual (to me, it sounds like she’s trying to be soothing when compared to how she normally talks, even outside of the times she’s actually soothing FR3-D1), she doesn’t make too many digs at Colin as he sounds increasingly stressed, and she asks gently and subtly about calling Central IT for help when she is generally pretty direct when she seriously wants something (like all the times she repeatedly shuts down Sam’s questions because she wants him to stay out of danger). It sounds like she’s trying to slip it in as a half-joke, but Colin treats it as a genuine suggestion when he usually either brushes off her jokes or plays into them instead, so I think it was her actual intent to involve Central IT even at that point. Furthermore, Gwen tells Sam something along the lines of “Alice is the only one [Colin] tolerates” in a previous episode, they have good banter throughout so far, and Colin’s explosive reaction to Sam mentioning the app completely deflates when he learns it was Alice’s idea. All of this seemingly demonstrates a bond that goes pretty far beyond what I’d think of as a basic work relationship with no actual friendship involved. Colin is already pretty deep into investigating FR3-D1 to the point that it’s probably going to be detrimental for him based on him threatening/ranting at the computers in the first episode, and Alice is already trying to intervene on his behalf. Simply put, she is doing a pretty bad job of pretending not to care and staying out of it so far, and we’re only 3 episodes in.

With that in mind, I don’t even think Colin will be the primary reason she’ll get involved as the series goes on, and I actually think Sam is being set up to be the one to draw her into much of the conflict. She cares enough about Sam to find him a job when he’s having a rough time, based on their conversation in the bar, and she tells him not to care about the incidents precisely because she cares about him, and doesn’t want him to get sucked in and hurt by them. With Sam’s propensity for curiosity established and likely being set up to be one of his fatal flaws, Alice will probably get drawn into the conflict whether she likes it or not if/when Sam goes digging and actually stumbles on something dangerous later on. As a side note, I really do think Sam’s curiosity is being set up to be something big here, since he repeatedly wants to look into the Magnus Institute and says it’s a “blast from the past,” he wonders about how the code system works and how it could be improved, and he’s generally shown to ask a lot of questions about the OIAR, Gwen’s backstory, etc. He asks about things more often than I think he would if his questions were purely an expositional device for the audience and not actual characterization (I could make a post just about this, but I think other people have definitely already done that). Finally, our very first introduction to Alice as a character in TMAGP shows her trying and failing to be glib and uncaring about Teddy leaving, where she jokes with him casually before admitting, sincerely and somewhat hesitantly, “I’m gonna miss you.” If her failing to not care about something in the opening scene of the entire series isn’t going to turn out to be important, if not Jonny Sims style foreshadowing of some kind, I’ll eat my hat.

2. Apathy kind of sucks, actually (thematically and otherwise)

Alice being saved by her refusal to care, assuming she manages to maintain it, feels too much like an easy out for the kinds of stories TMA was trying to tell, and clashes with its sensibilities in my opinion. A lot of people fall into the trap of nihilistic apathy when thinking about the state of the world right now, and TMA even acknowledged this in the series with the Extinction beginning to emerge as a new entity/fear. Between worsening climate change, the gradual rise of bigotry and the increasing trend toward fascism in the western world (especially america, it sucks here), escalating international conflict, poverty and the worsening cost/standard of living, like the fact that a majority of people my age will probably never own a house and our college debt is going to eat us alive, etc., it feels like we’re all circling the drain and no one with the power to help is interested in doing anything other than making it worse to make themselves money. A lot of people think the only way to cope with that is to decide to not give a shit, which is a pretty natural response to being constantly confronted with worse and worse news every year that shows no sign of stopping. This has also naturally inspired a lot of doomerism and a rise in insincerity/irony poisoning and cynicism in popular culture that’s really hard to escape even if you avoid the news entirely.

However, the idea that not giving a shit about the problems in the world can somehow spare you from them is a) ludicrous, since they won’t go away if you decide to ignore them (a majority of the TMA statement givers didn’t previously know or care about the fears, and they got screwed over regardless), and b) definitely not supported by TMA’s cannon or themes. Surrendering to the idea of your own helplessness is precisely what TMA ends by specifically not doing. Jon sunk into a hopeless state of mind throughout S5, with the culmination of this process being his proposal to let the world end and allow the End to consume everything, including the rest of the fears. It wasn’t necessarily that Jon didn’t care or was apathetic, especially since one of his primary motivation was to avoid inflicting the fears on another universe, rather, he didn’t think anything could be done to stop the fears from destroying his world or whatever world they ended up in, which is the same deterministic mindset that Alice’s style of apathy stems from (“I can’t change or fix it, so I don’t care”). The other characters refusing this course of action and banishing the fears is what ultimately spares TMA’s universe from the sort of extinction it would’ve had if they’d accepted that it was hopeless and Jon had gone through with what he wanted. TMA ends with the central takeaway that you can’t give in to the idea you won’t be able to fix things because then you won’t try, and shows the characters subverting their helplessness and actually solving the problem of the fears by getting rid of it at the source (the ethics of sending the fears somewhere else are definitely debatable, but that’s a totally different post). The idea that Alice could be saved from the consequences of the problems in TMAGP’s world by choosing not to care flies in the face of the conclusion to the previous series. Alice’s refusal to care won’t save her from whatever TMAGP has in store, and judging by the events of TMA, fatalism and apathy might even seal her fate.

Some of these points of evidence might be a little bit basic “water is wet” types of statements and I probably could’ve explained this in half the time, but I really do think that Alice’s apathy isn’t going to turn out to be very useful to her and I wanted to include everything I could think of that led me to believe that.

TLDR, Alice is just as screwed as the rest of the cast, if not more so, and her attitude is not going to get her out of it.

89 notes · View notes

brettanomycroft · 11 months ago

Note

incredibly intrigued by your sam thoughts give me more

hooooohohohohohoh *rubs together grubby little raccoon paws*

I am excited to answer this and also don't know how much more I'll be able to say about Sam that I haven't already discussed here and here (though danged if I'm not going to try!)

Something that I think is central to understanding how my brain thinks about Sam is the way I think about Gwen; more specifically-

(Gwen and Sam from @boonsandwhatever 's amazing art, found here)

While I don't truly think they're the exact same character, I believe that what we've seen of them so far suggests that we are looking at two characters who, in their heart of hearts, are very similar in terms of their inner selves and motivations, but who are nonetheless being set up to walk two very different paths.

So how are they similar? We've seen so far that Gwen and Sam are both

goal-oriented

hardworking

stubborn

temperamental (Sam less openly, but it's there)

petty (not as obviously as Alice, but it's soooo there)

curious

seeking validation for their work/pursuits/questions

not in the career/field they had aspired to be in

under tremendous pressure from their families (Gwen's has not been directly addressed, but what we know of the Bouchards and and Gwen's comments about her 'friend' circles seems to suggest this)

driven (Gwen towards power/recognition, Sam towards understanding - both of these tie into that need for validation)

barely holding it together

more sensitive to teasing than they let on

imposter syndrome? (this one may actually be a stretch but all of the above similarities strongly suggest this one)

Of all of the above traits, "curious" and "seeking validation" are the two that I feel are Sam and Gwen's strongest motivators right now - and were also the source of their conflict in episode 18. They are, of course, pursuing answers to their own questions without realizing that, in this case, they are the ants seeing separate parts of the massive and horrible mystery that is pushing into their lives.

Sam's path has him looking out as he seeks to learn more about The Magnus Institute and about the catalysts and victims of the cases they get at the OIAR. Gwen's path has her looking up, as she questions the role the OIAR plays within the government/society, how it is structured and managed, and what employing literal monsters has to do with it all.

In an ideal world, Sam and Gwen would team up to be like the supernatural Wonder Twins. If they're able to see past their misunderstandings and the walls they've put up, I think they could actually get a lot done - but I worry that their insecurities, ambitions, and lack of validation at the right times/in the right places will push them further away from the best possible allies they have: each other.

(If you're fanfiction inclined, I've actually explored some of these team/friendship dynamics in my fic "Pieces of You." Part 2 continues to explore how Sam and Gwen interact when they are seemingly in opposition)

I do think there is a very good chance that both Sam and Gwen end up in difficult, morally challenging, or outright evil situations as a result of their need for understanding, recognition, and validation. I've seen a lot of folks suggesting that Sam could become "avatar-ized" or willingly take on The Powers of the Horrors in order to finally "live up to the potential" that he perceives himself as having been denied when he was rejected from The Magnus Institute. As for Gwen, I think (hope, pray) that her own insecurities and need to prove herself could lead her right into the claws of Lady Mowbray, someone that she has already defended in front of Lena simply for being of a higher echelon, and who has already given Gwen a level of recognition that she did not expect but clearly craves (when Lady M asks about her family line). Of course I would be tickled pink if they both got over themselves, communicated, and worked together to overcome (or at least understand) The Horrors!

Anyway, I know this ended up being more of a Sam and Gwen rant, but I hope you enjoyed, and thanks again for asking!

#the magnus protocol #TMAGP #tmagp theory #TMAGP character analysis #character analysis #sam khalid #samama khalid #gwen bouchard #gwendolyn bouchard #tmp sam #tmp gwen #tmp theory #tmp speculation #Teal's TMAGP takes #answered #the magpod

26 notes · View notes

douglysium · 1 year ago

Text

Episode 12 TMP Quick Thoughts

Housekeeping and Prologue

Hello, this is Douglysium and you might not know me as that guy who wrote over 100 pages of analysis on the Eye (which can be read on Tumblr here (https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/735599414228484097/the-relationships-between-the-dread-powers-the) or Google Docs here (The Relationships Between the Dread Powers: The Eye- Knowledge is Fear and Ignorance is Bliss)) or as that guy who wrote an article on the Extinction (which can be read on Tumblr here(https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/717929126195003392/what-would-avatars-of-the-extinction-be-like-a) and Google Docs here(What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation)). Suffice to say I might be a bit of a TMA fan. Also, spoilers for TMP up until episode 10. You can read my ramblings on the last episode here (Episode 11 TMP Quick Thoughts).

