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mllemaenad · 7 days

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The Magnus Protocol: Getting Off

Much like Gwen, I would very much like to know what the point of this is.

The first time I listened to this, I had a horrible fever, and honestly I think my only takeaway was that dying to the sound of that irritating Mr Bonzo song sounds tremendously unfair. That's a gross insult added to fatal injury situation right there.

Now, listening with a clearer head, I just keep thinking – this feels like a ridiculously convoluted way to achieve anything. So what are they aiming for, with all this rigamarole?

Most of the victims seem to be ... well, moderately important, let's say? They're throwing a bachelor party in a private room in what sounds like an upmarket strip club, so they have some money to throw around.

And this:

Norris/Jordan Bennett This lot weren’t the worst. Just a bunch of heavyset, middle-aged lads with names like Ozzer, or Rozzer or whatever. My guess was they used to be a school rugby team or something. The groom was fine, acted embarrassed even though he was obviously keen and they were easily pleased. – The Magnus Protocol: Getting Off

... very much gives off private school old boys vibes. Er. I mean public school, since it's British. But regardless.

They're probably somebodies, up to a point. Successful in business or politics. Drive Audis or Lamborghinis, or whatever is fashionable these days (my entire understanding of what car people like may be derived from a couple of Top Gear episodes I saw over a decade ago). Vote Tory. Have wine collections. Send their sons to the same school they attended. That sort of thing.

But only up to a point. Jordan, the bartender doing the narration, pointedly doesn't recognise any of them. They're just more of the same sort she served every night. The Prime Minister didn't die in that strip club that day, nor did any famous film star, nor any CEO big enough to have been on the news defending his company's dubious business practices. Just some guys, presumably with a bit of money.

It took a bit to set up, too. All the business with the name and address in the envelope, which required a hand delivery to the monster. Then, of course, someone had to plant the lunch box – or I suppose it could supernaturally manifest itself, but that does not sound like less work. And it seems to have only worked because "Baz" the groom was genuinely a Mr Bonzo fan.

Norris/Jordan Bennett 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. – The Magnus Protocol: Getting Off

He had to like Mr Bonzo to trigger the trap. Had that lunch box been delivered to Jordan she would have tossed it.

It required research and setup, and access to exactly the kind of monster to which Baz would be vulnerable.

For an assassination, it's obviously absurd; there have to be thugs who'll do that job with less associated nonsense. It's entirely possible that somebody wants these guys dead, but that can't be why the OIAR did it. It's also a lot for the purposes of generating a scary story. I mean – the OIAR is drowning in scary stories. And if I'm honest, this one wasn't especially scary. I mean, don't get me wrong – it's deeply unpleasant and awful, but I've never been much moved by "monster on a rampage" tales.

But on the other side of it, it's much too small scale for a The Magnus Archives-style ritual.

There is Jordan, though. The thing about Jordan is that she is very much the sister of Dianne Margolis from Give and Take. If you subtract the specifics of the monsters, the stories are basically identical:

A place of business

A monster that is in some sense invited in

A massacre

A single, surviving staff member, traumatised and seeking compensation

Jordan and Dianne themselves are both professionals who find themselves wildly out of their depths when confronted with a supernatural interloper. And, crucially, both were abandoned by their superiors, and that isolation made them vulnerable. Dianne has a boss who goes on "personal development sabbaticals" and doesn't answer her emails. Jordan has a doorman who goes on unscheduled smoke breaks. Now, in fairness to poor Joey the doorman, it does seem as though Mr Bonzo took him out first. But there's a lot of plausible deniability to be found in that history – sometimes, Jordan is left on her own, and if something were to go wrong ...

Norris/Jordan Bennett 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. – The Magnus Protocol: Getting Off

A bachelor party is an odd choice of a place to kill someone. This isn't Baz's address. He wouldn't be here long, and in practice might be hard to pin down: he could arrive late or leave early; he could decide to go hang out in the public areas for a bit. Jordan, though. This is her workplace. You can just about guarantee she will be there.

Monsters in The Magnus Archives were not primarily interested in killing people. I mean – they did kill people, obviously. Sometimes quite a lot of people. But they killed people because dying people are often afraid, or because if you're, say, trying to make people afraid of falling, throwing one guy out of a cable car will make an impression on the other passengers.

Killing wasn't the point.

We have, here, another semi-public murder with a surviving witness. Jordan is unlikely to convince herself this never happened because she has her missing hand as evidence.

Geraldine The witness statements from three murders over the last five years – Nigel (speaking over her) I told your producer this wasn’t going to be discussed. Geraldine – that claim a person in a Mr. Bonzo costume was at the scene? Do you think there could be a copycat? – The Magnus Protocol: Saturday Night

On her own, Jordan might just be a spooky story. But that's a fourth witness statement for Geraldine. There have been at least four cases over the past five years of something almost exactly like this: grisly murders, and someone left alive to tell the tale.

Something is trying to get everyone's attention.

And I wonder if the name Gwen gave Mr Bonzo wasn't Jordan Bennett.

As for who benefits, I have no doubt Alice is quite correct.

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. – The Magnus Protocol: Getting Off

Sure, that's one of those lines that sounds like a joke, but which actually speaks the truth. That's been the horror all along: the difference between The Magnus Institute, that had to coax people in, and the OIAR, which can just harvest the horrors, sometimes from very private sources.

And I have not forgotten this:

There's a minister behind this mess, somewhere, and he is likely the one pulling the strings.

The question, mostly, is whether Alice knows she's right. She does talk a good game about indifference, of course, but it's becoming abundantly clear that the OIAR does not hire people who are not marked by the supernatural. And something is already following her.

What could she tell you, if she were ever willing to talk?

Celia and Sam are what remains, of course, but that's just more put-a-pin-in-it-for-later stuff. Whether Alice does or no, Celia has things going on, but she won't talk until the plot is right for it.

#the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #the magnus archives

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mllemaenad · 11 days

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I don't know if you've seen it yet, but I think the Fallout TV series might interest you. (usual Content Warnings for Fallout media, a lot of people die, take drugs, and so on)

I have seen it! I even, in theory, have thoughts about it. Unfortunately, right now I also have the flu, so any actual coherence on those thoughts will have to wait.

#fallout

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mllemaenad · 17 days

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The Magnus Protocol: Marked

Huh. The tattoos are interesting.

At the moment, they remind me most of "Leitners". Of course, there are other cursed objects in the world, but these, like the weird books of The Magnus Archives are specifically pieces of art that can infect a person and drive them to extreme acts.

They are linked, not by any particular obsession, but by the sense of compulsion itself. Daria, of Making Adjustments was driven to self-mutilation by her tattoo, because of her insecurity about her appearance. Gordie, David and, given that the actual company email address goes inactive at the end of the story, quite possibly the entire landscaping crew, were drawn inexorably to the sea by a sense of nostalgia.

Chester/Gordie On a personal note, I’d just like to say thank you for using us to do this job. I know we can’t have been the cheapest company to put in a bid, but as local lads we’ve been coming to this graveyard all our lives (even if just to sneak some booze as stupid teenagers), and now that the cliff’s finally giving up the ghost (if you’ll pardon the pun), it feels right for us to be the ones taking it apart. – The Magnus Protocol: Marked

They are not anxious or afraid – not at the beginning, anyway. It is their fondness for the cemetery that dooms them.

But even though theme around what the tattoo means and what it does to someone is quite different, there's apparently a community of some kind devoted to them. For a start, the particular tattoo in the story is from no later that 1908, and while I admit "Oscar Jarrett" is not a name that immediately means something to me, "Sutherland Macdonald" was a real Victorian tattoo artist. So this has been going on a while. And, Ink5oul seems to have some pretty strong ideas about what that tattoo was – and must have had some idea it was in that graveyard, to turn up within two days of the body's exhumation.

There's some kind of community built around mystical tattoos. It is old and, given the evidence from Making Adjustments, alive, well, and still inking creepy images into people to this very day.

That's an interesting thing in itself. The cults in The Magnus Archives were built around allegiance to a particular power. Leitner existed, but he was one guy with a particularly awful book collection. What draws these people together?

And if the tattoos are in any way like the Leitners, that carries with it some worrying implications.

The first thing is that the books typically had to be picked up and read to cause any significant harm. And while, yes, tattoos may be deliberately covered with clothing or makeup, there's still a much greater chance of a lot of people being casually exposed to them.

The second thing is that ... well, tattoos are on people. No one thought twice about burning a Leitner, assuming it was one that would burn. Hell, "setting the annoying books on fire" was Gerard Keay's whole thing. But what's the plan if you are dealing with an image that lives in the skin of a person? And a person, who, like Daria, genuinely had no idea what they were signing up for?

Then there's the meta around the case. Sam, here, behaves exactly like John did. He's always had an interest in the cases, of course. But the core thing about John was that he knew not a damned thing about monsters – but he always paid attention to the people. This is an easy one, of course; I'm sure everyone went HEY IT'S THE CREEPY TATTOO ARTIST! But it's true nevertheless. Ink5oul the creepy tattoo artist has been active at least as recently as 2020.

Sam wants to note the pattern. John was obstructed by a (deliberately) poorly organised archive. Even if he had the general idea of what kind of thing he needed to find, actually finding it was almost impossible. Sam is obstructed by any reasonable means of stringing his research together. Or at least so Alice says – I haven't forgotten that she was either lying or very wrong about the search function not working.

But the nature of the OIAR seems to be that it puts a barrier between the people doing the assessing and the cases themselves. They are removed from the situation in a way that the archival staff were not. And Sam has breached that barrier. He knows someone is out there who is involved in this stuff.

As for Alice, well, she's being followed. Probably by [ERROR], although we'll see. The episode is called Marked. The dead man in the grave was marked by his tattoo. Gordie, David and likely the rest were marked by exposure to it. Explicitly, Gordie became obsessed by the shape in the water. Something was pursuing that ship, and he had to know what it was. And Alice ... well, something has marked her, and is pursuing her.

The most interesting thing, really, is that it's Alice being pursued, not Sam. Sam wanted to go to The Magnus Institute, and found nothing but a soggy ruin. Alice complained every step of the way – and she's the one with the stalker.

Sam No, you’re right. I don’t know what I’m looking for. 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. – The Magnus Protocol: Saturday Night

Is that a thing, somehow? That Sam is fundamentally the one who does not get chosen? John was a magnet for every horror in the story – and it was all very deliberate, with the pain and fear leading to a final goal. But if Sam is somehow resistant to the horrors ... There seems to be something up with him. There are bits of static clearly popping up in the dialogue. There's something that made The Magnus Institute pick him up initially. But there's also something that made them let him go. Perhaps the peril is not to him, but to the people around him.

Gwen did just get thoroughly traumatised. And yes, she absolutely did that to herself, but it still happened.

I do wonder what Gwen thought the job was, though. She does nothing but read (or hear) and categorise monster stories all night, every night. But seems genuinely appalled that being "in" means confronting monsters. Did she think it was all code for something else?

And Celia – well, there you just throw up your hands. Obviously relevant. Too little detail yet to do anything with it. The how and why of her sleeping in the middle of nowhere is important, sure. But who's Jack?

Ah, well. Thoughts for later, I guess.

#the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #the magnus archives

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mllemaenad · 2 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Saturday Night

Well, that went better than expected. I mean – there are implications, obviously, but so far everyone's limbs still seem attached, so that is a definite plus.

The meat of this thing, the case file, is interesting, because of how far it leans into a desire for publicity.

We have:

A forum post with a deliberately provocative and arguably supernatural image in First Shift

The tattoo artist who live streams the creation of an obviously supernatural tattoo in Making Adjustments

The crowd-drawing (and occasionally crowd-murdering) violin in Taking Notes

The surprisingly popular horror media review blog that has had all content removed except the posts that detail the author's ensnarement in a supernatural film viewing in Personal Screening

Needles actively reporting his crimes and harassing the emergency service operators in Introductions

The unnamed gambler character in Rolling with It feeling inspired to dress up and cause supernatural havoc in public by getting people to roll the dice

... And now Mr Bonzo

Pretty much everything about Mr Bonzo, really. This was a character that regularly appeared on television. While the situation evidently escalated, it is strongly implied that there was always something wrong with him, both by the fact that Nigel does not know where the name came from, and by Gotard Rimbaeu's disproportionate terror at encountering him. He had a chart-topping song that can still apparently be used to summon him. He has merchandise that is still being sold. And the thing is, he's still making the news:

Geraldine And how do you respond to the more recent rumours? Nigel (on guard) Excuse me? Geraldine The witness statements from three murders over the last five years- Nigel (speaking over her) I told your producer this wasn’t going to be discussed. Geraldine -that claim a person in a Mr Bonzo costume was at the scene? Do you think there could be a copycat? – The Magnus Protocol: Saturday Night

This bit here is clearly the point of this interview. The nostalgia and the laughter were all to lead Nigel into a trap: the big story here is that Mr Bonzo has been seen killing, and they want Nigel to comment on it.

I know this is a reference to a stunt on an actual British variety programme. I think it might even have aired at some point in Australia – but I must admit it wasn't something that was on my radar in the 90s. It's hard to be accurate about something from that long ago, but I don't think I ever saw it. I'm not completely sure how close this is to reality, but I think pretty close, barring the murders.

The point is, this is something that was obnoxiously popular in the real world ... and perhaps even more prominent here. Even if you're not aware of the cultural impact of this thing specifically – and like I say, this largely passed me by – you'll know how this kind of thing can spread. A novelty can consume the public consciousness. And if it's just a novelty – well, it might be annoying after a while, but no more than that. But if it's more than that?

In an odd way, all of this reminds me of Good Omens, and how the gone-native demon Crowley relates to his colleagues:

"I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime," he said. There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars. "Yes?" said Hastur. "And then what?" "Look, it wasn't easy," said Crowley. "That's all?" said Ligur. "Look, people –" "And what exactly has that done to secure souls for our master?" said Hastur. Crowley pulled himself together. What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The knock-on effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you barely had to lift a finger. But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking a way at one soul. Admittedly it was craftmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example Or value-added tax. Or Manchester. He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester. – Good Omens, Corgi Edition, 1991. p.22-23. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

The Magnus Archives was about secret cults and esoteric knowledge. It was about old men and their devoted acolytes trying and failing, over and over, to summon their gods. It was John running into other avatars and getting laughed at, because he had the power and the doom, but he hadn't been properly initiated into the Mysteries, so he didn't know the proper terminology.