However, Protocol offers a very unique opportunity and experience for me because I didn’t actually get into TMA until after it was over and I binged all of it. So this is my first time experiencing something even remotely similar to what the original TMA fans probably experienced when waiting for each episode week by week and slowly having to put everything together with the limited information they had. So I decided to throw my hat into the ring since this might be my only chance to do something similar. However, I’m working on some longer form TMA content so I can’t spend as much time on these articles giving a bunch of super detailed thoughts. I will try to keep these short and that inevitably might mean some could have questions about why I think or predict certain things and in those cases I would probably recommend you read at least some of the two articles I mentioned above to get a better idea of where I’m coming from. This also means I won’t be giving you a play-by-play of every single thing that happens in the episode so I encourage you to listen to or read them yourselves and feel free to comment if you feel something is important.

These reviews are probably going to end up focusing mostly on the Entities and their manifestations as they are what I have thought about the most and spent the most time interpreting and there’s been a lot of… interesting theories floating around about how the Entities are manifesting that I want to go over.

Finally, I’m just going to say it right now, spoiler warning for all of The Magnus Archives. I know that Jon and co said one could start with Protocol and be fine, and while that’s probably true, media like this tends to be made in conversation with or take into consideration what came before it in the irl chronology in order to connect them. While I’m sure you could skip The Magnus Archives, I don't really see the point of skipping over it when we are already getting characters from TMA showing up in TMP in Protocol. So to me it’s pretty clear that if we want to understand the full picture of TMP and all the things it is trying to say then we can’t just try to pretend TMA doesn’t exist or scrub it away. Just because you could understand what’s happening without the context in broad strokes doesn’t mean you're getting all the nuances.

These articles are meant to be quick and short so sorry if there’s typos and if I don’t address every possible question or possibility. I don’t want to repeat myself too much in this series outside of the prologue so be sure to skim some of my other articles.

Episode 12 “Getting Off”

I think this episode is definitely one of the more straightforward Protocol episodes we have gotten so far, so hopefully this Quick Thoughts won’t br too long (but knowing me I probably just jinxed it).

We take in the scene through a CCTV in the breakroom of the OIAR at night. The transcripts clarify that Celia is very tired and searching through the cupboards for something and it is quickly made apparent that she is looking for tea and, since the break room has run out, Sam gives Celia a teabag from a secret stash that he apparently has. Sam then asks Celia out on a date and while she is busy at the moment she does show that she is willing to go out with Sam on “Saturday, 6? under the clock at Leicester Square. That work? We’ll go for dinner- well, breakfast- you know what I mean.” Once again, we see that the OIAR jobs appear to be very exhausting and have odd work hours. I also wonder what Celia’s end goal is. Does she genuinely like Sam or does she see him as means to an end. Is Celia here to help Sam and co or is she here to harm them?

As Celia leaves, Alice walks in and proceeds to make fun of Sam for clearly being extremely nervous as he asked out Celia. Alice says “(normal again) You know it’s rude to have absolutely no game? Christ, all these years and you still ask people out like a baby foal learning to tapdance.” A reference to the fact that she and Sam dated at some point, and how Sam probably acted very similarly when trying to ask her out. Sam does point out “Look it worked didn’t it?” which seems like it could be a sort of double meaning. Sam’s nervous approach got Celia to agree to a date but also Alice presumably agreed to go out with him in the past too.

Sam apologizes to Alice for dragging her to the ruins of the Institute only to fund nothing… well nothing Sam and Alice know about since something escaped the Institute. Sam says he’s done with Magnus stuff and Alice responds with “So you’re telling me that if I had a case full of emails with the title “Magnus Institute re: Samama Khalid – Massive Conspiracy” you wouldn’t be tempted?” to which Sam says no before asking “You don’t, though. Do you? That was just, like, a joke. Right?” Alice then says “Come on, for now let’s just focus on getting you as jaded and apathetic as possible.” Considering that Alice does appear to be pretty jaded about listening to the cases and piecing them together this could be related to her point about ignoring the talkers and not getting caught up in thinking too much about what’s happening.

NORRIS starts expositing the next case

“Claim Review: EL-56920

Policy Holder: Soho Jack’s Ltd.

Policy Number: 548651-656

Policy Type: Employers’ Liability

Site Address: Soho Jack’s, 9 Carlisle St, London W1D 3BK

Affected Employee: Ms. Jordan Bennett

Date of Incident: 9 March 2024

Incident Location: On site.

Documentation: Crime Report – Submitted

Medical Practitioner Report – Submitted

Incident Book Entry – Submitted First Aider’s Report – Submitted

Supervisor’s incident Report - Submitted

HSE communications - Submitted

Health-And-Safety policies - Submitted

Employment Contract - Submitted

Claim Valuation: £1,560,000 Assessment

Conclusion: Claim Denied Reason: Fraudulent claim (see incident description and police report)”

This, along with some information Jordan mentions later, means Jordan is suing Soho Jack’s Ltd. They go on to say that their lawyer has advised them to cooperate with Soho Jack’s insurance claim as a show of good faith, even if they’re planning on “suing your asses to kingdom-come.” They start recounting an event that occurred on the company’s property and apologize for their terrible handwriting (which we later learn is probably because Mr. Bonzo bit off one of their hands).

They go over how they started working at Jack’s in the spring of 2021 after they had finished Flair Academy. After struggling to find a job they managed to get an interview and then job at the aforementioned Jack’s. The club seems to have a good reputation as Jordan refers to it as “the Soho Gentleman’s club.” The company’s building “...has dances on the bottom two floors with VIP suites for hire above with a dedicated bouncer keeping them separate. Really, it’s just a quieter box with a private bar, some comfy chairs and the option of private dancers.” Despite this being “THE” Soho Gentleman’s club Jordan says “It’s always booked up with swank dickheads trying to show off, but Stags are the worst: they’re cheap, they’re loud, they drink too much, tip too little and only ever hire one dance for the groom. Plus there’s always some “nice guy” that won’t shut up about exploitation without even bothering to stop staring.”

Jordan begins to explain how the party the specific party that led to them wanting to sue Jack’s. They state that this specific party’s lot was not the worst and were “Just a bunch of heavyset, middle-aged lads with names like Ozzer, or Rozzer or whatever. ” and notes that “The groom was fine, acted embarrassed even though he was obviously keen and they were easily pleased. ”

“They started giving the groom gifts. Same old tat as always, cufflinks, poo gags, all the standard stuff. Then the groom spotted the last one on the table, this cheap yellow and purple kids lunch box. It looked old and shoddy and no one admitted to bringing it but the groom just squealed with glee and carefully opened it before pulling out a bunch old souvenir merch. Pencils, postcards, keyrings, all sorts of crap, all the same yellow and purple and last of all a cracked CD case. When they saw it the whole bunch gave this big laughing cheer.” I have talked about how I think Mr. Bonzo is probably tied to The Stranger if we view him through the lens of Smirke’s 14. I will retread some of those reasons later but right now I want to point out that no one admitted to bringing the Bonzo CD. It could simply be that it’s a prank and someone happened to grab an artifact or something tied to Bonzo, and maybe someone from the OIAR even planted it there, but it could also be connected to the idea of The Stranger and the fear of the unknown because it could be that no one actually knows who got that CD.

We also know that The Stranger is no… stranger to dropping off or delivering strange artifacts in order to feed on the fear of people interacting with unknown /mysterious objects. Breekon and Hope’s delivery service are a good example of this (strangers that show up and drop off never before seen or uncanny objects and artifacts).

“I could see which way the wind was turning and sure enough the bestman came over and asked if he could play it. The cover had this awful comic sans title: “Mr. Bonzo’s On His Way” and I wasn't exactly thrilled by this.” Jordan explains that “Mr. Bonzo was way before my time and from what I had seen online he had always looked pretty messed up. But hey, it was their night, if they wanted to spend it on some cringy nostalgia trip, who was I to say no?” Which could mean that Jordan doesn’t know a lot about Mr. Bonzo, and lack of familiarity with something is one of the things that we know entities like The Stranger love to prey on.

“This kind of thing happened often enough that we kept a battered old CD Player in the back that we could patch into the room's speakers, just in case. So, I ducked back there, put it on, turned the volume down as low as I could get away with, and prayed it wasn’t too obnoxious. Immediately the cheering children’s voices blared out the speakers accompanied by bouncy tubas loud enough to drown out the rest of the club’s music. It was awful but I could hear the lads stamping the floor in rhythm and as the kids started singing the men were singing along: “Mr. Bonzo’s on his way, he wants to stay, he wants to play! Mr. Bonzo’s on his way, he wants to stay, he wants to play!” If you want to listen to the song Jordan is referring to it is actually available on Youtube: Mr Bonzo (from 'The Magnus Protocol'). Maybe you can put yourself in the shoes of an annoyed Jordan or ecstatic old man at the club.

Jordan clearly finds the song annoying and after waiting a minute, in order to avoid being a “total killjoy,” they decide to turn off the song before “ Derek came down from the office to “have a word.” I assume Jordan meant Derek would complain about the music. However, when Jordan turns the CD player off it “...just grew louder, rattling the glassware in the bar: “Mr. Bonzo’s on his way, he wants to stay, he wants to play!” I even yanked the cables from the speakers, but it just kept getting louder.” Obviously, something supernatural is going on but Jordan reasonably assumes that the player just broke and begins to reach for their walkie talkie in order to call for some tech support. However, as they do so they are interrupted by a massive crash coming from another part of the room followed by a cheer. Jordan gets ready to reprimand the party goers for whatever mess they might have made but instead sees Mr. Bonzo. “It was hunched in the doorway, a bulbous figure with a purple hat that cast crazed shadows in all directions thanks to the club’s lighting effects. Then it doffed its hat and pushed itself into the room, foam catching on the doorframe with a squeak that set my teeth on edge. Its massive bulbous google-eyes seemed to roam all over the room before settling on the groom and it was almost as if the huge toothy grin grew wider when it saw him.” We know that Gwen delivered a name and address to Bonzo and in the previous episode Lena even tells Gwen “I’m sure you’ve already worked that out. But just in case you haven’t, keep an eye on the case loads over the next few days. It should become abundantly clear.” Implying that this could be the case Lena was alluding to or that the groom (or someone else in the room) is Bonzo’s target (but it’s almost definitely the groom).

Everyone in the room assumes the appearance of Bonzo is some sort of gift or prank and “The rugby boys were tripping over themselves to get in and hug it, laughing and pushing the groom to the front and so I figured at that point it was a prank. Again, none of them took credit for it and there was a moment of genuine hesitation, until one of them yelled out “It's ya lapdance, Baz!” and they all fell about laughing.” Jordan is furious that a coworker named Joey presumably let Bonzo in and the idea that Joey might have bailed on Jordan again by “ducking out for a smoke.” But as Jordan moves forward they notice something- “I began to stride over, readying for the inevitable complaints then hesitated as I saw something far more unnerving than the ugly costume that was capering with the groom in the middle of the group. There was a pair of heavy boots on their side, poking just inside the still open doorway. Joey’s boots, and they weren't moving. Just then the google eyes looked turned to me, and a puffy finger raised cheekily to its mouth.” So Joey was killed by Bonzo and all the while “the men had all started chanting “Bonzo! Bonzo! Bonzo”, stamping their feet and banging the tables in a circle around the pair in the center…” and the music kept getting louder. So loud that it began to sound distorted from the strain the song was putting on the speakers.

Out of all the Entities the Slaughter seems to have a pretty strong connection to music but The Stranger also has a strong precedent for music. For example, The Calliope in TMA is an artifact tied to The Stranger. In MAG 024 (Strange Music) it is mentioned that the instrument has "Be still, for there is strange music" carved into the cover of the keyboard. While The Slaughter’s connection to music is probably due to an association between rhythm and war (think the marching of an army or the phrase “drums of war”) as well as the fear of “violent” music, The Stranger’s connection to music seems to come from the idea of either strange unknown sounds or a song / sound that sounds really uncanny. It is noted by Jordan that Mr. Bonzo’s song grows louder and more distorted overtime which would mean that the song is becoming more and more incomprehensible as it would slowly change into a song with lyrics you couldn’t understand or identify as easily. It could also be that the song sounds uncanny in the sense that it is familiar in some ways but something is off about it.

Jordan tries to call for help on his walkie talkie but can only hear Mr. Bonzo’s theme blaring out of its tiny speaker. Jordan tries to warn everyone and get out but no one can hear him over the music. Bonzo takes the groom and begins to “dance” with him by spinning around faster and faster until Bonzo decides to rip his arms off and even as this act of gorey brutality took place the other party goers present continued to laugh and laugh until Jordan’s scream caused them to realize this wasn’t some sort of prank. Almost everyone begins to yell in terror but some yelled in rage and proceeded to attack Bonzo: “A few of the bigger guys picked up chairs or bottles and began to beat and slash at the thing. It didn’t seem to notice, its bulbous, bloodshot, eyes staying fixed on the groom’s body as it raised it overhead.” Bonzo then proceeds to continue pulverizing the body by smashing it against the ground over and over.

“For a split second, all was still but the music just pounded on, barely recognizable now over the distortion from the smoking speakers as those voices, no longer childlike, still chanted the words “He’s here to stay… He wants to play…”” “Then Mr. Bonzo turned towards us with its head bowed almost reverentially and everybody went silent. Slowly, awfully slowly, it raised its head, titling it coquettishly to one side. Then the seams across its face split revealing its gaping maw filled with even larger, sharper teeth.” Jordan admits that they don’t remember much about what happened after that but “I dream about it most nights. In the dream it digs through all those men to get to me, grabbing fistfuls of them and throwing them to smash against the wall. The strobe fires as its hands plunge into the pile of us and each flash shows a little less flesh between me and it, between me and all those teeth… finally everyone else is gone. I raise my arm to protect myself and it gently but inexorably lifts it into its mouth, smiles and bites… None of us was left whole but I was the luckiest. All I lost was a hand, it wasn’t even my dominant one.” The biting was set up previously in episode 10 when the transcripts mention “Gwen holds out the envelope and Mr Bonzo snatches it into his mouth, audibly chewing it. His teeth are not soft.”

Jordan says that they “told the investigators everything I know, doctors too. I don't know why nobody outside the room heard or saw anything, why the cameras weren't working, why it let me live. But I do know why there weren't any bodies. All I actually want is my hand back so I can tend bar but that isn’t going to happen is it? So I’ll have to settle for the next best thing and sue you for everything I can get, because I don’t know what happened that night but it was in your venue and no one came to help. Not Derek, not another doorman, no one. So yeah, you’d better have one hell of a settlement waiting for me, or I'll see you in court.”

While you could make an argument for themes of Entities like The Desolation, Flesh, Hunt, etc. I’m still going to primarily argue for Bonzo being tied to The Stranger or a similar Entity due to what we see in his previous appearances. For the sake of clarity, if there is any debate about what The Stranger embodies in MAG 200 it is stated “And as they learned to know their friends and kin, so too did they learn to fear the unknown figure, the coming of the stranger” and in MAG 092 (Nothing Beside Remains) Jonah tells Jon “We thrive on ceaseless watching, on knowing too much. What we face is the hidden, the uncanny, and the unknown.” while in MAG 111 (Family Business) Jon says “The Stranger is the unknown. The uncanny.” and Gerard doesn’t correct him.

However, a lot of Mr. Bonzo’s behaviours in previous episodes resembles The Stranger (and The Stranger has violently attacked or killed people in the past). Mr. Bonzo is also described as being a clown. Something we know The Stranger has a precedent for manifesting as, probably due to both the idea of the uncanny valley being achieved with a costume or makeup and the idea of a traveling circus full of strangers you don’t know from out of town in addition to a clown costume acting as a disguise that can obscure whoever is wearing it. Not to mention that Mr. Bonzo is described as a suit, which could very easily connect to an Entity like The Stranger. Firstly, The Stranger tends to have a big emphasis on wearing things like skins and suits. Additionally, Gwen mentions in episode 11 “That… abomination wasn’t a costume. That was skin. It was sagging, it was sweaty!” and we know The Stranger has a tendency for wearing skin, skinning things (such as with taxidermy), etc. as a form of disguise, in order to hide itself, or to metaphorically rob something of their identity.

This also applies to costumes in general since usually wearing costumes or disguises can actually obscure who is wearing them and thus their true identity is unknown. There’s also the fact that costumes themselves can easily fall into the uncanny valley. Ever since Five Nights at Freddy’s became popular there’s been an uptick in horror media focusing on how creepy and uncanny things like animatronic suits can be. Not that Mr. Bonzo is an animatronic but it is a suit. Also, Bonzo apparently has hard teeth and having solid teeth on a suit could look uncanny.

The surprise gift and sudden appearance of Bonzo that others assume is some sort of surprise or prank could also tie into The Stranger and the idea of something mysteriously appearing or not being expected. Bonzo was originally made to prank celebrities. As Nigel explains in episode 10 that his produce ““inviting a famous person on, someone really serious, and we tell them we’re going to have them do a segment with a popular children’s entertainer. Now, obviously these folks won’t have any idea about what kids are actually watching, so we could come up with the most horrendous thing, claim kids loved it and see how long it took for the guest to realize that they were the joke. That they’d been “berried”” and “The problem with a surprise prank is that doing it on Saturday night primetime means pretty soon everyone knows about it, and the guests knew it was coming. A couple even requested it. So the prank part of it sort of died, and he just became an SOS mascot. One of my many tormentors in the dungeon. By the end we’d even retired Mr. Six, and it was all Bonzo.” Once again, a focus on surprise and I think it’s interesting that Bonzo loses his punch the more people know about and understand him. Bonzo is a character that thrived specifically on the guests not knowing who he was and did. So a potential relationship with the unknown again.”

In episode 10 Nigel says to Gwen ““Try not to stare. He doesn’t like it when people stare.” Which could relate to The Stranger. While all the Entities are connected, overlap, and need each other for a ritual bringing them into the world to work, with even seemingly opposing Entities bleeding into each other or having overlapping fears, The Stranger can often have an antagonistic relationship with The Eye and forms of being known. The Stranger tends to thrive off the fear of being unknown so staring at something aligned with The Stranger might make it react negatively. In MAG 092 (Nothing Beside Remains) Jonah tells Jon “We thrive on ceaseless watching, on knowing too much. What we face is the hidden, the uncanny, and the unknown.” In MAG 165 (Revolutions) Not-Sasha says this in regards to The Eye’s Post-Change world “Do you know how it feels? To be – anonymous? And yet known! To have all the sweetest dread I can create tainted by the relentless gaze of that damned Eye. I’ve suffered enough.” So if my theory that Bonzo is tied to something like The Stranger is correct, that could explain a potentially negative reaction to being looked at for too long since aspects of The Stranger often don’t like it when people try to figure out what they are. This could ring extra true if it does turn out that the OIAR is somehow connected to The Eye.