It was also about the dead-end job you couldn't quit, no matter how much you wanted to.

The Magnus Protocol is the dead-end job you could lose tomorrow. The apparent high turnover at the OIAR, whatever the hell went on with Karl the former IT guy, Teddy losing his new job immediately after he got it – and Mr Bonzo. Mr Bonzo is the job you lose the moment a new guy turns up:

Nigel Well, there was a different man in the suit, of course. There were a few of them over the years. It was very physically demanding and that wasn’t the only injury we had with it. It actually became a sort of ritual: the newest member of the production crew wore Mr Bonzo until someone else joined. – The Magnus Protocol: Saturday Night

And it's also about freaking out a lot of people in one go.

If I have any theory about this part, it's this: what if the core difference between universes is a desire to be known, and this is because of the way The Magnus Archives ended?

There have clearly been supernatural entities in this world for centuries, at least – otherwise whence came the cursed violin? But it's impossible to reasonably discuss whether these are native beings who have been exposed to something new via interdimensional travel, or whether they are the entities from The Magnus Archives and something about the nature of interdimensional travel means that now they have always been here.

But either way, what if the new thing these beings have is ... a taste, let's say, for the public stage.

The entities from The Magnus Archives were like Hastur and Ligur. They might spend years tormenting one soul, or stage a whole set piece for one guy and have to deal with him just not getting the effort they put in. There were rituals, yes, and they were of a larger scale – but still tended to be desperately secretive.

It was craftmanship, sure, but in terms of nourishment it made them scavengers. They had to catch a person alone, or in a moment of emotional vulnerability, to feed upon them.

Then, of course, the apocalypse happened. And for a while, all the world was their smorgasbord. It turned out that everyone could be afraid at the same time. And while those set pieces still existed, they could shove lots of humans into them at once and torment them all together.

But then:

Archivist Because for the Fears to spread into these new worlds, they would need to leave ours, wouldn’t they? Annabelle If one should leave this place for… greener pastures, the rest must follow. Archivist Leaving us behind in the process, freeing our world at the cost of others.Basira What are you saying? Archivist We can pass them our apocalypse. [MUFFLED DISCOMFITED REALISATION] Annabelle Nothing so extreme. In these new worlds they would exist as they used to in ours, lurking just beyond the threshold. – The Magnus Archives: Connected

That puts everybody back to square one. I'm not suggesting that these beings have a coherent plan for restarting the apocalypse – we might get there, but these are creatures of feeling, not thought, so if we do it will likely be a human plan. Rather, I mean, that they have the feeling that they like being known. It was good to eat well. It was good when everyone was afraid.

And that changes the model. Now they're Crowley, setting up the M25 to churn out a smidgeon of low-grade evil every time someone drives on it. The push is not to isolate someone and work on them, but rather to declare to the world "Here I am".

Several people wore the Mr Bonzo suit. Not for long, but they were all touched by it. Millions saw "Nigel's SOS" (that is on the nose) and – and this is called out specifically – Mr Bonzo was especially popular with children, even though the original joke seems to be geared more toward adults. And all of them then knew about the serial killings. People don't work at the OIAR for very long, at least not usually, but everyone who does is exposed to the horror stories.

It's not the equivalent of being a statement-giver in The Magnus Archives, exactly. You don't have some personally crafted nightmare that will stay with you forever. But you know there are things out there that can hurt you. You have reason to be afraid.

And the OIAR seems to be sending Mr Bonzo out to kill. Kill whom? And why? Don't know. But as I said: he's making the news. And before him there was Starkwall. And they also made the news. By committing a massacre.

In more meta terms, Mr Bonzo seems to fill a similar niche to Jane Prentiss. He's almost certainly going to be a problem, but is probably not the problem with the world. But more importantly the kind of thing he is teaches you something about how the world works.

And he has some interesting similarities: in both cases you seem to be looking at something parasitical. Jane was both seduced and consumed by her wasp nest; and while there was enough of her left to understand what was happening she was desperate for help.

Nigel seems to be Mr Bonzo's prisoner, with the comedy dungeon transforming into a more literal hostage situation. But he's also his livelihood, and his claim to fame.

Geraldine Yes, I was going to ask – Mr Bonzo merchandise is still on sale via your own website. Do you feel at all uneasy about that? Nigel About what? The fact that a few sales might be from people trying to be edgy? A man’s got to make a living, Geraldine, and it’s not like I can tell if someone’s buying a t-shirt ironically. Besides, people think of Nigel Dickerson and Mr Bonzo is never far behind so it’s not like its changing my reputation. In a lot of ways I’m more his prisoner now than I ever was on my show. – The Magnus Protocol: Saturday Night

Jane was a creature of almost pure tragedy: sure, she had problems prior to the wasp nest – that's why she was vulnerable to it – but her descent into monstrosity is marked largely by confusion and distress. Nigel seems actively complicit in spreading Mr Bonzo around, and he's defensive when someone suggests it's inappropriate.

I assume the "worm tracks" Sam and Alice find when investigating The Magnus Institute are at least an Easter egg, although whether they're relevant to any of the current happenings remains to be seen. Whatever brought the place down mostly spared the archivist's office, and that feels relevant.

The return of the tape recorder is interesting, though, because it doesn't fit the pattern of how listening in has worked in The Magnus Protocol. Tape recorders were an Archives thing. Supernatural events would only record on tape. If no tape recorders were available in a given setting, eventually one would just manifest itself.

The situation in The Magnus Protocol has been much more opportunistic: any device with a microphone will do. If you stayed away from microphones – a thing Colin has largely managed to do – it couldn't create one to record you. Of course, tape recorders weren't just popping into being this early in The Magnus Archives either, so I'm not suggesting this is some permanent rule. But Sam and Alice's phones are clearly available as options: the first bit of conversation comes from a phone. But once inside, something makes a tape recorder when it did not have to.

And the other noteworthy thing is, of course ... whatever crawls out of the trap door at the end. Mostly this one is a "put a pin in that for later" situation, because while it's clearly important there's not much you can do with it just yet.

But there are a couple of things.

The first point of interest there is that it pops up just as Sam is talking about not being chosen for something. So is this someone who was chosen?

The second is how the character is credited: [ERROR]. That looks very much how one might see something in an error log; something technological in nature.

Which suggests Colin is right: he should figure out what's up with the computers as quickly as possible.

#the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #the magnus archives

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mllemaenad · 2 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Rolling with It

Well – the show is on the cusp of a mid-season break, so it is absolutely time for someone to do something rash and foolhardy. This will almost certainly lead to a frustrating cliffhanger next week, because that's how pacing works. I look forward to Sam, Alice and Gwen all screwing up royally on their respective excursions.

That said, I genuinely don't believe that sticking your head in the sand is an approach that works. It's all very well to say a person should stay clear of the supernatural, but there's nothing in that that guarantees that the supernatural will go along with that plan. Something quite clearly happened to Sam at The Magnus Institute. Providing he is cautious about it, working out what that was is probably a good idea. But Sam doesn't feel cautious.

It's interesting how traditional this one was, and yet how different – because it's in the differences that you can see how this world works.

This is a bona fide Magnus Institute statement read by, at least insofar as how it sounds, the Archivist himself. And, like others before him, the statement giver has turned up to get the Magnus Institute to deal with his weird supernatural problem.

But the thing is – in The Magnus Archives the statements were always about the people. Oh, there were plenty of weird artefacts in them, but the storyteller themselves was always the point of the whole thing. It was the terror of the individual that The Magnus Institute actively sought, and it was following the interconnecting threads of the various recurring characters that led John to his conclusions.

But The Magnus Institute: Manchester does not care about the people. It cares about the stuff.

There is a very distinct difference between this:

Archivist Statement of Nathan Watts, regarding an encounter on Old Fishmarket Close, Edinburgh. Original statement given April 22nd 2012. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. – The Magnus Archives: Anglerfish

And this:

Chester Statement and Research assessment for artefact CD137 - Sam What the hell? Chester Magnus Institute – Manchester. Private and confidential. Viability as subject – none Viability as agent – low Viability as catalyst – medium. Recommend referral to Catalytics for Enrichment applicability assessment. – The Magnus Protocol: Rolling with It

The statement giver is nameless, you can only infer he's probably male from an offhand remark:

Chester/Unknown Statement Giver And that brings us about up to date. They're yours now, and I never want to see them again. Don't get me wrong, it’s a blow but I’m just not the right guy to carry them. – The Magnus Protocol: Roll with It

And that's hardly definitive. The Magnus Institute is interested in him only insofar as his experience illustrates what the dice can do. And it intends to take these dice, enhance them in some way, and then use them to cause something. Their use twists fate in some sense – so you can see the logic up to a point. If you're trying to make something particular happen, you might be able to use the dice to do that.

But what the hell were they doing? Specifically, what the hell were they doing to those children?

It's been a thread, all the way through, that distance from people in The Magnus Protocol. The way the cases are gathered, without the knowledge or consent of the people to whom these things happened, the barrier between the protagonists and the stories as Chester, Norris and Augustus are the ones who actually read them ... and now this. The Magnus Institute was looking for "supernaturally active items", not people who had had supernatural experiences.

RedCanary also found an object in The Magnus Institute:

Chester/RedCanary Re: Magnus Institute Ruins By RedCanary on Saturday April 23 2022 12:17pm The photos from the spelunk seem properly gone, but I did find an old wooden thing with a bunch of similar symbols on. Some kinda empty box, not really sure what for, though. Gonna see if I can get the light right for a decent pic. Edit: No dice, I’m afraid. Must be something up with my phone camera. Really not helping the whole paranoia thing either. Anyone know anything about photographic distortion? Gonna see if I can borrow my dad’s SLR tomorrow. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

That didn't feel especially noteworthy at the time: The Magnus Institute always did have some weird crap in Artefact Storage. But I keep thinking about Mary Keay:

Mary Keay Often, during my studies, my mother would talk to me of the amazing arcane relics at your Institute. I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when I finally got a look at the collection of mediocrity that you call your “Artefact Storage.” – The Magnus Archives: First Edition

Mary was ... quite a piece of work, obviously, and there's no doubt that some of the things in Artefact Storage were very dangerous indeed. But it does seem that The Magnus Institute of that universe only collected supernatural objects incidentally: usually because a statement giver happened to bring one in.

But here – well, the artefacts are the point. And RedCanary took one away. And – heh – "no dice". I wonder if that box ever held dice. I wonder if they had still come up snake eyes.

The rest of the point of the piece seems to be about the nature of choice. That's always been a question, of course:

Archivist/Annabelle Cane Of course, that’s not the real crux of the free will question that’s bothering you at the moment, is it? I think that one probably comes down to whether or not you’re choosing to continue reading this statement out loud. You didn’t mean to, did you? No, I’m sure you told Basira and Melanie that you were going to glance over it and report back; perhaps they asked you if you were going to record, and you shook your head: maybe later. That sounds like the sort of thing you’d say. But think about it, John; when’s the last time you were able to read a statement quietly to yourself without instinctively hitting record and speaking it aloud? Is it just instinct, habit? Or is it a compulsion, a string pulled by the Ceaseless Watcher or the Mother of Puppets? – The Magnus Archives: Weaver

You can say the characters are making free choices, sure. But if an evil god (for want of a better term) is leaning on you, that constrains your choices. If your access to pertinent information is limited, that constrains your choices. If you're in the presence of a hypnotic artefact, that constrains your choices.

The statement giver is clearly compelled, at least up to a point. He knows, and Gary knew before him, that rolling the dice was likely a fatal idea. But they both did it anyway. So did all the random people he presented with the dice.

But at the same time, there are hints of a gambling habit that was present before he took ownership to the dice:

Chester/Unknown Statement Giver It’s been a while since I played the tables but I’ve used enough dice to know they were too heavy… And there was something else too. From that point on I own those dice. And I know it. – The Magnus Protocol: Rolling with it

And he clearly took to the damn things in a way that Gary did not. Gary clearly rolled the dice and had both very good luck and very bad. And at a certain point he decided to make them this arsehole's problem (and as badly as that ended for him, I can see why). But our anonymous statement-giver was committed to becoming a dark agent of fate.

Chester/Unknown Statement Giver I started to enjoy that more than the luck. I was rolling for myself less and less, focusing more on being some mysterious stranger. I even began dressing for the part: I got hold of this long dark coat, a wide-brimmed hat, grew a proper goatee, the works. – The Magnus Protocol: Rolling with it

It's funny that he didn't like D&D, given how quickly he took to LARP-ing.

But there are other questions about compulsion, too. Nobody but Gary was hurt? Not true. What about the truck driver, whose life was likely ruined by this event? Were they compelled by the dice to fall asleep, or to plough into that building, even though they'd never touched the dice?

Sam clearly gets a prod toward a Magnus Institute-related case when he's muttering about giving him – but he's also pretty clearly committed, whatever he says to Celia. And he is explicitly in the middle of the world's longest and weirdest application process as he's having this conversation. Maybe Sam's being leaned on, a little, but he's not resisting it.

And then there's Teddy. It's not that anything he says is impossible, of course. It's just an odd string of luck. He gets that job just long enough to be replaced by Sam and Celia, and then it's gone again. And then he's back in Alice's orbit. Teddy's not around the OIAR any more than that truck driver was around the dice. But does he still fall under its influence?

"Gerry Keay's" behaviour in the previous episode was definitely odd, but at the time it was a little difficult to tell whether he was overdoing an act … or if he was actually like that, for some reason. I'm more inclined to think the latter, now. I'm more inclined to think something's leaning on him.

And last, but not at all least, is Sam's questionnaire. Sure, "Why?" might be the weirdest part in the generic sense, but this:

Celia Please list your earliest four negative memories associated with school or an equivalent childhood educational institution, then rate each from zero to seven with zero being neutral and seven being traumatic. – The Magnus Protocol: Rolling with it

It's an odd bit of luck, right, that Sam's paperwork lands on a question to which he is bound to have an interesting answer?

And Gwen – it sounds as though she's been sent out to visit some kind of incredibly irritating 90s television star (I want to strangle the man from the name "Prank Tank" alone). She is to deliver him a name and address, just as Sam previously received a name and address. The coincidence, however, lies most in the children.

What was playing on TV when Sam, Gerry and the unknown others were in The Magnus Institute?

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mllemaenad · 2 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Running on Empty

While I have nothing but sympathy for the poor tutor who had to mark that essay, I must admit I enjoy the return to stories where a survivor recounts a bizarre supernatural experience.

It's not that I can't take an episode where the monster wins – those can be very effective. But, well, while I enjoyed the overarching plot in the fifth season of The Magnus Archives, I must admit I enjoyed the individual stories significantly less than the ones in the previous seasons. Mostly because they weren't stories so much as descriptions of suffering. Because the victims generally had little sense of a time before or after their torment, you missed out on all the bits about how they got themselves into this mess, how they got themselves out of it, and what they thought the whole thing meant. The personalities, the individual characters who came and went after their one weird thing, were part of the fun. And they were largely absent.

The cases in The Magnus Protocol aren't exactly like that, of course: you can glean a bunch of background, at least, by reading between the lines. But still. There's something immensely cheering about getting a couple of stories where someone essentially rolls in to declare "So that was weird, right?" and then wander off again.

Also, apparently Norris doesn't like the night shift.

It's interesting how similar the last two cases are. Dianne didn't seem like the type to use terms like "liminal spaces", but Hilltop Road has very literally been a threshold between worlds:

Martin/Annabelle Once there was a house, a building that, for all it might have looked like those around it, was not the same. Stop, no. It didn’t start with the house. It was here long before any might have thought of it as a home. Once, there was a patch of land, not quite as firm in this reality as that which surrounded it. Stop, no. It’s not about the land. Mud and soil has no part in what is there. Once, there was a point in space that did not quite obey all those petty rules that decide what can be allowed to happen in a world. Stop, no. It’s not a point in space. The Earth spins and hurtles through the darkness, but it still carries it along. Let us simply say that once there was a place. A place where the universe had… cracked. – The Magnus Archives: This Old House

And if you don't know that, then you do know that Hilltop Centre's status as a charity shop makes it a way station for objects of all kinds. And this place let those almost-human people in, and let them bring their weird objects with them.

The people in Running on Empty put me in mind of the gibbering crowd in Lost in the Crowd, whereas the volunteers in Give and Take reminded me of the students in Anatomy Class, but that's more a question of degree than kind. The latter put on a good enough show that it took weeks to really confirm there was something wrong with them; the former could be spotted almost instantly. Both are stories of the uncanny valley: the thing that is almost but not quite human. And in both cases the victim is very nearly overwhelmed by the crowd: objects crushing, or "people" biting, sure, but both instances of being isolated, outnumbered and then assaulted.

Poor Terrance is a perfect victim, as well: he already has a nervous breakdown on record, which will mark him as an unreliable witness, he is isolated enough that nobody reported him missing after his incident, and his job requires him to spend a great deal of time alone.

Norris is describing the situation in the OIAR perfectly. They are a small number of people working a night shift in an old building clearly intended to contain more staff:

Celia Sure, no worries. I’ll be honest, I thought there’d be more people working here given the size of the building? Sam Yeah, no we’re, uh… Alice Streamlined? – The Magnus Protocol: Introductions

The point of their work is deeply obscure to them:

Sam Where does it go? Alice If I were a betting woman, I'd say some long dead database that no-one will ever look at or care about. Sam So why do it? Alice Because that's what they're paying us to do. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

Their odd hours put them out of step with normal social conventions:

Gertrude To what do we owe this early morning… pleasure. Sam Oh yeah, sorry we work nights so… Gertrude So? – The Magnus Protocol: Running on Empty

And the place has high turnover and burn out rates. Colin is clearly not coping – he is absolutely right about the electronics being weird, but he isn't dealing with that information very well – Sam is struggling with the sleep schedule, Gwen is stressed enough that she's about to commit a murder over an empty kettle and Alice ... unflappable Alice is worried:

Alice Just been a lot of changes round here recently. I don’t love it. Teddy, Sam, Celia, and did you hear Lena put Colin on “mental health leave”? – The Magnus Protocol: Running on Empty

It's not clear whether the computer voices are aware of each other, so calling it coordinated is probably overstepping the available evidence at this point: but Chester and Norris do seem to have delivered almost exactly the same warning. What might the staff of the OIAR be in danger of letting in?

The story also continues its thread of visual communication, with Gerry's painting. Gerard Keay has always been a painter, of course. But if The Magnus Archives needed to give you a visual, it simply did:

Archivist/Dominic Swain Instead, my attention was fixed on a picture attached to the one small area of wall not covered by bookshelves. It was a painting of an eye. Very detailed, and at first I almost would have said almost photorealistic, but the more I looked at it, the more I saw the patterns and symmetries that formed into a single image, until I was so focused on them that I started to have difficulty seeing the eye itself. Written below it were three lines, in fine green calligraphy: “Grant us the sight that we may not know. Grant us the scent that we may not catch. Grant us the sound that we may not call.” – The Magnus Archives: Pageturner

But here there is:

The video you could not watch

The alert that was not read out by a text-to-speech program

The email you could not read

The painting you could not see

The painting might not be anything, of course. But if you knew something could hear you but not see you, a person might resort to communicating purely through a visual medium. "John" apparently sent Sam Gertrude and Gerry's address. But nobody knew that until they got there, and so they travelled unmolested.

It's hard to say for sure what this universe's Gertrude knows – although I'm going to assume she knows something of significance, or she wouldn't be here – but it makes an interesting contrast to The Magnus Archives. There, the primary concern was being seen, and Gertrude was paranoid enough on that front to cut out the eyes from the illustrations in all her books. So one might expect equally paranoid behaviour if the concern was being heard.

The actual arrival of Gertrude and Gerry is fun: I enjoyed both characters, so I'm happy to see more (although if I get to wish to see an existing character, it's Adelard Dekker; I was always a little sad that we never got to properly meet him). It is suggestive of the way the world works that they're together, though.

I mean – I know this isn't the kind of alternate universe story where the Roman Empire never fell. It's recognisable modern day Britain, so I assume just about everybody still hates Margaret Thatcher and it's customary to drive on the left hand side of the road.

But it's a different world, and the history relevant to the story has not played out the same way. And yet, Gertrude and Gerard Keay are still a duo. Are there some things that are always true, then, no matter the world? I'd be interested to learn how it came about, though. That Sam was personally traumatised by The Magnus Institute isn't exactly surprising: he hardly hid his interest, after all. But Gerard Keay? Signing her kid up for a "gifted" program at The Magnus Institute doesn't sound like Mary Keay's style at all: she valued her independence too much. So what happened there?

And what is Georgie doing? It does make one wonder what life would have been like for her and Melanie – the first ones, I mean – when the world was put back together. Everyone clearly remembered what had happened, or they wouldn't have bothered to murder Simon Fairchild. So they would always be set apart.

My general thoughts on the plan are that it is reasonable to pass the entities along. Sure, it's a trolley problem. Nobody likes a trolley problem. But you are setting a risk of harm to the denizens of other worlds against the certain deaths of everyone in yours. So – sure, have at it.

But if you do that, you have now made yourself responsible for those worlds. You know what these things are, and you know how they operate. The people in other worlds likely do not, and won't know how to defend themselves.

So maybe, now, you have a responsibility to do something about that. Ha. Like make a really good podcast about it.

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mllemaenad · 2 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

Huh. It sounds rather as though Chester has some opinions about barging into other people's space in the workplace.

I must admit, I don't go in for a lot of worrying about whether a piece of information is somehow a red herring and doesn't really mean what I think it means. Mostly because I don't think The Magnus Archives really worked like that.

It had a lot of complex world building that it revealed in pieces, and its central conceit was that its protagonist was a man who had an urgent need to understand the mechanics of the world but, as the villain of the piece was actively denying him access to that information, he had to drag it out of horror stories one weird fact at a time.

I don't mean to say that there was never a misdirect: in season 3 the characters really needed to believe in the threat of the Unknowing, and so for the duration of that story arc it was a threat. It had a reasonably plausible explanation for why the rituals had always failed – that if it wasn't Gertrude Robinson blowing them up it was the servant of some other rival power – and you could just go along with it. But when the story wanted you to think about the rituals, it immediately and clearly started saying that actually, they collapse on their own all the damn time.

By and large, if something seemed weird it probably was. If you heard the same name twice, you'd probably keep on hearing it. The lady infested with bugs you learned about in episode six, and who definitely freaked John out, was in fact going to be a problem. And so on. I don't mean this as a criticism: stories with endless impossible-to-guess twists are often just annoying. Solid world building that makes more and more sense as you go on is a positive.

It's possible that The Magnus Protocol is a different kind of story, and is actively trying to mislead its listeners. But that feels like a problem for a later me, should evidence of that arise.

It does deal quite differently with the way information is distributed across its cast, though. I mean – Jonah Magnus/Elias Bouchard absolutely hoarded information, but otherwise it was fairly well distributed. If another character found out something important, John heard it on the tapes. Martin also listened to the tapes. And honestly, John was reasonably forthcoming if he knew a useful fact the others didn't. I'm not disputing the time everybody forgot to tell Tim about an impending apocalypse for a couple of weeks ... but even that got resolved by Martin realising and telling him about the impending apocalypse.

Here, though ... everyone is following a different thread, and nobody is sharing what they know. That creates a very different atmosphere.

And the story ... I mean, it's mostly about a workplace getting wildly out of control.

It's interesting that Alice seems to like Chester, but dislike Norris. I suspect that there's mostly just a meta joke there, as the episode was penned by Norris's voice actor. But still: it's hard to imagine the sense in which Norris could be a "whiny little toad" when his personality fluctuates with the cases he reads. And Chester's case, here, was definitely someone having a whine. Don't get me wrong: Dianne had a horrible experience. But she is very much here to complain about it.

You could argue, as a starting point, that the whole case reads like a broad summary of how things went in The Magnus Archives:

Got dropped into a managerial role following the long absence and eventual death of my predecessor

Did not receive any reasonable training or oversight during the transition period

Found the place completely empty of staff and had to just deal with that

Completely winged it on actually running the place

Direct line manager was unhelpful and almost gleefully unresponsive to requests for assistance

Several people just ... signed up to work there, with no process whatsoever and nothing that even had a whiff of a related skill set

Then there were monsters everywhere, which was just great

The situation was very much out of control

Was very much in peril of being actually be crushed to both despair and actual death by the sheer number of monsters and other weird crap that had taken over my world

Everything was on fire

Sitting on the floor and screaming does feel like a reasonable response to all of the above

Even Dianne's mild officiousness (she keeps ... listing her bachelor's degree. Why on earth?) is reminiscent of how John could sound when he wanted people to think he knew what he was doing.

That said, it is a relief to encounter a character who had a supernatural experience and reacted by noting that this was some horrible bullshit and leaving.

Of course the primary difference between this and The Magnus Archives is where the threat came from. The archival staff could be a cantankerous bunch, but they were never in themselves the problem.

Dianne's weird volunteers remind me most of the eerie students in Anatomy Class. Which isn't to say that they're the same – just that it has the same kind of feel to it, where the point is that their behaviour is almost recognisably human. And as the working situation spirals out of control in the story, you feel it also deteriorate in the OIAR.

It's all about intruders. Celia is the least obvious intruder – the new hire, who has a much reason to be here as anybody else. But there's the sense that she may have come here from very far away indeed, and like the volunteers in the story, she brings odd things with her:

Celia Is there any way to look up specific files? Alice Like what? Celia Oh I don’t know. Every case about being buried alive or meat or… whatever. – The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

Celia seems to be very much referencing the entity categorisations from The Magnus Archives. So you have to wonder – is that relevant here? She might operate as an audience insert here, with preconceptions about how the world works that ultimately won't help her.

I don't think it is necessary to throw out everything you know from The Magnus Archives to enjoy this story. It's hardly unusual for a sequel to be accessible to a newcomer but provide a richer experience to anyone familiar with the original. Gwen Bouchard likely has some interesting connection to Elias Bouchard that will come up eventually. If you listened to The Magnus Archives you know the name and can anticipate and be curious about what that means. If you didn't – well, they'll tell you when they get there.

But this is more about the nature of reality. Robert Smirke's fourteen was one man's attempt to categorise, explain and control a nebulous collection of supernatural experiences and beings. It continued to be relevant in The Magnus Archives because many of Smirke's associates were still around. They set up cults and organisations around their own personal obsessions, and taught younger people to think as they did. The broken world was largely the fault of an assortment of privileged men from the heyday of the British Empire literally defining the rules of existence.

Here – well, the existence of The Magnus Institute implies the existence of a Somebody Magnus, if not necessarily a Jonah. But the fact that it's located in Manchester makes it quite clear that the early events from The Magnus Archives could not have occurred in the same way. So are there different people involved? Different obsessions? Different rules?

None of the items were fit for sale. I specifically recall two large, soiled Crinoline dresses, a Chaise Longue with cushions filled with some sort of coarse sand, a taxidermied vulture, a rusty antique printing press and a collection of old medical equipment that had seemingly been recently used. There were many, many additional items but I was unable to take a full inventory as the shop floor was overfull. – The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

There's a lot going on, and it's all creepy and wrong. But how do you sort and make sense of it all?

And then there's Sam, who finally pushes his way into Colin's private space. There's the question there about relevance again. Sam has come to ask about a weird email (and as an aside, I am going to amuse myself imagining that Alice has a filter on her inbox to send anything from that address to spam, and every one of the hundreds of affected emails says "stop calling me Chester"). Colin does not care about the weird email, although he cares about being recorded enough to assault Sam and break his phone.

Sam brought something weird and unwanted – the phone with is internal microphone, and the audience can be certain Colin is right: it's listening.

While I have no doubt there are weirder things in the world than internal emails from people who don't work at the OIAR, it does seem like a strange thing to dismiss out of hand. Sam has received mysterious forms from a supposedly "automated" process, and a peculiar email from a "John" who does not exist. Alice has received a security notification regarding Sam's search activities. Gwen has received a recording of Lena attempting a murder, and apparently information from a "source" indicating that Lena hid that information from her superiors.