Bonzo’s eating and biting could potentially be linked to The Stranger’s tendency for odd uncanny behavior, like that time Breekon / Hope ate a butterfly. The fact that this monster looks like Bonzo could also be related to the idea of the uncanny, since he would resemble Bonzo but behave and look a bit off. Also, it seems hard to tell if Bonzo is a costume or a monster resembling a costume which makes it harder to know what he is for sure, and The Stranger loves playing up mystery (think how we never know which character is Breekon and which character is Hope from Breekon and Hope in TMA, and Jon describes one of them as “one half of Breekon and Hope”). Also, Bonzo can only say his name which means you never really know what he’s saying or talking about.

Bonzo killing everyone in the room but leaving someone alive is not a completely unheard of idea. The Entities in general often seem to leave witnesses if in doing so more fear is generated and we see creatures like the Not-Them kill and replace people while ensuring that at least one person remembers what the original persona actually looked like even if no one else does. The reason for this is because if the Not-Them’s disguise was perfect and changed every bit of memory and evidence then there wouldn’t be anyone to be afraid of the idea that someone they know has been replaced by a stranger.

Jordan mentions “I don't know why nobody outside the room heard or saw anything, why the cameras weren't working, why it let me live. But I do know why there weren't any bodies.” which emphasizes his confusion about what’s happening. While confusion is often tied to The Spiral, in this case it stems from a bunch of unknown factors and variables, like why there were no other witnesses and why the cameras weren’t working.” As far as there being no witnesses and the cameras failing to work, the Entities are known for usually being on the downlow and not common knowledge but Entities like The Stranger tend to thrive off the fear of mystery and have a precedent for things like mysterious disappearances or hiding people / things. The Calliope I mentioned earlier mysteriously disappeared from the Institute’s archives at some point in TMA and in MAG 092 (Nothing Beside Remains) Jonah tells Jon “We thrive on ceaseless watching, on knowing too much. What we face is the hidden, the uncanny, and the unknown.” Jonah specifically mentions that The Stranger has a connection to “the hidden” among other things. In MAG 102 (Nesting Instinct) Jonah even says that The Stranger essentially hid Jon from him when saying “I was doing everything in my power to locate you. Everyone was working on finding the ritual site.” and “[Irritated] I am sorry, John, that my powers have not yet reached the level of omniscience.” Jordan does say that they know why there weren’t any bodies which implies that Mr. Bonzo probably ate them.

Jordan having trouble remembering exactly what happened actually does have a precedent with The Stranger since the Entity does have connections to memory loss or a loss of identity. In MAG 165 (Revolutions) we see Not-Sasha watch over a Domain that takes the form of a merry-go-round with people fighting over faces. People with no faces must fight over the faces of others to rip them off and regain some sense of identity. When they lose their face it is said “And soon enough they will forget they ever even had one, rest assured; it’s best to step the dance and keep your face secured as much as you are able. Just. Keep. Running.” Jon and co also face memory loss when they interrupt The Stranger’ ritual in TMA and forget who they are and what they are doing for a period of time.

Some other Entities this statement parallels are that of The Slaughter (with sudden brutal and gory violence), The Flesh (via bodily disfigurement by way of losing a hand, Bonzo being described as releasing “some vile mixture of putrid water, rotten foam and rancid meat.” when cut at some point, and Bonzo biting into people), The End (a lot of people brutally die), The Corruption (from the aforementioned vile mixture pouring out of Bonzo), and even The Eye (with the strange and horrifying dreams Jordan is forced to relive over and over resembling how people who give Jon live statements are forced to relive said moments in the form of nightmares over and over). Like always, I have to at least touch on the fact that The Eye doesn’t seem to just be the fear of being watched but also being a witness to something you don’t want to see. Jon can force people to recount and relive terrible moments, Jonah can force information into the heads of people like Melanie and Martin, and in MAG 200 The Eye is stated to have been born from the fear of one’s own eyes showing them too much.

All this being said, I still think the OIAR is somehow connected to The Eye. There’s the cases being like statements but also the fact that they supply sensitive information (such as names and locations) to things like Mr. Bonzo. People like Jonah could almost always know one’s location thanks to their Eye powers and The Eye is connected to the fear of someone / something knowing too much about you (such as knowing where and who you are). I wonder why Bonzo was sent to kill this particular groom when he was just partying? Did the groom know something or overstep some line or was the groom just some sort of offering to appease Mr. Bonzo? How was this person’s name and address obtained? Was it just mundane tracking or something closer to Jonah’s clairvoyance? Nigel acted like he was doing the OIAR a favor so right now it seems like this was a target decided by the OIAR and not necessarily Nigel. Unless you want to argue that the “favor” is aiding in keeping Bonzo pacified, under wraps, or something potentially more mutually beneficial. I wonder if Jordan’s dreams are somehow connected to being directly involved in a case or facing an External of the OIAR? It could also simply be that Jordan is traumatized.

We cut to Gwen and the transcripts say she “is sat at her desk, stunned by what she has just heard.” and she only says “Jesus Christ…” I wonder if this is because the case is unusually brutal or gorey when compared to most others or if she realized there’s a connection between the letter she delivered and what happens in this case. Considering what Lena said it's very possible that some of the cases the OIAR gets are connected to the activity of their own Externals (such as Mr. Bonzo).

ALICE CONT.

“Gwen? Hello?”

GWEN

“(dazed) What?”

Getting sucked into a statement like this and statements having a negative impact on one’s mental state are both things we have seen in TMA. Jon had a hard time stopping once he started a statement and at one point Jon expresses worry that Martin was listening to a bunch of statements for Peter Lukas and his plan in regards to The Extinction. Although, it could be that Gwen is merely shocked.

Gwen explains that she met one of the Externals but Alice seems to think Gwen is just referring to some annoying assholes as opposed to any supernatural monsters that takes the form of beloved childhood characters.

Gwen seems to finally wonder the question that I’ve been wondering for a while now:

GWEN

“What do you think we’re actually doing, here at the O.I.A.R.?”

ALICE

“Apart from mortgaging our mental health for a wage packet?”

GWEN

“We’ve both been here long enough to know this place. We’re not doing good. We’re not just sifting random data. There’s something wrong here.”

ALICE

“What are you getting at?”

GWEN

“You never wonder what the point is? Who benefits from all this awfulness?”

ALICE

“I don’t wonder. I know.”

GWEN

(sitting up) “What? Really?”

ALICE

“(portentous) Oh yeah. I’ve known for a while. What we’re doing here, it’s all part of a grand plan to satisfy one of the most unspeakable evils known to mankind... “

Gwen’s on the edge of her seat.

ALICE

“(almost a whisper) …the UK government.”

In TMA the point of the Institute sifting through statements and stuff was twofold. Firstly, to feed The Eye but also to set up the lynchpin for The Eye’s ritual with the position of the Archivist. I wonder if something similar is going on here but I can’t say since while you could argue that being an Externals Liaison is like the Archivist and shares the role as being a “living chronicle of fear” (especially since Lena remarked that Gwen should show fear via screaming because Externals tend to like that) Gwen had to blackmail her way into that position. I have no idea who was the Externals Liaison before her or if there are other Liaisons, if there even was one(s) before / with Gwen at all. Also, unlike the Institute, the OIAR is explicitly connected to the government and is meant to respond to things (not just watch). So it’s very likely that the OIAR has a role that is different from just “The Mass Ritual / Institute 2.0.” They could still be gathering fear related to the statements and being observed like the Institute in TMA though. However, even the Institute still wanted the Archival staff to do a good job following up statements and stuff. Jon tries to reorganize the Archives after Gertrude purposefully left them disorganized and Tim corrects Jon about some errors he made when reading some statements. The OIAR doesn’t really seem to care how well or poorly their workers categorize the cases and I don’t know if anyone checks.

Alice’s joke about the greatest evil known to mankind being the UK government feels like foreshadowing considering that the OIAR, and by extension all the Externals like Bonzo, are connected to the government.

Alice’s comment “Apart from mortgaging our mental health for a wage packet?” references how stressful this job seems to be.

Conclusion

Yeah, idk. This was a very simple episode overall and it mostly just seemed like it was following up Lena’s point about paying attention to the caseload.

Okay, hold on, before I end this I figured I should actually try to look at the voices in the computer system a bit more closely, since quite frankly, like with the alchemy symbols, I’ve admittedly been neglecting them and not focusing on them as much as I should have. This is because I actually couldn’t tell if there was any kind of correlation between the voices and the kinds of cases they read but a video by Maddie’s Maxis called “This Channel's First Video - The Magnus Protocol Analysis and Theories” (which you can view here This Channel's First Video - The Magnus Protocol Analysis and Theories) hypothesizes that there is actually a correlation. As we all know two of the computer voices sound like Martin and Jon and Maddie argues that the kinds of statements the voices read correspond to something that had to do with the character. For example, in theory NORRIS (Martin’s voice) tends to have statements relating to self-loathing and loneliness. I don’t know what they are feeding Maddie but Maddie is potentially cooking here. So I decided to glance over at some of the statements and see if there are any patterns.

I’m going to start with the theme that seems the most concrete in my opinion. The cases that NORRIS (Martin’s voice) reads seem to often be tied to themes of isolation, losing loved ones, or feeling abandoned. I should make it clear that while I know Martin in TMA is connected to The Lonely I am not saying all the cases NORRIS reads are connected to The Lonely. The mere presence of feeling alone or isolated doesn’t automatically make a statement Lonely related in the same way someone dying, getting attacked, or something taking place at night or in darkness automatically means End, Slaughter, or Dark respectively. Also, it’s important to remember that every Entity, even seemingly opposing ones, have overlap, shared fears, commonalities, etc..

But let’s look at the cases to see if this pattern is really there. The case NORRIS covers in episode 1 involves the Anglerfish, or something resembling it, killing and replacing their romantic partner. Harriet even says “And that voice I have loved for twenty years answered: “Some of him.”” So loss of a loved one.