Someone or something is listening, and someone or something is communicating. It could even be multiple someones – but nobody at the OIAR is comparing notes to find that out. If Colin knew about the other instances, would he care more about the email?

There even seems to be disinformation being spread, as Alice explicitly told Celia the search does not work:

Alice Well, there’s a search bar, but it doesn’t actually do anything. You’d have to dig through them all manually. – The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

But we already know that it does from Sam's research into The Magnus Institute:

Alice Apparently you tried searching for files with the terms… (checking printout) "Magnus” and “Protocol"? Sam That’s what this is about? I mean, yeah, okay, I got a case referencing the Magnus Institute and then I looked it up and found a few files on the system that mentioned using “The Protocol”. Why would that be restricted? – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

I don't know why she did that, aside from her general aversion to digging into the cases she assesses, but it does make it harder to keep everybody on the same page.

And then Gwen, who both unceremoniously bursts into Lena's office, and apparently blackmails her way "in" to the true business of the OIAR. She too brings something unwanted: evidence of Lena's attack on Klaus-the-presumably-former-IT-guy-whose-fault-it-is-the-damn-code-is-in-German.

But what does "in" mean, and what does an "external liaison" do? The most reasonable assumption seems to be dealing with these Starkwall people, who were also likely the people who charged in to the Hilltop Centre and dealt with a messy situation by a) shooting everybody and b) setting things on fire. I see now why the first word Sam associated with those people was "massacre".

It's interesting to consider what Gwen might be trying to get out of this. Lena keeps referring to her as ambitious, but a managerial role on the night shift at a creepy data warehouse isn't exactly reaching for the stars. Obviously there is more than that going on here – but how and what does Gwen know about it? And if Starkwall deals with everything the way they dealt with the situation at Hilltop Centre, what could standing next to that mess gain a person?

Finally there is Hilltop Centre itself. It's interesting that in both universes the place seems to have latched on to charity as a cover: Hill Top Road's most notable incarnation was as a halfway house, and Hilltop Centre is a charity shop. The former gave the owners access to discarded people; the latter to discarded objects. It also suggests, though does not prove, that this is not the same reality from which Anya Villette hailed. Of course, the house could have been repurposed since her cleaning job in 2009, but it does seem a stretch since at that point in time it had been newly constructed as a private residence. It is also interesting that it was once again destroyed by fire.

So what was this "good cause" the volunteers were so diligently serving? And – if it was Starkwall and the OIAR that dealt with the situation there – who called it in? Dianne's report is clearly after the events, so this is not the case that summoned them.

I'd be interested to hear what did, and what they thought was going on.

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mllemaenad · 2 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Introductions

It may just be a side effect of the new story format, but it strikes me how deliberately ... attention seeking, let's say, some of these supernatural events seem to be.

I don't mean all of them. I noted previously that Norris's stories, so far, have involved accessing quite private information – and without access to those accounts you wouldn't necessarily spot what was going on.

But Chester's first story in First Shift had something deliberately post a provocative, and apparently gory, image that had to be removed by the forum moderators:

Chester Re: Magnus Institute Ruins By RedCanary on Saturday April 30 2022 2:01am [Image removed by moderator] Canaries should stay above ground. Re: Magnus Institute Ruins By FlowersUnderground on Saturday April 30 2022 2:27am Gross! Can we get some mod action over here? Re: Magnus Institute Ruins By BadGrav31 on Saturday April 30 2022 3:11am What the hell is that? Are those eyes? Are you all right? Re: Magnus Institute Ruins By ArcherK on Saturday April 30 2022 7:33am RedCanary, you have been warned, our terms forbid posting explicit images including gore. I’m sorry it’s come to this, but you brought it on yourself. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

And the deleted posts in Personal Screening indicate that something took the time and trouble to remove any content that wasn't related to the horror story. It's not just that "Freddy" knows how to skip irrelevant details. Someone or something did away with the clutter.

And it is more noticeable still in the cases that are direct recordings, rather than read by the text-to-speech programs. I don't so much mean Daria from Making Adjustments, whose privacy is presumably being violated here, but I do mean the mysterious tattoo artist, Ink5oul, who made their mark while livestreaming, and apparently got increased fame and fortune out of it:

Daria Before I could reply they hit a button on their set-up and suddenly we were live streaming with lights in my eyes and their arm tight around my shoulders. I don’t remember much of what they said to their viewers, but they kept telling everyone how lucky I was whilst they dragged me into the chair. – The Magnus Protocol: Making Adjustments

And here we have Needles. And the thing about Needles is that he deliberately calls the police to demand that they be scared of him. And the thread of humour running through the story is that everybody (barring, presumably, the poor bastard who got "cuddled") needs a bit of convincing that needles are, in fact, scary. Needles can feed on the fear of others, sure – but he's got to work for it.

Needles Call it dessert. But you’re not afraid are you? Unsettled, off-balance but nothing more. Why is that? Police Operator I guess I’m just not scared of needles. Needles (irritated) Not sca- This isn’t some poxy blood test, some little pinprick, this is hundreds, thousands of razor sharp points pushing into your flesh. We’re talking about the embrace of an iron maiden, an excruciating agony formed from a thousand tiny hurts. – The Magnus Protocol: Introductions

It's interesting how deeply entitled he feels to the operator's terror ... but I have to imagine he's aiming high. If there's any group of people, in any reality, who are used to hearing horrifying things on the phone and just dealing with them, it has to be emergency service operators. Needles wants to be feared by the fearless. Surely he doesn't need to? He could presumably wander down an alley and find another isolated person to stab. But he chooses to make himself known.

I don't mean to say that no one in The Magnus Archives ever posted weird shit on the internet. Obviously they did. But there is a difference between a program that disappears after being downloaded once, or a forum that ostensibly never received any visitors, and these fairly direct demands to be noticed.

There are occasional more public instances of supernatural occurrences in The Magnus Archives, but, well in the case of a ritual the participants believed they were about to remake the world in the image of their god – so discretion was pretty much off the table. And in those cases, they were nevertheless isolating a bunch of people. Just ... significantly more than the norm.

In most cases, the incidents were private or isolated. The entities needed a victim to be isolated in order to get hold of them. Finding other people – or sometimes even merely thinking of other people – could save someone from their grasp. Yes, there were cases where the isolation could be emotional rather than physical, but the whole process relied quite heavily on most people not seeing or acknowledging the monsters.

It was the core struggle of the characters working in the archives: even if you believed the stories, even if you accepted that if it would only record on the tape recorder it was definitely real, there was still very little you could do about it. You can't easily follow up on something that happened behind a closed door with no witnesses or physical evidence. There were few opportunities to actually deal with the things that lurked in the shadows.

But here it does feel like something wants to be seen.

And that leads to the other side of the story: the people doing the listening. We're reminded again that these people are all working a night shift, and Sam in particular is suffering for it.

It's not clear why this is a night shift. I'm aware there are multiple possible reasons this could be so, but my assumption so far has been that they are the remnants of an additional emergency service. After all, one term for a person who arrives to deal with a crisis is a "first responder" – and Sam is apparently in the middle of applying to the supposedly defunct Response Department.

The fact that they seem to have mislaid a whole department certainly suggests the OIAR has seen better days, and it's highlighted that the building feels like it should have more people:

If, for whatever reason, you found yourself working with a reduced budget, you might have to choose which shifts remained active. And well, things do traditionally go bump in the night ...

There's also a really clear parallel drawn between the determinedly phlegmatic police operator and Alice, the almost 10 year (!) veteran, who has heard it all before:

Alice Well who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and they’ll kill again. What was it? Sam Like … A guy made of needles I think. Alice Needles? Is that scary? I’ve been working here so long I can’t tell anymore. Gwen Maybe if you’re scared of needles? Sam To be fair, he did sound kind of … sensitive about that. Alice Huh. – The Magnus Protocol: Introductions

Even Gwen takes some time out of her work to be moderately dubious about the potential scariness of needles. The only significant difference between these people and the operators on the call is that, at the moment, they don't really do anything with what they hear. Which goes back to that Response Department again.

None of that means the OIAR isn't necessarily up to something nefarious, of course. The Magnus Institute also had a moderately respectable public face, at least in the universe in which The Magnus Archives was set.

The OIAR has some association with a mercenary company called "Starkwall", after all. And that both suggests that, at least at one point, they had the ability to respond to what they heard with some force – and that their activities were incredibly dodgy.

Then, of course, there's Celia. Needles introduces himself three times in the story: speaking to three operators, and a fourth, beyond that, to Sam, who hears his story. It seems reasonable to suppose that he will recur at some point in the future. And Celia introduces herself right after that. So presumably she's staying too, at least for a while.

Celia, of course, was a character from The Magnus Archives. And, so Google tells me, both characters share a voice actress. I am going to assume that's plot relevant, because it's an odd and distracting choice if not.

The interesting thing about Celia, of course, is that that is not her name. Or, no, to be clear, Celia is the name she chose for herself after forgetting her original one.

Martin [Puzzled] Celia? Celia Probably. The, um… place I was trapped in, they took my name. I never got it back. But I like Celia, so… yeah! Celia it is. – The Magnus Archives: Scavengers

Her name prior to that was Lynne Hammond. Reasonably, you might expect an alternate version of the character to go by Lynne. You can come up with reasons for her to have still chosen to change her name, sure, but that seems unnecessarily convoluted.

But if it is the Celia from The Magnus Archives, it raises interesting questions about how she got here. She's not a voice on a machine – she's apparently a whole, functioning person.

There's no way to know where she was, at the end, as she was carried off by monsters. Proximity seems an unlikely factor. You'd have to assume that, of all outsiders, Rosie was closest to the fire, because she had only a limited amount of time to make a run for it – and she's confirmed alive, well and cat-sitting The Admiral.

Celia might have come through, accidentally or intentionally, on her own, of course, by poking around Hill Top Road, because apparently that's a thing – although if this is indeed a multiverse, you'd still have to ask how she ended up in this one. Or is she here because she was taken by the "servants of the Eye"? And if so, might the other "cultists", both the ones we know and the lost ones from Georgie and Melanie's previous rescue attempt, be here too?

Amusingly, Celia's surname seems to be Ripley. And that might mean nothing at all. Several characters in The Magnus Archives were named after famous horror writers, so if you recognised somebody's surname it mostly meant they were probably going to be a major character. In a new universe, people might tend to be named after famous horror characters.

So it's really only interesting if you assume that Celia, needing a surname to go with her new first name, chose it for herself.

Ripley is the one who knows about the monsters. She's a survivor of multiple interactions with hostile alien life – and okay, there was the time she didn't survive, but even then she did. She's the sensible one, to whom nobody listens when they should. She's an employee of a company that repeatedly and explicitly prioritises its ability to profit from a terrifying space monster over the lives of its workers. She's constantly out of place in both space and time, with no way to get back to her old life. And, interestingly, she has a complicated relationship with AI – dealing first with Ash, the android company plant who turned on his coworkers in pursuit of the alien-as profit, and later Bishop, her eventual ally in protecting the child Newt from the monsters.

You can see how, under the circumstances, Ripley might be a good role model for Celia. She doesn't scare so easily either.

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mllemaenad · 3 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Personal Screening

The interesting thing here is how much this is about a person proceeding with a very unwise course of action despite quite clear warnings that he should stop.

To be clear, I'm not of the "stay ignorant of the monsters or they will get you" school of thought. The Magnus Archive had 200 episodes. Most of those were about someone who did not work at The Magnus Institute having a decidedly unpleasant supernatural experience. Most of those people had no particular reason to believe the monsters even existed before that experience occurred. Ignorance won't save you, and there were a handful of cases where someone competent (say, Adelard Dekker) actually knew something that could and did save people.

Understanding the kind of world, the kind of story, you're in, and how its rules work, is an important aspect of surviving a horror story. But poking a bear just to see what happens is generally not a wise course of action.

And I'm usually sympathetic to the statement givers, even when they do things that are obviously the wrong thing to do in a horror story. The average person has no reason to expect that poking around in some back streets in search of a lost companion is going to lead them to a faceless, screaming crowd, or that getting on a cable car could led to travelling into an endless sky. People don’t plan their days around things like that, and you can’t expect them to know ahead of time what sort of story they’ve wandered into. But this guy ... Tom. Tom, what is wrong with you? That is not how competitions work.

The case quite obviously interrupts Sam filling in his mysterious “Response department” forms, which sound an awful lot like poking a bear just to see what will happen.

Sam And I’m going to fill it in anyway. See what happens. Alice You’re wasting your time. Sam It’s my time to waste. – The Magnus Protocol: Personal Screening

And while it may be no more than coincidence, it’s impossible not to note that the title of the blog post that draws Tom back in calls back to the language Sam used to describe The Magnus Institute:

Sam What? Oh no, I’m fine. It just threw me. Have you ever heard of the Magnus Institute? Gwen Like from the case? No. Why? Sam Nothing. Just a bit of a blast from the past, that’s all. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

Chester/Tom BLOG POST: GENERAL: A BLAST FROM THE PAST – The Magnus Protocol: Personal Screening

If not a coincidence, that could be a fairly pointed warning.

Tom's story is very much about a man prodding at an old wound – and in doing so ignoring every single warning that he is heading into danger. It is as much about what is not said as what is. The blog itself is full of gaps: there are the deleted blog posts about various pieces of horror media, which mean that Tom is stripped down purely to the narrative that destroyed him.

Arguably, given the last post, he is a lure for the next person – but I don't believe this actually fits with what is there. You can see, yes that:

Chester/Tom Voyeur needs to be seen to be believed. The scariest movie I have ever seen. – The Magnus Protocol: Personal Screening

But if you read the entire contents of the blog, you also get a very clear rundown of why you absolutely should not see it. You're not going to get bored or distracted by Tom's 4,000 word review of Puppet Master 4 and never see the pertinent information. It's all clearly laid out for you. Tom didn't heed the warnings. Will you? And, by extension, will Sam?

Personal Screening refers, of course, to the viewing that Tom "won", but also to a screening process. There are numerous red flags in the Voyeur story to which Tom is utterly oblivious. Many people would simply not have followed that trail. But the process has effectively "screened" for someone who will go on to the very end.

And there Sam sits, having first ticked the box he wasn't supposed to tick, and now filling out the forms he's been warned not to fill in. How many more steps will there be before he reaches the end of his screening process?

And then, of course, there's the long silence between the first post and the second. It is not outright stated, but pretty heavily implied that Tom's father's "accident" occurred shortly after the first post was made. This is what Tom "went through" and what made him stop posting.

Everything around the Voyeur setup is framed around taking Tom back before that time: the "like minded people" who discuss horror the way his father did; the cinema he frequented with his father; the popcorn he devoured as a child.

He's a horror fan, but that doesn't help him. In point of fact, it probably puts him in more peril, because he notes that horror no longer scares him:

Chester/Tom I know that I only found out about this film like a week ago, but I feel like I’ve been waiting to see something that would truly scare me for… years now. I feel like I’ve just been kind of… numb to the whole genre. Obviously, I still really enjoy everything horror related, but it takes a lot to get any sort of reaction out of me these days… I even started seeking out the borderline “should be illegal” stuff… Faces of Death, the August Underground series… even those barely get a shudder out of me… I’m hoping this might finally scratch that itch. – The Magnus Protocol: Personal Screening

He has presumably watched hundreds of characters come to terms with the fact that they are in a horror story and resolve themselves to deal with it. But virtually nothing makes an impression on him: not the disappearing comments; the odd website; the wildly incoherent contest submission; the mysterious letter; the bizarre disparity between the exterior and interior of the theatre; the lone, deeply suspicious, employee; the whole setup being for a single "fan" with no obvious promotional benefit for anybody involved – nothing. Only the realisation that, not only does the cinema have footage from his life, but that there is something wrong with it, provokes any reaction. Even then, that reaction is more consternation than terror.

If you do poke a bear, you should know exactly why you're doing it and be prepared for the response. Tom obviously dances around the emotional issue – and never fully grasps the rules of the world he inhabits.

And, well, this is a Chester story. Is Chester John? Could not say. If The Magnus Protocol intends to discuss the identity of the voices, it has not chosen to do so yet.

The story is certainly relevant to his interests, though.

Horror, if it's any good, is usually about something, rather than just gore for gore's sake. It's unsurprising that Tom did not like The Babadook: the story frames itself around the worrying behaviour of a child whose father was killed in a car accident. Tom is seeking horror for nostalgia: that story would be asking him to confront things he does not want to think about. But the film also contains a malevolent children's book, whose titular character comes to terrorise the family – which has definite shades of A Guest for Mr. Spider.

It's not about the reference, though: it's about the attitude to the threat.

Now, I don't believe "ignored all reasonable warnings and charged headlong toward ruin" is a reasonable summary of John's story. But I do think that's how he tended to frame it:

Archivist Healthy? I am an Avatar of voyeuristic terror, whose unquestioned craving for knowledge has condemned the entire world to an eternity of torment; healthy i-isn’t – i,it’s not – – The Magnus Archives: Dwelling

The thing is, John was always keenly aware of the danger.

Archivist Of course, I believe. Of course I do. Have you ever taken a look at the stuff we have in Artefact Storage? That’s enough to convince anyone. But, but even before that… Why do you think I started working here. It’s not exactly glamorous. I have… I’ve always believed in the supernatural. Within reason. I mean. I still think most of the statements down here aren’t real. Of the hundreds I’ve recorded, we’ve had maybe… thirty, forty that are… that go on tape. Now, those, I believe, at least for the most part. Martin Then why do you – Archivist Because I’m scared, Martin! Because when I record these statements it feels… it feels like I’m being watched. I… I lose myself a bit. And then when I come back, it’s like… like if I admit there may be any truth to it, whatever’s watching will… know somehow. The scepticism, feigning ignorance. It just felt safer. – The Magnus Archives: Infestation

Access to the right information might well have saved him a lot of misery. But what he got was access to a lot of the wrong information, because people significantly more powerful than he was had access to enough personal details about him to know exactly what buttons they had to push to get him to behave a certain way. And Voyeur – well, it's right there in the title. Whatever is pursuing Tom is also keenly aware, not just of footage from his personal life, but of all the little details of his personal experience that would draw him in. And, implicitly, it enjoyed exploiting that.

The whole of The Magnus Archives, like this blog, could be taken as a warning. And by the end, a lot of his motivation was geared toward preventing another person from walking his path:

Archivist [With sadness] You didn’t speak the words! You didn’t feel them move through you, vomiting out of you like… … I did this. It’s my fault. And I don’t want… I can’t let anyone else feel that. That helpless, enormous guilt. Ever. – The Magnus Archives: Seeing It Through

I don't especially think Sam will walk John's path, or not exactly. Mostly because I don't think there's much point in telling the same story twice. But I do think it would be John's primary concern. And Sam – Sam has experience of the supernatural. And Sam wants something badly enough to pursue it with what at least looks like a devil-may-care attitude. It may be that he is, in fact, better prepared to deal with what he finds than it appears. But there's a warning here: why are you poking a bear? And will getting what you want be worth the price?

As for Chester's source material – well, that's interesting too. So far:

Norris's stories have both accessed very private information: an email chain in one instance, a diary in the other.

Chester's have both drawn on reasonably public information: a forum thread and a blog.

Augustus has only had one story, so it's unreasonable to draw extended conclusions, but it does differ from both of the above: it was taken from a letter that would have been private when written, but is likely regarded as a simple historical artefact now.

But, well, as they say: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence ...

In terms of the rest of the framing story, it makes me think about the difference of the audience position between this and The Magnus Archives. Just as the statements were largely willingly given in The Magnus Archives, the audience was generally allowed to listen in.

Tape recorders, after all, record. And they play back. That's what they do. There's no ambiguity about what person is doing if they are using a tape recorder. And mostly, the cast used them deliberately, to record statements or thoughts or (apparently) poetry.

After a while, John tended to treat the tape recorder as a sympathetic ear in a hostile environment, and would just flop down and tell you how unbearably weird his week had been. Martin tended to use the tapes to leave messages for John, but also sometimes spoke to them directly. There were characters, like Tim and Melanie, who became actively hostile to the tapes, and because of that you would only hear them in specific circumstances. That might colour your perception of them, but it was a choice they were allowed to make.

I'm not arguing there were no violations of privacy in The Magnus Archives – there very much were. But in terms of the tapes this tended to come down to a minute or so of overheard conversation, some subsequent shouting once the tape recorder was discovered, and then the tape recorder being very firmly turned off.

As the audience, you might eavesdrop a little, but most of the time you were included as an additional, if silent, character in the conversation. And if you were overhearing something the characters did not want you to, they could usually cut you out.

Here, just as the characters in the stories don't know they're sharing their stories, the main cast don't know they're being recorded. Sam has been watching Colin, and reports this to Lena behind his back. But we are watching Sam in turn. Gwen is investigating a recording of Lena and a former IT Manager, and we watch her do that.

Only Colin seems aware they're being observed, and he is becoming obsessive about avoiding it.

And it's a thing, obviously, in the modern world. Your phone has a microphone, and so may your TV and various other devices. And people mostly do just ignore it, because they have little other practical choice.

It's even highlighted in this story itself:

Chester/Tom BLOG POST: GENERAL: NO WAY I WON THE CONTEST! I can’t believe it! The invitation was waiting when I got home today, in a small black envelope. I don’t even remember giving them my address. The website must have logged my IP and looked it up or something… I’m really not sure how any of that works. – The Magnus Protocol: Personal Screening

I don't actually believe that's what happened here – but if it did, it would be a different kind of horrifying thing, to which Tom is cheerfully indifferent. The idea that he might be so completely surveilled, and that unknown people will act on that surveillance at will, simply does not phase him.

But if The Magnus Archives cast the audience as a known listener, inviting you in to hear its characters' woes – where are our sympathies pointed here, where we are very much on the outside looking in?

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mllemaenad · 3 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

Okay, well, it sounds very much as though "Freddy" is tattling on Sam. Might not be, of course: once you've assigned a personality to something you head straight down the path of attributing meaning and motive to all its actions. And in the case of Freddy, there might be no intelligence behind it, one intelligence with many voices behind it, or many intelligences with potentially competing motives behind it. Depending on which of those it is, you get a different picture of why it does what it does.

It alerts Alice that Sam has been poking around "The Magnus Protocol". It shouldn't have alerted Alice; it sounds as though Colin was the intended recipient, although it would make sense for it to go to Lena as well. It suggests that it did not want official action taken against him for looking – whatever that might mean – but that it did want someone to know what he was doing.

It's fairly easy to predict that Alice, upon receiving such an alert, will tell Sam to knock it off but not actually take any action against him. The recording Gwen hears at the end of the episode suggests (although does not confirm) that things can in fact go very, very wrong in this job – so this may constitute a protective gesture. On the other hand, if the greatest risk were to just be getting fired, well then that might be for the best.

It's a weird alert, though.

Alice I just received a security notification. Sam About me? Alice Someone was trying to access restricted files. And my money is on you. – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

What do you mean, "someone" is trying to access restricted files? No user ID? Or username? Or even a device ID? What the hell sort of security alert is that? If you were a manager, and you received that, you'd have to go on a witch hunt. Depending on how you look at it, it's either a terrible alert tailored to produce a stressful working experience ... or a whisper that might be meaningful to Alice, and no one else.

The arrival of the third voice, "Augustus" is interesting because he is a complete unknown. To be clear, I'm aware that the prevailing theory is that this is Jonah Magnus. I'm not especially here to dispute that; not at the moment. The man's first name starts with a "J", which fits nicely with ".jmj error" and, well, the name Magnus is right there in the title, which suggests it's at least to some degree relevant. It's as good a theory as any, and while you can absolutely throw out other possible names there's not enough detail yet to prove anything.

But what is interesting is the implication if that is Jonah Magnus. If the voices originated in this world then they might be anybody, of course. No way to tell. But if they came from another world, it suggests that something more than just voices came through. Because, to my knowledge, that voice was never recorded.

It makes sense that you'd hear John's voice leaking between worlds – he's on virtually all the tapes. It makes reasonable sense that you'd hear Martin's: he was on quite a lot. You might also expect "Elias Bouchard", or Basira or Tim or even Gertrude – because if it's just voices then whether they're alive or dead or even confirmed still hanging about in another dimension shouldn't matter. But if it is Magnus, then something came through that wasn't recorded: the voice of an earlier body, or even his original one. Some internal sense of "this is how I sound" that differs from anything recorded on the tapes.

And if it isn't him? Well, all of the above still applies, with the added question of "Who is it, then?"

If it is him – and I will speak as such for now because there's not yet enough thread to follow if it isn't – then his story choice is interesting.

Alice Dear grandpa Augustus does always tell such lovely stories. – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

Alice implies that Augustus's stories are somehow worse than Norris's and Chester's – she didn't remark on any of theirs in quite the same way, except to call Norris's first one "tame". I don't know what metric she's using: they all seem pretty ghoulish. But this story does address a different perspective.

It's a tale of resentment and entitlement. Of someone who was special, but not quite special enough for his own liking – and who fed his soul to something monstrous to increase his own standing. His father seems to have a seat in the House of Lords, and all the wealth and standing that would accompany that position. The letter writer, however, is a bastard: an acknowledged bastard, apparently, whose father has provided for him, but nevertheless a bastard set apart from the legitimate children of the household.

He's also very concerned that people aren't appreciating his talents.

Augustus/Violinist My violin tutor, one Oliver Bardwell by name, nursed a conviction that this honor was purely the fruit of his own skills as an instructor, rather than a product of my talent and endeavor. ... My course was set for Mannheim, a destination where I felt a youthful certainty that my brilliance would at last be acknowledged. – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

This fits very well with Jonah Magnus, who very much played second fiddle, so to speak, in the story that had his name on it. On a meta level: he was the villain of the piece, the one who pretty well had to fall and fail in order for the narrative to reach its conclusion. But even in-universe it's highlighted that he's just ... not that special:

Archivist Right. When I said that I would ‘replace’ Jonah in there, that’s not– That place, the centre of The Eye, i-it’s… It wasn’t made for him. That’s why he’s like that, it’s too much, it’s overwhelmed him, his whole being, just destroyed. Martin Oh yeah? But let me guess, it was made for you? Archivist Yes. – The Magnus Archives: Parting

It's got to be galling: Magnus built an institute and served his god for literal centuries, and eventually remade the world under its power. But does the Eye want him? No, no it does not. It wants the grumpy archivist who does not want to be here at all, and who is in fact actively plotting to kill it. Jonah Magnus is the Eye's acknowledged, but displaced, bastard son.

It's also implied that a sense of ... hm ... aristocratic entitlement, let's say, played a part in the selection of his hosts:

Archivist Elias’ stomach tightened at the memory, the fierce judgement in his father’s eyes. Even laid out in a casket, it was as if he had looked at Elias with disdain. What should he say? That he had no idea why he wanted this job? That he was all alone in the world, no friends, no family, nothing but the deep certainty that he deserved better. That he was destined to be important. That it was in his blood. – The Magnus Archives: A Stern Look

And it is hard not to notice, at this point, that Augustus picked Gwen to hear this tale.

The violinist is "gifted" an instrument by a dubious merchant type reminiscent of Mikaele Salesa (the man was right – the peddler of magical artefacts is indeed a folktale staple), and it did make him a bit more special ... but never, ever quite special enough:

Augustus/Violinist And yet, while admiration rained down upon me, never was I elevated beyond the confines of my origins. The rarefied world of my noble patrons was closed to me. Modest riches adorned me, some small fame clung to my name, but never was I truly allowed to escape the position of my birth. – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

It is also very much the story of a man who learned how to hurt other people for his own gain:

Augustus/Violinist It was not simple philanthropy that led to my taking on positions of tutelage in those bustling cities where I plied my trade, providing a musical education to the poor and the easily forgotten, asking nothing in return. Nothing except the occasional student who would not be missed. – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

That's almost exactly how Magnus operated: employing people who would not be missed and then using them up to serve his own ends. Like Magnus, the violinist feeds people to his malevolent god.

And, not least, there are the sinister implications of the letter itself. The recipient is a "nephew", meaning he is almost certainly the child of one of the violinist's legitimate half-siblings: people he dismisses as "useless". He was not close with the nephew, so his inheritance may be something of a surprise.