In episode 3 NORRIS covers a case in which Dr. Samuel seems to feel immense guilt and sorrow about the death of Maddie. Once again, the loss of a close loved one.

In episode 8 NORRIS goes over a report Terrance submits about the effects of brutal liminalism. While no one dies or is replaced in the actual events of the case, Terrance does mention “originally took my role as a night janitor at Forton following a protracted divorce which cost me the majority of my friendships.” So while their partner isn’t dead they did lose a loved one, and if you read my thoughts on that episode you know that I actually think the case has a lot of similarities with The Lonely. The fog, the vaguely familiar but impossible to understand gibberish, people with repeating features, being isolated in a dark void, etc.. Even if you disagree that it’s The Lonely there is still a connection to themes of losing someone close and being alone.

If there was an episode to disprove this theory it would probably be episode 12 since it’s just Bonzo murdering a room full of people. Jordan does say “I don't know why nobody outside the room heard or saw anything” and earlier in the case they mention that they believed their coworker by the name of Joey the doorman might have ditched him again but this definitely feels a bit more like a stretch. Jordan does seem to blame the establishment for what happened and this is because from the perspective of Jordan no one came to help despite how obvious and loud the commotion was. Which could maybe tie into the idea of being abandoned or left alone but this is definitely pushin it and it’s clear that our understanding of what kinds of cases each voice reads might expand as the series goes on.

Maddie argues that CHESTER (Jonathon’s voice) seems to usually cover cases related directly to the Magnus Institute. Which is generally true, CHESTER covers the cases of RedCanary spelunking in the Institute’s ruins in episode 1, and the gambling dice being submitted to the Institute in episode 9 for example. But CHESTER also covers the case about Tom wanting to watch Voyeur in episode 5, the case regarding Hilltop Center in episode 7, Gordon’s encounter with the tattoos and Ink5 during construction in episode 11. It’s very possible that these are just related to the Institute in ways we don’t understand yet, for example some of the characters that appear could be members of the Institute or something, but in my opinion this definitely throws a wrench into some things.

CHESTER seems to have a stronger case for a theme of curiosity and a desire to know in general as opposed to just the Magnus Institute. RedCanary investigates the archives out of curiosity, Tom really wants to see the Voyeur movie for their blog, the narrator explains that they experimented with the gambling dice to figure out how they worked, and Gordon keeps talking about how they “just need to see it. I need to know what’s in the water.” As I’ve mentioned previously, The Eye also has a major emphasis on a desire to know and understand something even if it comes at the cost of yourself and / or other people. Hilltop Center still seems like a bit of an outlier here but while Dianne isn’t spelunking through ruins or anything she does mention that she was looking for people to help her work at the center. Which, while a bit of a stretch, could fit with a theme of curiosity or desire to know in the case of Chester. Or at least the idea of something being searched for as a theme at least.

If you wanted to argue that CHESTER actually related to things being looked for you could say that the case about the gambling dice revolves around the narrator giving the Institute artifacts, and they even say “So yeah, I tell you all about them, how I got them, all that crap and you just… You take them away, right? You accept them? Good. I think. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works. It’s how it worked for me, at least. Put them in whatever vault you like, bury them, drop them in the ocean, for all I care. All that matters is that they’re yours now.” So you could say that the Institute was looking for artifacts. You could also argue that the narrator was looking for people to roll the dice, looking for good luck, or started making their way towards Gary when they found him.

AUGUSTUS has a voice I am not familiar with (and we will get to the popular theory in a moment). I can only recall AUGUSTUS voicing one case, I might be forgetting one or something, so I don’t have a lot to go on. AUGUSTUS could be covering really old statements, as Sam notes the one in episode 4 is from the 18th century, or statements revolving around others climbing their way to their top and doing whatever it takes to do so. It’s kind of unclear until I can see some more AUGUSTUS statements.

There’s also some obvious character associations with this theory. Martin, someone connected to The Lonely, has statements reflecting some kind of isolation or abandonment, Jon, the Archivist with a strong tie to The Eye and someone who was strung along while trying to solve Jonah’s plan and learn the truth about the Entities, has statements involving extreme curiosity or people looking for things, and Jonah, someone who is really old and ruthless (so ruthless that they made the world a fear hellscape in an attempt to avoid death), has had a statement taking place in the 18th century involving someone giving a blood sacrifice to play violin super well.

There’s a popular theory going around that the three voices in the computers are actually Jonathon, Martin, and Jonah, and this definitely seems like one of the more credible theories floating around the community to a degree. AUGUSTUS’ unfamiliar voice could be the voice of Jonah’s original body. Jon, Martin, and Jonah were all in the panopticon when the Change ended which could be the event that got them tied to the computers. It could also have to do with being the pupil of the Eye somehow. Jonah and Jon were both the Eye’s pupil at some point and Jon got his position by killing Jonah to take his spot. It’s possible something weird happened like Martin was about to become the Eye’s pupil after removing Jon from the position, giving them this common link, but I can’t say for sure.

Maddie also points out another big thing to remember in the video. I have mentioned that Annabelle seems generally right about what happens to the Entities’ various Monsters and Avatars after the Entities get pulled into the next universe. Monsters, like potentially the Anglerfish, presumably get sucked into the new universe since they are part of the Entities. Other people may or may not get sucked into the universe depending on how attached they were to the Entity. It’s also possible that they will always just be left behind. However, Annabelle also mentions that it’s possible the Entities will take the aspects of a person that are connected to or are a part of the Entity. So, it’s possible that the parts of Jon, Martin, and Jonah in the computer are not them in their entirety but merely specific aspects of their personality or being. It could literally just be their voices taken by one or more Entities for all we know.

We also know that some Entities, like The End, seem capable of making copies or “memories” of people after / when they die. In MAG 154 (Bloody Mary) Eric states “I know that I’m not really Eric; I’m just a memory someone wrote down. It hurts, most of the time. I don’t like it.” So one could argue that the voices in the computers are not the fully sentient original versions of Jon, Martin, and Jonah but “memories” or copies created by one or more Entities. This could also explain why the third voice might be Jonah even though Jonah potentially died before the Entities jumped universes. This voice could simply be The Eye’s metaphorical recollection of Jonah or Jonah wasn’t completely dead when the Entities switched universes. This also means that the voices in the computers could be more malicious than we first assume if there’s a chance they are in actuality not Jon, Martin, and Jonah or are in truth aspects of The Eye or bits of their personalities trying to achieve a specific goal.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the cases the voices read out don’t seem to be completely random. The second Sam is about to give up his search for the Magnus Institute CHESTER spits out a case that is perfect for reigniting his curiosity with the addition of a new clue, and when Celia takes the job the first case she gets is about Hilltop Center (which could relate to Celia’s questions about multiversal and time travel). I still can’t say if the CHESTER or any other of the computers are trying to help Sam or use him for more nefarious purposes.

I’m not super confident about this being the patterns the computers follow at the moment because frankly there isn’t a lot of cases to go off of, and I need to see more AUGUSTUS. It’s also possible that the cases are more variable or context dependant. What the voices read could depend on the person at the computer, for example: it’s possible CHESTER reads a bunch of cases connected to the Institute because that’s what Sam was most interested in. There are also some cases we don’t have enough context behind yet, for example the mysterious figure in the Hilltop Road case could be connected to something like the Institute in some way, or that some of the voices focus on certain Externals Liaisons, people, etc..

If you want another TMAGP theory video to watch here’s one by Pinkelotje: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX51EHLy7BQ&ab_channel=pinkelotje.

#tmagp #tma #the magnus protocol #the magnus archives #theory

21 notes · View notes

xxshadowcasterxx · 1 year ago

Text

THE MAGNUS PROTOCOL 10 SPOILERS, ANALYSIS, and THEORIES.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod

First off, we start with that interview about Bonzo, the clown suit turned murder machine

Then we have Colin (who is ALIVE) hacking into the OIAR Computers and Celia drinking the SUS coffee

Then we get into the meat and potatoes of the episode

1. Gwen does a run to the house of Nigel, the guy who made Bonzo. He gets a letter FOR Bonzo, supposedly with an address that targets somebody for Bonzo to kill. (Interview mentioned 3 new murders, which Nigel denies any involvement with.)

2. ALICE AND SAM AT THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE RUINS

Sam finds a box with a key (we don't know what for yet.) He and Alice walk around and we get some very interesting details about the Institute ruins

-Worm tracks recognized by Alice (Jane Prentiss/Corruption was definately here.)

-Hole opens up underneath the ruins (Leading into tunnels?)

-Alice finds something labeled Archi (Presumably originally having read Archives or Archivist).

OTHER IMPORTANT DETAILS

*WE HEAR THE CLICK OF A TAPE RECORDER*

One of the devices used to listen in on Sam and Alice is A Tape Recorder, presumably the SAME tape recorder that once was used by Jon, as it was found in the Archi Room

Another detailis that Sam is looking for something specific, but he isn't quite sure what it is. He has fragmented memories of his time at the Institute, and one of the things he wonders about specifically is *why he wasn't chosen for something.*

We also hear someone BREATHING as Alice and Sam leave the Institute, breathing that sounds suspiciously familiar...

THEORIES

-Sam is a FAILED AVATAR

It has been speculated that in this universe The Magnus Institute was trying to CREATE Avatars of this world's version of the Fears, evidence for this being shown by the reports mentioning them taking in "Subjects" and "Strange Artifacts"

In Episode 10, Sam mentions that They, presumably The Magnus Institute, didn't choose him for Something. I believe that this "Something" is the ability to become an Avatar. Something about Sam made him ineligible, unable to be an Avatar. I believe this will be explored later.

-The OIAR is The Magnus Institute

I believe that the OIAR is a recreation of the Magnus Institute, run by the same people with similar goals in mind. There are parallels between the two businesses that seem significant to say the least.