Which leads to this:

Augustus/Violinist There has been a great deal of rain here this last fortnight, which has been strangely pleasing to my maudlin mood, and has brought with it some nostalgia for that dreary summer you took residence with me. I flatter myself to think that I might have imprinted upon you some part of myself in that time together, and perhaps in this way I seek to keep hold of my prized violin still. – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

Right. So, yeah, the kid is definitely screwed. For all we know, the violinist lives still.

If Norris's stories are of loss and regret, and Chester's could be called a warning, Augustus's is both an enticement and a trap.

Go on. Play the cursed violin. Feed it blood. What could possibly go wrong?

But you have to wonder, then: why would Magnus tell a story that so neatly reflects what an awful person he was?

We also establish, outside the main story, that Gwen is definitely the kind of person to open weird attachments in her work email. When the OIAR gets hit with a ransomware attack, we'll all know who to blame.

It's hard to state anything definitive about what she heard. I mean – yes, it sounds bad, but, well, Gertrude Robinson once dismembered a man and threw him down a cursed pit. I'm not going to sit here and try to claim Gertrude was nice, but she was very much on the side of the world not ending. What any of this means all hinges on who the guy Lena was talking to was.

And, of course, this one is littered with world-building notes to put aside for later: "Starkwall", "The San Pedro Square Massacre", "The Protocol". Little you can do with any of them immediately.

But ... just for a thought exercise, say it is Jonah Magnus talking.

A protocol can be a lot of things. It may be rules to be followed in a formal occasion. It may be instructions in the event of an emergency. And there are also network protocols, which are about the transfer of information. I suspect in this case it has a double meaning, as Archives did. So it is something practical ... and also something else.

The word is then uttered for the first time in the episode where Magnus first speaks. It is immediately followed by a tale in which a man transfers an instrument – and I think more importantly the music that instrument produced – to someone new, and in doing so hopes to transfer some or all of himself.

The thing is. I'm not going to call Magnus's master plan "bloody stupid" but ... well, let's just say it had some obvious holes. I mean, really. He spent literal years specifically torturing this one guy, then used him very much against his will to end the world, and then just ... let him wander around, being annoyed about that. Obviously John had some moral qualms about the whole apocalypse situation, but even had he not – pretty well anybody would probably put "ruin Jonah's day" quite near the top of their to do list, under the circumstances.

It would hardly take a genius to foresee some retaliation. And self preservation is Magnus's whole deal. It's the reason he gives for destroying the world:

Archivist/Jonah Magnus I began to worry that if one of them successfully attempted their ritual, then I would be as much a victim as any, trapped in the nightmare landscape of a twisted world. At first, I attempted prevention, but the cause seemed hopeless. The only way to ensure I did not suffer the tribulations of what I believed to be an inevitable transformation was to bring it about myself. So what began as an experiment soon became a race. Beyond that, I was getting older, and mortality began to weigh more heavily on my mind. How much in this world is done because we fear death, the last and greatest terror? – The Magnus Archives: The Eye Opens

The apocalypse is just him getting everyone else before they could get him. And I have wondered, a bit, about Magnus's attitude in Last Words:

Archivist It’s over. Jonah/Elias Is it? [sigh] Yes. Yes, I suppose it must be. [TIRED EXHALATION] Where’s Martin? I rather thought he’d be the one to do the deed. … [METALLIC CLINK] Ah, I see. Going it alone, are we? Probably for the best. Empathy only holds you back in the end. Archivist You’ve failed. Jonah/Elias Have I? Archivist Immortality. It’s impossible. Even without me, nothing escapes entropy. Not forever. Not even fear. Jonah/Elias Yes… Pity. I suppose I always knew that, deep down. But it was wonderful while it lasted. I’ve seen more than I could have lived in a thousand lifetimes, and every moment was so – – The Magnus Archives: Last Words

That's all very odd, really. He thought Martin would kill him? In fact, he once bet quite heavily that Martin would not kill him. Of course, he hadn't ruined the whole world at that point, which is a thing that might well adjust a man's attitude to murder. So he thought Martin would come here, and kill him?

He was not especially surprised to see John standing over him with a knife. He seemed mostly bemused at the idea that he had failed, although he did agree that this thing, in which he bathed in the misery of others, was indeed over. There was some begging and screaming, of course, but he put up very little resistance – even though this was a straightforward physical assault. None of John's overwhelming psychic powers here, just a man who never showed much inclination toward violence taking his very first stab, so to speak, at knifing someone to death.

It seems peculiar, that a man who would do literally anything to stay alive – who betrayed his friends, who stole the lives of others, who doomed the whole world – would not have a plan in place to escape the very obvious enemy who was almost certainly going to come after him.

Unless, of course, he did have a plan. And we're listening to it.

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mllemaenad · 3 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

Well, Colin is the most interesting character. It might just be because I've done IT. Never mind the supernatural. That error does not mean anything. You're seeing that error because it's the last thing that failed, but it only failed because nine other things failed before it. The first thing that failed is the actual problem, but you don't know what that is because you currently can't get to the top of the log file because of all the other things that crashed. So what the hell is wrong with you, you stupid machine?

It's all very relatable.

That said, a ".jmj error" does seem likely to be the text-to-speech programs crashing, so it probably is a supernatural error and it probably does mean something.

For the moment, it still seems most reasonable to speak as though "Norris" is Martin. It may not be, of course. It could be a disembodied voice with no personality attached to it at all – but what do you do with that, until the narrative makes something of it? It could be somebody else entirely, but in that case I know nothing about them or their motives so there's nothing useful to say until they reveal themselves.

So for now: Occam's razor. It sounds like Martin and it came into being after the conclusion of The Magnus Archives, so the simplest guess is that it is Martin. If and when useful evidence to the contrary surfaces, I will change my mind.

Also: Norris told a story about a man who killed his love and then lost himself so badly that he turned into a tree like bloody Harold from the Fallout series. It also dealt very much with feelings of being forgotten and unnoticed:

Norris/Samuel Webber I can’t go home. Not for a few days at least. And I’ll have to avoid the usual haunts until they forget about me again. That won’t be difficult. What’s one more stressed doctor. Just a grey man in the crowd, unnoticed until I’m useful. The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

That's a problem from Martin's past, but also a problem he might reasonably said to be having now, if he's explaining the horrors of the world to people and nobody (with the possible exception of Sam) is listening.

If that isn't Martin, it is something doing an uncannily good job of explaining why Martin might not be having a great year.

And, while this is evidence of nothing, for the moment I am much amused by the idea that a ".jmj" error is the cast of The Magnus Archives continuing their longstanding tradition of complaining about statements. One of those creepy messages comes in and Martin just wails "Again? Seriously?" and the whole system blue-screen-of-deaths. It may not be true, but it's funny in my head.

I do note that the new format gives a much greater capacity for bad or ambiguous endings to the tales. There's a thing John says in season four that sticks with me:

Archivist One thing that always strikes me when I read statements like this is… the bias of survivorship. With one or two notable exceptions, the only statements the Institute receives are those where the witness has successfully escaped whatever terrible place or being has marked them for a victim. I wonder how many don’t make it out. How many of those shapes in the water were once just like Mr. Shakya. – The Magnus Archives: Submerged

And he's right: there are a few instances of letters-to-be-read-in-the-event-of-my-death, and a few cases where a person who is clearly still being pursued by something stops in to tell their story before being run down, but most of the stories end in an escape. They aren't exactly happy, but they do tend toward the hopeful: by luck, tenacity or skill you may survive. Even the cavalcade of horrors in season five has finally has something you could call a happy ending: you can assume most of those people lived, and even went home.

If you compare the first four stories of The Magnus Archives with the first four stories of The Magnus Protocol, you get a very different pattern.

The Magnus Archives:

Nathan Watts of Anglerfish outwitted the titular monster – he spotted that the voice did not come from the figure's mouth, and got away.

Joshua Gillespie of Do Not Open outlasted the coffin, using music ice, and apparently an iron will to resist its siren song.

Across the Street is the odd one out: while Amy Patel seems to have survived the experience unscathed, the story is clearly about Graham Folger, and the monster very definitely got him.

Dominic Swain of Page Turner was rescued by Gerard Keay.

But in The Magnus Protocol, because the stories are harvested, they can just end – and so far, they do:

Harriet Winstead's fate in First Shift is unclear: did she escape, or was she killed or taken? She is last seen in fear for her life and seeking shelter.

Likewise, in the episode's second story, RedCanary's fate is somewhat unclear, although only in the sense that there isn't a definitive ending: there's a clear implication that their explorations had permanent consequences. More than that, while it is uncertain if Harriet got help, it is certain that RedCanary did not. Due to the anonymous nature of the forum, they were warned and banned when their behaviour began to reflect the peculiar things that were happening to them. Nobody went to help.

Daria of Tweaking lived (at least so far), but is afflicted and changed by whatever the tattoo artist did to her, and the most distressing thing is that she seemed largely unaware of that fact. She knew that the tattooing itself was weird and invasive, but did not seem to find her persistent self-mutilation odd, and is merely awaiting further "inspiration" to continue the process.

Samuel Webber of Putting Down Roots turned into a tree, and while it is not completely clear if that means he died, he's definitely gone – his belongings simply found among the roots.

There has not, so far, been a story that matches the general pattern of The Magnus Archives, in which a person who is at least broadly fine describes the weirdest thing that ever happened to them. People here ... they disappear.

Everything feels much worse in this universe.

In terms of the overarching plot, Alice's plot against Colin seems unnecessarily petty, and also weird. I've turned her logic over in my head a few times, and I do not believe it. There might indeed be occasions where a bigger IT department would be better at troubleshooting problems than the one local guy, but those occasions probably do not include a scenario where you're running 30-year-old proprietary German software that is mysteriously haunted by text-to-speech programs that should not be there. Colin freely admits he does not understand the system – but it is highly doubtful that anyone else does either.

She also says this:

Alice All I’m saying is that Colin tinkers with this system all the time and I don’t see any oversight. If you queried upstairs asking about it, all bambi-eyed and innocent, some alarms might go off. They might even come down and do a refresh or reboot or whatever. – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

This contradicts a lot of what was said in First Shift, in which Colin was indicated to be essential personnel who might not be allowed to quit, and that he was being leaned on by a minister to accomplish ... something. Now, granted, Alice may simply mean that a senior IT person isn't monitoring him – but it does seem that the people "upstairs" are aware of Colin's activities, and seem to be in contact with him about them. And her insistence on a "refresh or a reboot", aka "turning it off and back on again" is interesting in light of the earlier conversation:

Colin Do you have any idea what will happen if this thing finally managed to extinct itself? Alice We’d go home early? – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

Calling in IT only makes sense in the context of killing the system: shutting down whatever they are using and migrating to something consistent with what everyone else is using. Then they could be supported the same way everyone else is, and have their software updates managed at an enterprise level. And what would that do? Stop the voices? Unleash indescribable horrors on the world? Couldn't say.

But the core of the episode is a small-scale power struggle over the stark difference between Colin and Alice's attitudes to their work.

Colin seems overworked, highly stressed and oddly dedicated: he learned German to help his crappy IT job, for a start. He is suspicious of the system and what it is recording, and disinclined to be "friends" with it, but also seems to regard its failure as potentially catastrophic. He is under some kind of pressure from above that indicates that someone regards his work as critical, but does not seem to have clearly stated what that means to anybody – or if he has, they weren't listening.

Alice is committed to the idea that their work is meaningless, and engages with it as little as possible – she sticks around while Colin is fixing her workstation, but exits to make coffee the moment Norris starts talking again. She's stated previously that she believes they only exist as a forgotten department and is unmoved by the thought of their programs finally biting the dust.

Sam, as the new guy, is caught between them: he's naturally more engaged with the stories than Alice is, and has clearly been looking into the history of The Magnus Institute, but he's also closer with Alice than with Colin and being mentored by her.

The plot goes nowhere, because Sam declines to participate. It's impossible to say who is right and who is wrong, or if both characters are just screwing around because their jobs are awful – but it is interesting that this ideological difference escalated so early.

Something strange is happening. Do we care, or do we not?

Of course, it's also fair to note that the characters themselves may be unreliable. John continued to pretend to disbelieve the statements in The Magnus Archives long after he'd worked out the correlation between the ones that required the tapes and the ones that were true – because he believed that was the prudent thing to do. It may be that Alice is deeply invested in everything that is happening here and simply refusing to say. But you can't know these things until the characters crack so, for now: Alice is committed to not caring, and Colin is committed to finding things out, and this is becoming a problem.

The story ends with a minor spat between Gwen and Alice, which is interesting because it sheds a bit of light on Gwen's past. Her surname is Bouchard, which makes it easy to make assumptions – but it's hard to tell what is still true in an alternate universe. Apparently The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street still got made, but The Magnus Institute is in Manchester so all bets are off.

In this instance, however, there seems to be a pattern: Gwen, like Elias, seems to have come from money.

Alice Let me guess, fancy gowns, champagne, bathing in the blood of the poor – that sort of thing? Gwen You know we make the same, Alice. An old friend just made partner at her law firm. She wants to celebrate. Alice You sound thrilled. Gwen Oh I can’t wait to catch up and tell them I’m still working in the same cesspit I was last time they asked. – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

Elias, however, was something of a feckless stoner whose most notable trait was an utter lack of a defence mechanism for dealing with the supernatural. I would not describe Gwen as feckless at all, and while Elias was picked as a means for an immortal to hold on to life and power, and thus ostensibly rose quickly to the top of The Magnus Institute, Lena seems to be actively stymieing Gwen's career.

But it creates an interesting pattern. The OIAR is implied to be a place with a high turnover rate and little security – and it's a bastard of a job that no one enjoys and seems to be accomplishing little. It's easy to wave your hand at Sam: he's here because of whatever weirdness has led him to research The Magnus Institute.

But. It's him, but not just him. Sam is overqualified for the job. Gwen has connections, which usually lead to better prospects. No idea what Alice has been doing with her life, but ...

Alice Fine. Yes, I’m working that night. I’m working every night. I was born down here and I’ll die down here. Happy? – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

So why are these people still here?

#the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #the magnus archives

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mllemaenad · 3 months

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Right, well, I wanted to write, so I'm going to do that, even if my wrists hurt. Things I will pay for later, but make me feel better now.

Have now listened to episodes 1 and 2 of The Magnus Protocol.

My first impression is that this is much worse than what was going on in The Magnus Archives.

The Magnus Institute was a private institution with no obvious access to other people's information (Magnus's occasional psychic spying notwithstanding). Most information it received seems to have at least been given willingly. There are a handful of instances of John forcing people to talk, yes, but not so many that I am constantly concerned for the privacy of London's citizens. Gertrude is said to have disliked compelling people to talk (Family Business), so while her tally very likely exceeds John's purely due to the length of time she was in the job, it's still probably not very high. It's impossible to account for the behaviour of previous archivists of course but, well, the whole place is set up to entice people in to tell their tales. I would hazard that most of the materiel in the archives was volunteered.

Even in cases where someone was forced – at least they knew about it, because they were there. The lady in Scrutiny who was so deeply disturbed by John's behaviour was also able to make that behaviour stop just by rolling up to The Magnus Institute and reporting it – which is a reasonably straightforward outcome, given the general weirdness of their world.

I don't mean to say that The Magnus Institute didn't do harm – it very obviously did. But even in terms of its final apocalypse, we're looking at a horror that lasted mere months (assuming a passage of time that broadly corresponds to the broadcasting schedule) before a group of disgruntled employees (and Georgie) burned the nightmare tower down, stabbed Magnus and reset reality. There were limitations to The Magnus Institute's reach, and Jonah Magnus's personal ambitions concluded with an utter, embarrassing flop by any reasonable estimation.

Here, though, you're looking at a government department with truly concerning access to people's data. The forum-based statement in First Shift is perhaps not too awful (forum threads can often be read by anyone, even if actually posting requires an account), but the earlier piece regarding the bereaved woman was a private email thread, and the story in Making Adjustments is drawn from a recording of a woman's session with her therapist. Sam calls out the massive invasion of privacy this sort of thing entails, but is shut down on the grounds that it's fine because they "work for the government".

Alice Ok, so looks like it's an email. Sam And I just… read it? Is that even legal? Alice Probably. We do work for the government. Sort of. Sam What about GDPR? Alice Look, Sam, I don't know what to tell you. This is the job. I've been doing it for years and there's never been any problems. Maybe ask Lena? She’d probably know. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

While it is too early to definitively establish the worldbuilding rules here:

In The Magnus Archives, giving a statement was functionally feeding an eldritch power

Gertrude Robinson took statements, but kept the archives themselves in a state of disarray, to impede Magnus's plans (Dwelling)

Much of The Magnus Archives played on the difference between knowing a thing and understanding it

The characters in The Magnus Protocol are not just collecting, but blindly categorising statements – they are organising them by keyword, but not encouraged to analyse what they see or hear – Alice notes that they are paid not to care (Making Adjustments)

At least in The Magnus Archives, making a statement tended to come with consequences: typically horrifying recurring nightmares

So you have to wonder – what consequences will there be for these people, who have had their stories stolen from them?

In terms of workplace horror, this is very much coming at it from the opposite direction. The Magnus Archives was about the horrible job you couldn't quit. Most people find themselves stuck in these for economic reasons rather than supernatural ones, although in fairness both Martin (Children of the Night) and Melanie (Dig) are explicitly called out as very much needing the work, but the characters are nevertheless stuck and constantly call back to the fact that they would absolutely quit – if only they could.

It ran on punishing hours and constant exhaustion, the expectation that you would take on tasks you were in no way qualified or trained for (this started with "archiving" and escalated quickly to "apocalypses"), the boss who expected you to "just know" things you couldn't possibly know at all, and a soul destroying amount of responsibility with little hope of advancement. The same person ran the institute since its founding, literally consuming his employees along the way, and if you wanted, say, to be Head Archivist, you were very much stuck waiting for the current occupant of the role to die.

It is significant that, with the noted exception of Eric Delano, all of Gertrude's assistants died on the job (some of them by her hand), and tallying John's assistants is a bit like listing off the wives of Henry VIII: dead, dead, dead, divorced, survived, status unknown. While the story leans on deaths for drama, it gets a lot of mileage out of using historical data, so characters stick around. It's weird for them to be actually gone.

The Magnus Protocol opens with Teddy quitting the OIAR to take a job in insurance. The very first thing you learn about this place is that people leave, and this idea is reinforced a number of times even in the first two episodes: Gwen is pressured to resign by Lena because she is "difficult", and Lena notes outright that, for most people, this job is strictly short term:

Lena Hmmm. I’ve always known you thought you were slumming it down here, but I never actually considered you might think of this as the first step of a career. Most people simply move on within 12 months or so. Gwen I’m not most people. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

Moreover, Making Adjustments concludes first with a fraught conversation about possible redundancies and then with Alice accusing Sam (however playfully) of looking to "jump ship" when he's seen researching The Magnus Institute.

This is the horrible job you might lose tomorrow. While the threat in The Magnus Archives was that you were probably going to die in this job, here it leans more toward – if you didn't show up tomorrow, who would question it? People leave.

It is a night shift, for no clear reason – they're doing data entry on what definitely looks like non-essential information so why the hell can't they do that in the day? Employees are not encouraged to think about their work, and Gwen is criticised for favouring accuracy over speed. It is grimly impersonal, and what little solidarity there is appears to be hard won; it's noted, for instance, that Colin is really only social with Alice, and Alice seems committed to team camaraderie.

But above that is the sense that the employees are considered too insignificant to participate in what is really happening here. I mean, among other things, Colin seems to be having a wildly different workplace experience to everyone else.

Alice postulates that they are a fossilised department – one that only really exists because it's been forgotten – although even she notes that the theory only works if you don't poke at it too hard:

Sam I've no real idea what the OIAR even is. Alice You and everyone else. I’ve checked and there's not really much info on it. My current working theory is that maybe it got set up in the 70s, back when everyone was off their tits on LSD and giving ghost-hunters massive grants to wave crystals in graveyards. I reckon at some point they must have put together a small government department to, like, oversee the spending and monitor this stuff and no-one's noticed it's still going. Sam Makes sense. Alice As long as you don’t pay too much attention. – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

Even if that is a bit extreme, the general consensus is that their work goes nowhere and does nothing. Which fits broadly with the general lack of action and urgency in the department ... unless you happen to be Colin.

Alice Colin! There’s my guy! How's it hanging? Is it an app yet? Do we have a minimalist logo? I assume you’ve finished all the social features? Colin Don't you start. I swear I'm going to shove a cable down that prick's throat, pull it out his ministerial anus and floss him to death. ... Teddy Colin, mate, you know you’re never getting out of here. Colin Christ, don’t say that. Teddy Even if his nibs lets you off the hook, which he won’t, you couldn’t bring yourself to just leave. Not 'til you’ve figured out all these fun little errors. Colin Or they finally kill me. ... Colin I already have to explain to some chinless inbred politician that we’re running on something as old as the goddamn Atari Falcon, now I’ve got some green little smartarse giving me lip for it too? Well you can take your funny little lines and shove them up – – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

Colin, specifically, is suffering from ministerial oversight. A lot of it, apparently. Departments that only continue to exist because they've been forgotten don't typically have the responsible minister leaning on the IT manager. Not even on the boss – the IT guy. It's interesting because his specific level of stress and frustration seems more consistent with what was going on in The Magnus Archives than here.

And then, of course, there are the stories themselves. It's impossible not to note that the text-to-speech programs sound an awful lot like the protagonists of the previous series. Presumably this is plot relevant, or else it's a really distracting choice. It's impossible to state at this stage whether that means it actually is them or not, but assuming for the moment that it is (because it is not interesting to discuss other possibilities until they become interesting) then what they have to say seems noteworthy.

They are presumably reacting to Sam specifically (welcome to the cursed protagonist club, new guy!), possibly to the box he ticked during onboarding, and likely to whatever past trauma led him to this job in the first place. And both seem to be issuing a warning.

Norris/Martin tells a story that Gwen classifies as "reanimation", but I admit I'm not sure I agree. The thing sounds like an iteration of the Anglerfish monster.

Norris/Harriet Winstead “Arthur? Is that you?” And that voice I have loved for twenty years answered: “Some of him.” – The Magnus Protocol: First Shift

Archivist Are you the same Sarah Baldwin that disappeared in Edinburgh in August 2006? Sarah Some of her. Skin. A few memories. Not on the inside. – The Magnus Archives: Return to Sender

That feels at least in part like an Easter egg – no newcomer is going to recognise the Anglerfish – but it is the crossing of the boundary: this is the first true story they heard, and proof that there is something very wrong with the world. And presumably the themes of grief and loss that pervade the story would relate pretty strongly to Martin's whole ... situation. I'm assuming nobody here chose to be a text-to-speech program.

Chester/John, meanwhile, issues a fairly stern warning about The Magnus Institute. The canary in the coal mine is a bit on-the-nose as a metaphor, sure, but if I were trying to explain to someone what was wrong with that place, I would likely also be blunt. The rough thing, though, is that quite explicitly no one heeds the warning: while the "removed" image is not described it pretty clearly illustrated RedCanary's fate. It's not just that the canary died down the mine. It's that it died in vain, because no one understood what killed it. And of course, it does pique Sam's interest to the point that he starts digging in to what happened. I'm disinclined to believe that curiosity is bad in these stories – if anything, John's issue was that he could never find out the things he needed to know fast enough to make a good decision. But there is a point there ... if you start looking into things, you have to be prepared to deal with them.

The third one, in Making Adjustments seems to be playing somewhat on The Picture of Dorian Gray: Sam and Gwen start the episode by doing practice runs on classification using classic horror, and the story, when it begins, draws on that confusion between art and subject. You can line Dorian up beside Dracula and Frankenstein any day. But the bigger point seems to be that the catalyst for this happened on camera:

There are nested violations in this story: Daria expected a photo shoot, but at no point agreed to be tattooed on camera. Beyond that, the story she told in private to her therapist is now being recorded and catalogued by the OIAR. And whatever happened to Daria, this "Ink5oul" person seems to have profited by it, and by things like it.

I must admit, I'm not much of a "what entity is this" person, because as far as I could tell the general consensus on that in general fell between "that's arbitrary" and "all of them, probably, if only by their conspicuous absence". That sort of thing is very useful when talking about the people and their particular obsessions – if Simon Fairchild turned up, for example, you knew exactly what sort of aggravating bullshit you were in for – but worrying too much about the exact nature of a supernatural manifestation rarely leads anywhere useful.

I am more interested in the broader implications of how the story is told. In The Magnus Archives, the characters read the stories aloud – and usually adopted the persona, and sometimes even the accent – of the original statement giver. That had supernatural implications, of course, but also played into the broader themes of the story: John is very much invested in the individuals. The tragedy of Jane Prentiss, the mystery of Gertrude Robinson – these are his obsessions. Pretty much the only point he scores in his conversation with Leitner (The Librarian) is being able to instantly spot a passing reference to Gerard Keay: John is crap at the cosmology, but he's been paying attention to the people. Many of the recurring characters are very dead by the time the story starts, but they are kept alive in the narrative because the living characters step into their shoes, and care about what they did and what became of them.

Here, though, there is built in distance between the active protagonists and the individual horror stories. They largely don't even read them – Alice says she "skim(s) the case for keywords" (Making Adjustments) and otherwise tries to ignore what is happening. When a story is read aloud it is done by the text-to-speech programs, and they, as John and Martin did, adopt the personas of the authors in a way that sounds much more fluid than software from the 90s should be capable of. When the story comes straight from the source, it is not told to Sam or Alice or Gwen, but to someone else entirely. There is a reason for the audience to connect with the stories – from that external perspective you're getting pretty much the same thing you did in The Magnus Archives – but the actual characters have no reason to connect, or even to truly listen or empathise with what they're hearing, and doing so is regarded as a mistake.

Which makes you wonder – what might you miss when you're not paying attention to the people?

#the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #the magnus archives

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mllemaenad · 4 months

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I miss writing. I am just here to whinge for a moment. I did something awful to my wrists a while back, and now typing hurts. If I want to write anything, I have to accept that it will take me weeks of doing it a paragraph at a time. And of course I still have to type for work, and most days by the time I've done that typing anything else will lead to agony.

But I still miss writing. I still have thoughts in my head, my hands just don't want me to get them out.

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mllemaenad · 4 months

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Having now listened to all of The Magnus Archives ... hm, yeah, I think they made it out all right in the end. And I don't just mean that in a soppy I-can-only-stand-happy-endings sort of way (although, it's been a crappy few months, and to be honest I wouldn't mind a happy ending), but because I think there's a really satisfying conclusion to John's character arc if he finally figures out how it all works.

Er. John? Jon? I have seen it spelled both ways, and now I am confused. And the character seems to be named after his creator, which is not making me less confused. But the transcript uses "John", so I will go with that.

John's core problem is that he is constantly trying to take control of his life and his choices, but is never able to do so because the narrative won't let him. He undoubtedly makes several rash decisions that the audience can guess won't end well, but even in cases where he sits down and attempts to make the best choice possible he ends up playing into the hands of his enemies, because they are able to tightly control the information to which he has access. Things that seem rational based on what he knows end up being terrible choices, because of how well curated "what he knows" happens to be.

There's a thing a lot of the characters do, where they describe the logic of their world as akin to dreams or nightmares:

SIMON No, no, no, you’re right, of course. The thing you have to remember is that no one actually knows how these things work – not really. There’s always been plenty of theories, of course, and over a century or two you do start to get an intuitive feel for it, but… there’s really no hard-and-fast rules. The powers, or entities, or fears, or whatever you want to call them, are bound up in emotion. In feeling. How they exist, what they can do, how they interact with the world… it all makes about as much logical sense as a nightmare. [MARTIN INHALES] Which is to say, there is a certain sort of emotional logic to it all: things feel like they flow together in a way that makes sense, but if you try to stop and do the maths, then it all comes apart. At least, in my experience. – Simon Fairchild, doing the exposition for characters and audience alike. Big Picture

But, as Simon points out, the trouble is that none of them really understand what they're talking about. Few people in this world seem to dedicate actual time to understanding it – most are either seduced or destroyed (or some weird combination of the two) by the power that comes with worship and terror.