WHAT IS THE STORY/WHERE IS IT GOING?

The Two collect and organize Statements or Records of Supernatural incidents. What's especially interesting is that in The Magnus Archives, Gertrude mentions that organizing the Statements only helps the Institute work faster. It was their GOAL to organize Statments, and that is what the OIAR is doing.

This leads me to also believe that Lena is or was one of the most important people at The Institute, either working as an Archivist herself or perhaps even being Head of the Institute, similar to Elias in TMA

I believe that I have pieced together an Idea of what the Story of TMAGP is and where it is headed, given the evidence we have so far.

IMPORTANT EVENTS

-The Magnus Institute begins to collect "Gifted Kids" in order to experiment on them and try to create Avatars

-Nigel Dickerson airs on Channel 6 with his show "Nigel's SOS"

-Introduction of Mr. Bonzo

-Bonzoland (Never Finished)

-Murders by Bonzo

-The Magnus Institute Burns (Cover Up)

WHAT HAPPENED?

The Magnus Institute began a program for "Gifted Children." We know of two people who were involved in this program: Sam and Gerry Keay. The two of them (separately) leave the Institute, both of which being "Ineligible" for whatever experiments the Institute was preforming.

These experiments and/or attempts at creating new Avatars of the Fears left both Gerry and Sam with large gaps in their memory.

Gerry: "Yeah, I barely remember any of it."

Gerry: "Oh yeah, but I was pretty young. I remember filling in a bunch of forms and questionnaires, then some old men asking me questions about what books I liked to read, who did I look up to, that kind of thing. And then I left."

Sam: "I have… I have memories of weird stuff I saw here, but no context. I want to know what was happening, why they chose us… why they didn’t choose me. Maybe find the bit where everything started to go wrong.

But… it’s too late. And now… I’m the only one left who cares."

Sam: "I was on one of their gifted kids programs and – um – I got hold of a list of a few of the other kids, and thought it might be nice if we could get in contact, swap stories and that…"

These experiments were done so that possible candidates for New Avatars could be chosen. Both Gerry and Sam were rejected.

It is also revealed that The Magnus Institute burned down sometime after these experiments were stopped or shut down after discovery.

I believe that The Magnus Institute fire, which occurred in 1999, was done by the higher-ups of TMI in order to cover up whatever experiments they were doing.

At first, this might seem incredibly contrary to the known behavior of the Institute, which was built for the very purpose of Storing and Organizing Knowledge for the Eye. Wouldn't burning it and destroying all of the Statements stored there hurt the Eye?

It would. Except, the Statements weren't destroyed. They were moved.

This leads into my belief that the OIAR is the Magnus Institute, simply disguised as a new Business. It was created with the intention of moving the Statements and both organizing them and preserving them through the use of the Computers. This would prevent them from the risk of being destroyed by something like Fire, which was established to be a way to hurt the Eye in TMA.

However, there is still one thing preventing the OIAR from fully covering their tracks. And that is the Failed Avatars.

I think that the OIAR, specifically Lena, is killing the old Avatar experiments in order to prevent anyone from knowing about the Institute's actions in the first place. And she's using Bonzo to do it.

In episode 10, we see Gwen Bouchard, who has been newly appointed by Lena as some kind of "Inside Man," making a delivery to none other than Nigel Dickerson, the creator (and possible host) of Bonzo.

Bonzo the Clown is a living creature, one mentioned to "hate being stared at." This aligns him with the Stranger, who is directly opposed to the Ceaseless Watcher.

He is given an Address by Gwen, which supposedly leads to some kind of target for Bonzo to kill.

I believe this target will be one of the Failed Avatars, possibly even Gerard Keay himself, as well as Gertrude Robinson. They would be killed by the OIAR to prevent any leaks of information.

Another lose thread in the OIAR's plan is Colin, who seems to have discovered something about the Magnus Institute and is well aware of the OIAR's habit of "Silencing" those with information.

This is what leads him to spiral and believe that any device near him is "Watching" him. He's correct in this assumption, of course, but wrong about Who it is that's Watching. He believes it to be the OIAR, but in reality I have come to the conclusion that it's one of two possibilities.

One: The Eye, or more specifically, Jonathan Sims, Former Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

A very popular theory where everyone's favorite wet cat, Jonathan "I know what a meme is" Sims, has been trapped inside of the OIAR's computer system.

Evidence to support this is the use of his voice in the reading of Important Documents, named "Chester" by Alice.

This theory suggests that after the events of The Magnus Archives, Jon's death successfully caused the Fears to travel to another universe. Since he was so tightly connected with the Eye at that time, being "The Pupil" of it, he was also supposedly transported into the world of TMAGP.

If this were the case, then it begs the question as to why Jon and the Eye would be trapped in the Computers specifically. Not just computers, seemingly every electronic device, as we see the "Listeners" also use phones and even televisions to Watch/Listen into conversations.

Two: The Web, or Us, The Audience

It was established clearly in TMA that the characters were being recorded/listened to by Tape recorders controlled by Annebelle Cane, and subsequently the Web. As Audience members, we are also apart of the Web when we listen in to these conversations through these devices. It's possible that this is the same case in The Magnus Protocol.

These are all the theories I have and am able to support with evidence. If you have any input, responses, etc, let me know!

#the magnus protocol #tmagp #tmagp spoilers #tmagp 10 #JON IS BREATHING #Government coverups #OIAR is TMI

21 notes · View notes

cirrus-grey · 1 year ago

Text

I know I haven't mentioned it in a while but I'm still red-stringing about the symbolism of tea vs coffee btw. Alice found a tape recorder and now Sam’s bringing her tea. She's been introduced to the Archives' universe. She's upset and goes to make herself coffee instead. She refuses to be drawn in and finds refuge in the comforting and familiar instead.

#i want to add a tea/coffee column to my spreadsheet...#the magnus protocol #tmagp spoilers #original post #my magnus protocol stuff #16 anti-social #magnus protocol speculation/analysis #alice dyer #queue cause i'll be at work when the episode airs #500 notes!#jeeze theres one every week now #1000 notes!

1K notes · View notes

forest-of-stories · 1 month ago

Text

Throwback Thursday, Fandom Edition: Fear and Truth

[The following post contains some discussion of anxiety and self-recrimination connected to social justice discourse.]

The Magnus Archives began its fifth and final season in April 2020. Season 4 had ended with a cliffhanger and a massive shift in the status quo, and the fans had spent five months anticipating and speculating upon what would happen next.

And while our anticipation built, the real world entered a crisis that changed it forever.

Episode 161 of TMA was preceded by an announcement from director Alexander J. Newall that said (and I’m paraphrasing), “We wrote our post-apocalyptic story arc before the current global health emergency; please pay particular attention to all content warnings moving forward.” At this point, my part of the world was trying to adjust to the new normal that COVID-19 had brought us. Even in my relatively stable and comfortable position – safely housed, working remotely, with plenty of ways to communicate with my family and friends even if we couldn’t see each other in person – I was feeling a great deal of distress, alarm, and helplessness. I knew better than to assume that TMA would necessarily provide escapism; maybe catharsis was the most that I could hope for. And, indeed, I remember a crying fit after I finished listening to that first new episode. Maybe, like Jon and Martin, I was “mourning” the world that had once existed.

Even if I had questioned whether I really wanted to put myself through this emotional wringer every week, to opt out of listening would have been to distance myself from the fandom community that had become part of my support system. So I kept going, and several years later, I’m still unpacking my feelings about how the story played out from there.

I’m not going to attempt a full critical analysis of Season 5; my opinions are extremely subjective and informed by my own circumstances and the personal emotional buttons that it pushed. At times, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to articulate them at all, lest my complaints – and I have several – carry a ring of “Local Woman Outraged That There’s Horror In Her Horror Podcast.” I’m not angry at Jonny Author Sims for not fulfilling my specific emotional needs in telling the story that he wanted to tell, or at the fans who found Season 5 satisfying, and I don’t think that it was an artistic failure or a betrayal of the show’s premise. I liked some of the individual episodes, and I thought that Jon and Martin had some very sweet relationship moments (as well as a few that deeply frustrated me, such as Martin’s jealous half-joking request that Jon kill Oliver). I’ve written fanfic that took place during Season 5, both while it was ongoing and after the show ended.

That said, much of the journey through what some fans called the “Eyepocalypse” or the “Fearpocalypse” was a departure from much of what I’d enjoyed about the previous seasons.

Firstly, and most straightforwardly, “road trip through surreal hellscapes” was never going to appeal to me as much as “bureaucracy and workplace shenanigans But Spooky.” Among the fifth-season episodes that I actually enjoyed outright, and have revisited since the show wrapped, were the ones that delved into the history and workings of the Magnus Institute: “Curiosity,” “An Appointment,” and “A Stern Look.” (I haven’t listened to The Magnus Protocol yet, but I’ve gotten the impression that it does bring us back to Spooky Workplace.)

However, very few of the statements that Jon was compelled to channel during said road trip were as memorable or had as much narrative momentum as the ones from the first four seasons. There was a variety to the Institute’s statement givers, in terms of their backgrounds, their voices, and how they responded to the presence of the Fears. Listeners were invited to care about their choices and their fates. Most of Season 5’s statements were exclusively about the constant torment of whatever Fear Domain Jon and Martin were visiting that week, the people undergoing that torment rarely if ever had any meaningful choices, and their fates were a foregone conclusion. They came across less as characters than as simplistic allegorical devices, singled out from an almost entirely undifferentiated mass of suffering, so that Jonny Author Sims could show off an experimental writing trick or make a political point. And even when I appreciated the stylistic swings or agreed with the politics (which was often), they didn’t offer the same emotional engagement and impact as the instances of the Fears interacting with the pre-apocalypse world.

And speaking of those politics…

All of the living creatures in the Fearpocalypse were either trapped in constant cycles of supernatural agony and terror, or served the Fears by constantly inflicting that agony on others. Everyone was either a monster or a victim of the monsters. Most of them couldn’t choose which category they fell into, except when they sort of could, as in the episode where Jon had the opportunity to ask Jordan Kennedy, a character whom we’d met before, if he’d rather continue to be buried in a pile of ants every second or be a “torturer” (Jordan’s word) and “complicit” (Jon’s word) in inflicting those same horrifying circumstances on others. I think that the recurring theme of "impossible choices" was often one of this show's strengths, but the framing of that choice (and of another one, at the end, which I will also discuss) didn't entirely work for me.

For most of TMA, it was very easy to interpret serving the Fears as a metaphor for entanglement with harmful societal systems. During the first four seasons, the show was obviously interested in exploring the different manifestations of that complicity, for both the employees of the Magnus Institute and the statement givers in the outside world. And one could read Jordan’s decision as an extension of that metaphor: it’s an extreme version of the decision to hurt others in order to avoid being hurt, or being helpless, oneself. But the actual world-building in Season 5 only offered one manifestation of complicity in the harmful system: “you exist to torture people.” To me, that is both less interesting than previous explorations of the concept, and more upsetting in a way that I did not enjoy, even in a genre that is supposed to be upsetting by definition.

In fact, the entire Fearpocalypse world-building – not just that episode – reminded me of how some particularly reductive Internet social justice discourse frame privilege and oppression within real-life systems of power: “Everybody is either An Oppressed who is defined by their suffering, or An Oppressor who is defined by the suffering that they inflict on others.” Prolonged or repeated exposure to that binary has always been a massive guilt and scrupulosity trigger for me, and there were intervals in which listening to TMA, and spending time in a world where that binary was literally real and true, felt like hanging out in the comments section of a Tumblr post or the most anxious and self-hating parts of my own brain. The reality of the COVID lockdown, which threw some of the contrasts between the haves and have-nots into sharp relief, exacerbated this but hadn’t exactly caused it.

“Hey, Nevanna,” some of you might say, “it sounds like this podcast just hurt your privileged fee-fees and you don’t enjoy thinking about your own role as An Oppressor and the ways that you benefit from the exploitation of other people in your own world, and that sounds like a You Problem.” And maybe I don’t, and maybe it is, but maybe I just don’t enjoy thinking about it like that, and I don’t think that anybody should have to. I do not think that “unless I am constantly suffering, I am a monster defined only by the suffering that I constantly inflict on others” is a useful way of thinking about the world and one’s place in it. Nor do I think that this was the specific message that Jonny Author Sims was trying to send his audience about the real world in which we actually lived. During the first act of Season 5, he reminded us that the Fearpocalypse world was “about fear, not truth” and “almost fully subjective.” One blogger referred to those tweets in a very cool piece of speculation about how our main characters might “turn the world back” to what it was before Jonah Magnus’s ritual.

I continue to have mixed feelings about the ending that we did get. Shortly after the finale, I read a post by another fan that echoed some of those feelings:

Look, I’ll be honest: I never cared too much what happened to the other worlds in the cosmic trolly problem of the final few episodes. This is fiction, and I chose to invest myself in the characters and world we had for five seasons, rather than worry about other fictional worlds we would never see. [...] I’m also not against the concept of “everything the characters have done has played into the schemes of an unfathomable intelligence and it turns out there was never any way to win.” That’s good old fashioned cosmic horror, of which I am a big fan. The issue, for me, began where TMA stopped being primarily escapist cosmic horror, and started leaning into the Fears as a metaphor for real world systems of control and oppression. The analogy has not been even a little bit subtle throughout season five, to the extent that a lot of fandom discussion sees them through that lens first and foremost (“fear capitalism”). We had people trapped in the system and being exploited, avatars complicit in the system out of cruelty or fear of being victimized themselves, Georgie realizing that opting out of the system doesn’t help, etc. etc. The problem with this weighty analogy, though, is that it demands a subversion of the system, a glimmer of hope for the oppressed, or else it becomes unbearably bleak. [...] With the “fear capitalism” metaphor so strongly to the forefront by season five, what originally could have been a spine-shivering revelation that a vast, cosmic intelligence has outplayed the characters at every turn, and the survivors are fortunate that it has turned its attention elsewhere, instead becomes a fable about how it’s impossible to make even the slightest dent in an oppressive system, and how every choice you make, regardless of how well-intentioned, makes you complicit in your own oppression.

I am not currently interested in litigating whether “undo the current hellscape by sending the Fears to every other reality in the multiverse” or “imprison the Fears in the current hellscape and try to ensure that everybody in it is tortured to death as quickly as possible” was the Correct Moral Decision. Some fans have argued that the first of those options was a metaphor for colonialism or NIMBY attitudes, and while those interpretations are valid, I’m not here to discuss them, either. My issues were, and to some extent still are, with the setup of the finale, not with the possible resolutions to the debate. I liked the suggestion in episode 160 that Jon was only the “chosen one” because a privileged and supernaturally powerful man – who was nonetheless still a man, with very human wants and fears of his own – decided that he would be useful; the subsequent revelation that the Web had been grooming Jon since childhood undermined that. I disliked that literally every single living thing in existence was further reduced to The Masses, to abstractions in a philosophical exercise, while a small group of people made decisions about what would happen to them.

And while I agree with the post that I quoted above about the bleak implications of the ending, I interpreted an additional message from the very construction of the cosmic trolley problem: “Any attempt to ease suffering on a small scale will ultimately cause it to spread on an infinitely larger scale, so maybe allowing the world you know to die off, because it’s broken beyond repair, is a viable alternative.” This attitude was almost unbearably dismal in its own right, especially when I applied it to the reality in which I lived. I even considered that my reluctance to accept “we’re all screwed and everything I do to help just makes things worse” was some kind of moral or emotional failing on my part.

My mental health improved greatly when I reminded myself that, as with the other political implications of the Fearpocalypse, nobody was asking me to apply its logic to my own reality, and even if they had been, I wasn’t morally obligated to listen and obey. Jonny Author Sims might have been using his story to explore and reflect the horrors of our world – war, bigotry, abuse, illness, and many others – but he wasn’t writing an instruction manual for how to deal with them. This might seem obvious now, but it didn’t feel obvious then.

Horror fiction can help us to process our feelings about the things that scare us in the real world, but if TMA – including Season 5 – has done that for me, has given me the catharsis that I hoped for, it’s done so through the differences between the story and our reality, just as much as the similarities. Our reality is not divided cleanly into Monsters and Victims, and agency and responsibility are not limited to a Chosen One or a group of main characters. And when the world changes, sometimes there’s no way to change it “back” to a desirable state. The best we can hope for is a way forward.

#the magnus archives #throwback thursday: fandom edition

3 notes · View notes

cult-of-the-eye · 1 year ago

Text

the way tmagp is constantly humanising the computers with the transcripts saying the computers are "awakening" and "eavesdropping" and alice giving them names (fredi) and jokingly treating them like people to the point where we start doubting if its a joke. its just so fitting to tma's theme of someone slowing turning non-human and trying to hold on to that humanity, which makes me think the focus of tmagp might be on turning human and dealing with the consequences of life.

#tma #the magnus archives #tmagp #the magnus protocol #tmagp theories #tmagp speculation #tmagp analysis #tma analysis

177 notes · View notes

magnus-archives-brainrot · 1 year ago

Text

So, this is how I'm processing MAGP8 and my timeline theory. I'm not sure how this really works so far, but I'll reblog with more theories as time goes on. This is just my current theory

Image Description:

[Start ID]

A square labeled "Timelines" is at the top of a digital dark-themed lined notebook page. Coming from this box is a red line signifying The Magnus Protocol timeline. There is also a green line signifying The Magnus Archives timeline. The two lines parallel each other vertically before diverging at a point labeled "1999", which is when The Magnus Institute burnt down in The Magnus Protocol. The red line continues down at an angle with the green line mirroring it, forming a triangle. The next point on the green line is marked as "2015", which is when Gertrude Robinson dies after failing to destroy The Magnus Institute. After this, still on the green line, the last marker is labeled as "2020s", which is when the Eyepocalypse happened in The Magnus Archives in season 5. The base of the triangle formed from the red and green lines is an alternating red and green dash marks, with text above the line (in the middle of the triangle) reading "Hilltop Rd rift (MAG200)".

On The Magnus Archives side of the line, a single dashed line goes out at an angle away from the rest of the diagram labeled as "Post MAG200? May have combined with TMAGP universe?" Connected to the red and green dashed line, a single red line goes down towards the bottom of the page, signifying the current Magnus Protocol timeline.

Written on both sides of this new red line, it says, "Worlds are combined. Gerry + Gertrude are from MAGP's original timeline. Celia, Chester, + Norris from MAG universe." There is a "v" shaped line below "Chester, + Norris" labeled as "JMart". The text continues on either side of the red line reading, "Unknown if more MAG characters are present. Georgie mentioned, but not sure how she ties in. Maybe she's MAGP's Georgie, not MAG Georgie... Maybe they combined into one person?" At the bottom of the red line, a single point is marked as "2024 (Sam joins the OIAR)", signifying where The Magnus Protocol starts.

[end ID]

#the magnus protocol #tmagp spoilers #the magnus archives #the magnus protocol spoilers #tma #tmagp #magpod #tmagp vague #tmagp speculation #tmagp theory #magpod analysis #the magnus pod #magnus protocol #magnus pod #the magnus universe #the magnus archives fanart #the magnus podcast #the magnus institute

58 notes · View notes

vlly-of-despair · 9 months ago

Text

Ok I’m just thinking because in episode 26 of Protocol we find an Archivist, and it’s very curious because most of the Fears and rules of the universe don’t follow the foundation we have from TMA. So that begs the question why have an Archivist, why have such a stronghold Eye server in this universe from over 20 years ago and longer, when clearly most other things aren’t in the neat Smirke’s 14 we know, and the Fears that may have fell through from TMA would be new.

BUT Archivists aren’t just people with special abilities aligned with the Eye, aren’t they? Not really. Jonah may have originally hired his Archivists with a job aligned with knowledge, with Knowing, with cataloging accounts of the Fears. But the Archivist, when he fully Became his role, was a catalyst for the Apocalypse. Jon’s role, from the moment he aligned with his true purpose as an Archivist, was to be the physical embodiment, the material vessel for the Entities, the Archive of fear.

And in TMP, we may not have the same Entities exactly, not in the same way. But there is still people who want to bring a new world, what the ‘Protocol’ was made to combat against all the way back to Newton’s experiments… the Philosopher’s Stone, the Magnum Opus, the Great Work. And I think even without Jonah Magnus himself at the wheel, the Magnus Institute was (is?) trying to bring about their new world with the linchpin of their own through their Archivist, but obviously this didn’t work as planned…

Even if there are different Entities, the goal was still to have these Eldritch creatures fully immersed into the world, which could be conducted by someone special who could be a God of their making, in a sense. A human turned conduit of Powers. As for the Magnus Program, they were looking for children who could make this requirement, be the next experiment if the last Archivist failed. But they were burned down by the OIAR as word got around that they were coming close to fulfilling their goal of creating this being that would bring about a terrible new age.

Sam, for all his sadness in being rejected from the Institute, was literally saved in the end from this horrible fate. This is probably why Chester specifically seems to be targeting Sam in regards to information about this Archivist and the Institute. They are literally the same, Jon fulfilled his destiny just as Sam may have if the cards were aligned just a bit differently…

#the magnus archives #the magnus pod #the archivist #the magnus protocol #tmagp theory #jon sims #jonathan sims #tmp error #tmagp 26 #tmagp analysis #tmagp spoilers #tmagp speculation #samama khalid

43 notes · View notes

centaurianthropology · 8 years ago

Text

The Magnus Archives ‘Hard Shoulder’ (S02E21) Analysis

It’s the return of Section 31, and a bit of follow-up on one of the few largely standalone stories from the series. Is everything connected? Who are the drivers of Breekon and Hope? And … are we ever going to get any sort of emotional payoff for last week’s revelations? Come on in to hear what I thought about ‘Hard Shoulder’.

Okay, going to get this right out in the open. This one didn’t click with me. At all. I found Daisy’s reasons for visiting the archives to be suspicious at best, and potentially utterly nonsensical. Her statement was vaguely interesting, but her character was a total blank for me, and the whole Section 31 plot is definitely the least interesting of the subplots to me. So if you adored this episode and want to give this analysis a miss, I wouldn’t blame you in the least.

Let’s start with the initial revelation, which I both like and I don’t: Basira only helped Sims because she thought he’d murdered Gertrude and wanted to … I really don’t know. Do some sort of undercover sting operation? I mean, that does make better sense than her showing up conveniently with tapes, claiming that somehow the police couldn’t find a tape deck. And frankly, it makes her a better professional, who actually did trust her partner, and used Sims to try to either solve the case or reveal himself as the killer. I like that bit a lot, actually.

What I like less is the explanation for why he’s going to keep getting tapes: because she likes him. Um, sorry, what? She’s willing to break protocol for a guy who’s been mentally unstable the entire time she’s known him, who she thought was a murderer? I don’t care if he was as smooth as Tim, I can’t believe that she would share evidence in a case with a potential suspect just because she liked him. That she would share information because he might have unique insight, or because she was being stonewalled by both her department and the Institute? That I could buy. But this explanation skirts dangerously close to ‘shoehorned love-interest’ territory. I really hope that what’s actually happening is some clever subversion of that, because I would really hate the only super professional female character recurring in this show to be violating professional conduct because she likes someone.

Of course, I must acknowledge that this information is coming from Daisy, who seems shady as shit. She comes to the Institute to bring a tape of her own, for no reason. She doesn’t send Basira, but comes herself. She then proceeds to blow their entire undercover operation by telling Sims about it, and then when he asks her to give a statement, she just … does. Just like that. Nothing in this setup makes any sense to me.

The story itself was fine. It didn’t raise any hairs, but I did appreciate it being a follow-up to ‘Do Not Open’, and perhaps even tying that story in with a few others. Out of everything that happened in this episode, I think the actual story of it worked the best.

For one, the driver of the van was named ‘Tom’, a man with the sort of face so ordinary you couldn’t remember it? The sort that might look an awful lot like a stock photo? I do have to wonder if Not-Sasha’s new boyfriend is also a driver for Breekon and Hope. And if that’s the case, how does he fit in? We’ve only ever heard about the two big fake-Cockney guys.

Speaking of Breekon and Hope, I also appreciated that we got a more physical description of them. Hitting them is like hitting a wall, and their skin is like rubber. Whatever they are, I really don’t think they’re human. They pass for human, and probably work for both human and horrific elements of this world, but perhaps they properly belong to neither.

We also get to find out what exactly was in that coffin from ‘Do Not Open’, or at least we sort of find out. It turns out that the coffin contains a staircase descending into impossible depths. It’s likely this is where John from ‘Do Not Open’ went, and Daisy’s partner followed suit, walking calmly down the staircase as though he was sleepwalking.

So, yeah. The story was fine. We got some potentially interesting information about Breekon and Hope, and about Tom. I think that this is one of two potentially really interesting things to come out of the episode. The other was the only reason I can think of to explain why Daisy would suddenly decide to tell such a personal story—something she’d never told anyone—completely out of the blue. A few people have speculated that perhaps the Archivist can detect lies. I wonder if it can compel statements. It was a little difficult to tell with the voice performance, but I think that Daisy was genuinely surprised and upset she told the story after she was done, and she was completely ready to leave, but when Sims asked about vampires she immediately info-dumped again. To this complete stranger, despite being a hardened cop. The only explanation I can think of why this would happen that remains consistent with that characterization is if she didn’t intend to tell it until prompted, and then had to tell.

That, to me, could be very interesting. Not only could it be interesting for Sims, but it might have fascinating implications regarding Gertrude. Sims is flailing around in the dark as far as what being the Archivist means, but Gertrude had 50 years to master it. What could she do by the end? What if she started using her ability not to passively record, but to hunt and to interrogate?

I’m interested to hear what’s on next week’s tape, delivered by Daisy for an unknown reason. Because to me, the only way I can square the complete not-explanation for her appearance, her revelation about Basira, and everything she did in this episode (except perhaps the statement itself, and its potential coercion), is that it’s a trap. She gave Sims a tape that is going to contain answers, but more than that, will actually harm him. At that point, I think I could forgive a lot of what seem right now to be glaring flaws in this episode.

I guess I should dig into those flaws, shouldn’t I? I’ve tried to put it off, and dig into the few implications I found genuinely interesting, but in truth, I thought this episode was really frustrating. While Basira’s all-too-convenient appearance earlier is now explained, Daisy’s appearance isn’t. If she’s setting Sims up for a trap, awesome, but why blow their investigation to him? Why the explanation about Basira? It doesn’t serve to help Basira in any way, and sort of comes straight out and says that she’s breaking procedure for a stupid reason, making her look unprofessional.

And if Daisy’s statement was compelled, why wasn’t she more shaken? Why wasn’t she pissed that she’d told a very personal story against her will? The only other explanations are that she just randomly decided to tell a very private story to a complete stranger, or that she intended to tell it all along. And neither of those actions make any logical sense whatsoever.

I will put my hand up to not being overly excited about this episode in the first place. The first Section 31 episode didn’t grab me at all, and the entire subplot has left me unmoved. I find conspiracies dull, and have yet to find either Basira or Daisy particularly compelling characters. I was hoping this was going to be an interesting twist in Basira’s story, and with the opening, I felt like we were getting somewhere. Her working undercover, as I said, actually worked really well for me, but that got ruined with the whole ‘she likes you, so she’ll break with procedure to pass you tapes and risk getting fired’ thing which immediately made her look incompetent.

The plot, and the motivations of everyone involved, were entirely opaque. Normally I love a bit of vaguery, since filling in details with your mind is a huge part of what makes audio horror so scary. But this episode was vague for no reason I could discern, and wasn’t even frightening.

I don’t want to be Debbie Downer here. I hate listening to an episode and finding it uninteresting and confusing. I felt like there were two elements to this story that could potentially blossom into something very cool indeed, but I couldn’t make any connection to the characters or the plot. And a connection, after last week’s revelation, was what I really wanted. I may be alone in this feeling, but after some factual closure last week, I wanted genuine emotional fallout. I wanted at least a confrontation with Tim, if not a discussion with Elias or Martin about everything that’s happened. I wanted a focus on the team that’s been put through the ringer this season, and instead we got the sub-plot I find least interesting.

I feel like we’re on the cusp of certain answers and certain revelations, and that this story might have advanced it, but only in the smallest and most tangential way. I was hoping for some hint of character advancement after everything that happened last week, and there wasn’t any. Sims doesn’t seem changed. He’s still doing precisely what he was doing before the CCTV reveal. No one is confronting him, and after all that buildup and what felt like the beginning of payoff last week, I will now admit to a bit of frustration. Even a small acknowledgement that things are shifting would have been something, but this was totally disconnected.

Conclusions

I may look on this episode more favorably later, once certain facts are laid out and better explanations are given. But right now this one is on the list of I’ll-listen-to-it-if-I-have-to-check-lore-and-the-Wiki-fails-me. There aren’t many episodes like that for me, but this one didn’t click. Sigh. You can’t like them all.

#The Magnus Archives #analysis

16 notes · View notes