So they get close, but they miss the point: it's not dream logic, it's story logic. There's a reasonable amount of crossover, of course: both deal in emotion and theme and imagery. We'll forgive a plot hole or continuity error in a story if the narrative feels right, and nobody is surprised if their dreams don't have coherent worldbuilding in them. But stories have purpose in them in a way that dreams do not. They're trying to say something that you need to think about. You can't really tell somebody about a dream without imposing narrative logic on it that wasn't necessarily there when you dreamt it, and most dreams simply fade away into nothingness once you've had them. But a narrative is shaped, and if it's good it can live virtually forever. You can't control a dream, but you can and should control a narrative.

That's the thing John finally works out.

I mean - of course it's got story logic, right? It's a story. It's a piece of fiction, so it's got themes and tropes and character foils and recurring imagery and all that jazz. But beyond that, it is a story made up of a patchwork of other stories: most of the episodes contain a little self-contained supernatural story with its own protagonist and its own ending; over the top of that lie a series of recurring characters who pop up across multiple episodes, and whose personal stories you can learn, and who will intersect with each other to build a historical narrative that explains how we got here; and on top of that are the characters who live closest to the present – John and whichever assistants are still alive at any given moment – and their struggle to deal with all this.

It's that patchwork that makes up the net in which John is caught for most of the series: because he is only able to follow the narrative, he is not able to control it. Yes, he is directly manipulated by actual characters in the story – most prominently by Jonah Magnus and Annabelle Cane – but it is mostly the story itself that keeps him locked in place.

In most cases, there is nothing whatsoever he can do about the various events that take place in the story. He's almost always reading about something that happened anywhere between years and centuries prior. Even when he's acquired enough information to understand what's happening in these stories he can't do a single damn thing for the characters. They either made it out on their own or they didn't.

Occasionally the story moves closer to the present, usually at season end but in a few other places as well, but even then he is still following behind the narrative. The story isn't about him, but his predecessor: "Why was Gertrude Robinson murdered? What did she know?" He is following the story of a dead woman. Her story is well and truly over, but he cannot catch up to the end of it.

Because the thing about the Archivist is that – well, it’s a bit of a misnomer. It might, perhaps, be better named: The Archive. Because you do not administer and preserve the records of fear, John. You are a record of fear, both in mind as you walk the shuddering record of each statement, and in body as the Powers each leave their mark upon you. You are a living chronicle of terror. – Technically John speaking, but in practice Jonah Magnus monologuing about his evil plan. The Eye Opens

His whole purpose in the story is to read (or on a few notable occasions hear) something bizarre, express a general "What the actual fuck was that?" and move on, without any ability to act on what he has learned.

But there is logic to their world. Season five – well, technically the finale of season four – turns the implicit into the explicit.

It does tickle me, that in this world of would-be occult dynasties and ageless monsters, the Chosen One is simply that – someone I chose. It’s not in your blood, or your soul, or your destiny. It’s just in your own, rotten luck. – More of Jonah Magnus being smug. He does go on a bit. The Eye Opens

The thing is, though: you aren't a Chosen One unless you're in a story. That's a narrative archetype. Even if you attempt to impose the idea on a historical event, you're only doing so retroactively by slotting a person into a particular narrative framework that probably does not match reality. It's unsurprising that Magnus had to build his horrifying fantasy world out of the trappings of a quest narrative: his whole power base is built out of collected stories. But if that's the world you make, you end up with a very specific set of rules.

Consequently, John spends much of the season explaining why they have to follow the rules of a quest narrative in order to actually go anywhere.

ARCHIVIST (heh) You see that tower, way off in the distance? MARTIN (don’t like where this is going) Yeah. (beat, sigh) It’s watching us, isn’t it? ARCHIVIST The Panopticon and the Institute. Merged into something entirely new. MARTIN (splutter-scoff) Wai– what? No, there’s, there’s no way we can see it from here. We – We must still be a hundred miles from the border, never mind London! ARCHIVIST You could see that tower from anywhere on Earth. And it can see you. And if you walk towards it, eventually you’ll get there. But you have to go through everything in between. [Pause.] MARTIN (bright) You’re being ominous again. ARCHIVIST (ah!) Sorry. Sorry. MARTIN What do you mean ‘everything?’ What’s out here? [The Archivist inhales. As he does so, there’s a sort of creaking – and then we hear the weakest strains of bagpipes beginning to fade through.] ARCHIVIST Nightmares. Come on, that trench is our first. – John, taking a turn at the exposition. In the Trenches

Dreams don't work that way – or at least they don't have to. Dreams can drop you into any situation and pull you out of it again with neither logic nor explanation. But if you are heading to a dark tower to confront an evil wizard ... well, then, everybody knows that you have a lot of walking to do. That you must meet friends and foes along the way and fight smaller battles before you fight the big one. It's how it goes.

It's even more explicit – almost painfully so – when dealing directly with character development.

ARCHIVIST Alright. [MORE WALKING] Next one’s through here. BASIRA Next one? ARCHIVIST Her latest victim. [DOOR IS WRENCHED OPEN WITH A METALLIC CREAK] [MARTIN REELS, SOUNDS OF FLIES BUZZING] Recognise her. BASIRA … No… I don’t think I do. ARCHIVIST That wasn’t a question. It was an instruction. We can’t move on until you do. MARTIN John, what are you getting at? ARCHIVIST This isn’t just a journey through spaces. – Basira preferring not to do introspection in a literal hellscape, but John has worked out the narrative rules so it's confront-your-past day in the apocalypse. The Processing Line

John is not wildly unusual in being a specific person's Chosen One: you can make the word "destiny" do a lot of work, and the poor bastard in the role is as often as not the favourite of a god, or the only child of a king, or the last of something bearing the duty of a larger group.

He is somewhat more unusual in being two people's Chosen One, and somewhat moreso again by being broadly opposed to the thing he was chosen to do. But the core thing is that this is a known role; it's a structure you can work with. Eventually. When you're in a position to do so.

Martin figured it out a season earlier.

MARTIN It’s not him! It’s not anybody. It’s just me. Always has been. I… When I first came to you, I thought I had lost everything. John was dead, my mother was dead, the job I had put everything into trapped me into spreading evil and I… I really didn’t care what happened to me. I told myself I was trying to protect the others, but… honestly we didn’t even like each other. Maybe I just thought joining up with you would be a good way to get killed. And then… John came back, and… and suddenly I had a reason I had to keep your attention on me. Make you feel in control so you didn’t take it out on him. And if that meant drifting further away, so what? I’d already grieved for him. And if it meant now saving him, it was worth it. When you started talking about the Extinction, though… you had me actually, then, for a while. But then – (laughs sardonically) then, you tried to make me the hero. Tried to sell me on the idea that I was the only one who could stop it. And that I’ve never sat right with me. I mean, I mean, look – look at me, I’m not exactly a – a chosen one. But by then I was in too deep. So I played along. Waited to see what your end game was, and here we are. Funny. Looks like I was right the first time. It’s probably still a good way to get killed? – Martin explaining that he was just stringing the villains along. Panopticon

The thing is, he is Peter Lukas's Chosen One. The reasoning behind it is cruel, but I can think of a few stories about gods making bets on what humans will do. But he works out what kind of story they're trying to tell him, and turns it to his advantage.

This is a good one. Everybody knows this one: one of the characters is betraying the others and working with the villains. It isn't because he wants to; it's because his hand has been forced. But it's a trap. It will get him killed. It will get his friends killed. The villains are lying to him about what they mean to do and how far they mean to make him go. The audience knows this, but the characters just keep digging their holes deeper and deeper ... until the sudden reveal that it was a con all along. The "traitor" never intended to turn on his friends. It was part of the plan. It's a classic. It's basically the plot of The Sting. Who wouldn't want a turn at being Robert Redford?

And it works. Martin gets everything he wants out of that ploy: Lukas is destroyed, "Elias" is unmasked as Jonah Magnus, John makes good on his earlier commitment to run away with him, and he skips the eye gouging. You can't fault his results. The problem is, Martin is a secondary character. He doesn't quite have the narrative weight to resolve the primary conflict. That plot revolves around him but the plot does not, so in the longer term, things continue to get worse.

But he does prove it can be done. If you recognise what kind of story you are in, and the different ways that kind of story can go, you can grab on a narrative thread and steer it in a direction that works for you.

ANNABELLE We found the one we believed most likely to bring about their manifestation. We marked him young, guided his path as best we could. And then, we took his voice. ARCHIVIST No… ANNABELLE His, and those he walked with. We inscribed them on shining strands of word and meaning, and used them to weave a web which cast itself out through the gate and beyond our universe. So that when the Fears heard that voice, and came in their terrible glory, they might then travel out along it. Or be dragged. BASIRA Is she talking about the tapes? ARCHIVIST Yes. – In which Annabelle explains why there are tape recorders everywhere. Connected

You can say voice or tapes, but that's missing the point: it's stories that will carry these beings out of the world. Two hundred odd narratives about godlike beings with insatiable hunger and Lovecraftian pretensions who can travel to other worlds when the denizens of those places hear the tales. That has its own uncomfortable implications, sure, but if you've been paying attention you know something else about those stories:

ARCHIVIST Statement ends. (sigh) One thing that always strikes me when I read statements like this is… the bias of survivorship. With one or two notable exceptions, the only statements the Institute receives are those where the witness has successfully escaped whatever terrible place or being has marked them for a victim. I wonder how many don’t make it out. How many of those shapes in the water were once just like Mr. Shakya. – John is being gloomy, but he has hit upon an important point. Submerged

They are largely stories in which humans beat the monsters. They are stories about how to survive. You can do a horror story with a catastrophic ending, of course. It can have a great impact. But probably not two hundred of them in a row. That would be hard going on the listener: another week, another corpse. So these are largely hopeful stories – with those noted exceptions, of course.

I've seen the memes: I know Joshua Gillespie, who beat a coffin that wanted to consume him with a bowl of ice, is a favourite. Of course he is: that's genius. Or Dylan Anderson, who just ... covered a homicidal pig in concrete. Characters like Gerard Keay and Adelard Dekker are attractive because when they arrive on the scene, the supernatural becomes no more than another problem to be solved with just the right application of human ingenuity (and Dekker, notably, is probably the source for the concrete trick – you cannot fault results).

There are two possible threads to pull on here: you can pull on the thread of supernatural horror, or the thread of human resourcefulness in the face of adversity.

SASHA Why record it? ARCHIVIST What? SASHA Before, in the office. It, it was stupid going for the tape recorder like that, and then when you dropped it out there – ARCHIVIST I said I was sorry. If I’d known Martin had another one stashed in here, I never would have… SASHA No, it’s, it’s fine, just… I just don’t understand. I thought you hated the damn thing. You’re always going on about it. ARCHIVIST I do! I did. I just… I don’t want to become a mystery. I refuse to become another goddamn mystery. SASHA What? ARCHIVIST Look, even if you ignore the walking soil-sack out there, and the fact that we are probably minutes from death, there is still so much more happening here. MARTIN I’m not sure we can really ignore the – ARCHIVIST Every real statement just leads… deeper into something I don’t even know the shape of yet. And to top it all, I still don’t know what happened to Gertrude. Officially she’s still missing, but Elias is no help and the police were pretty clear that the wait to call her dead is just a formality. If I die, wormfood or… something else, whatever, I’m going to make damn sure the same doesn’t happen to me. Whoever takes over from me is going to know exactly what happened. – John, making bad tape-recorder related decisions. Infestation

And there is mystery. That is another thread you can pull on. Because in the end, Gertrude wasn't a mystery at all. Her activities, her personality, her associates, her strengths and her weaknesses are all pretty well documented. She's dead on the floor with three bullets in her. She's the reason they're in this mess, because she did the thinking Jonah Magnus could not and set him on his path. She would hate that with every fibre of her being – but it is known. What you know about her is that she failed, and she died.

John is wrong, in the above, because of course he is. He doesn't know anything yet, except that his workplace is probably evil and currently full of worms. He hasn't worked out the story logic, yet, and he doesn't yet see the difference between knowing and understanding.

Mystery. What if? That's a powerful plot thread you can pull on, if you're in the right place and you are desperate enough.

There's what he can't do, in the end. He can't trap the weird fear entities in the world and starve them to death. Annabelle knew exactly what buttons to push to get him heading in that direction, sure, but it was never going to work. I don't even mean the business with the lighter, although that's the practical way this was set up. I mean this is a five-season series in which the temples of these dark gods are repeatedly destroyed by fire, book burning is a recurring motif, and "What if we made it explode?" is always a solid cross-generation Team Archives plan. For heaven's sake – The Magnus Institute has basically the same fatal flaw as The Death Star. We're blowing it up in the finale. We just are. It's that kind of story. It doesn't matter what he wants. There was never anything there for John to pull on.

But this?

ARCHIVIST Do it! The knife’s just there. Let them go. MARTIN [Tearful] I’m not going to kill you! ARCHIVIST Cut the tether. Send them away. Maybe we both die. Probably. But maybe not. Maybe, maybe everything works out, and we end up somewhere else. MARTIN Together? ARCHIVIST One way or another. Together. – Absolute last-minute planning, because that's how they do things. Last Words

It can seem to come out of nowhere, unless you've been watching him put it together. His world runs on narrative logic. He is the Chosen One atop a burning tower, on a terrible quest. He's faltered a bit, at the last minute, because if you don't shake hands with Frodo Baggins on the way past you are not respecting your ancestors. He's aware of most of this because he's spent most of the season tiredly explaining to his travelling companions that, yes, the journey is a damn metaphor. He is backed by dozens of stories where people escaped at the last by determination, or connecting with their loved ones, or just ... not being all that interested in worshipping dark gods.

Magnus is dead. The entities are packing their bags and running for the exit. There is no one left to care what he does next – except Martin, who would also like a way out of this mess. He has spent years struggling to understand what kind of story he's in and what his role is supposed to be, but now he gets it and is finally, finally the person in the room with a bit of power.

He does not say "Maybe the girls will dig us out of the rubble and we can go home and pretend this never happened". That would be the best possible result for them, of course, but it wouldn't work. No one would believe it. But what he can do is follow the example of all the people that came before because, crucially, "Fuck it, I am not dying today because I don't want to" and "Look, this is the power of love and I am holding on to it in the face of the worst crap I have ever seen" really are the strategies that work. And now he's in the one moment of the story where there is no one else's story left to precede him. This is the only moment in the whole series where the story is really his, and he can decide what happens next.

And what happens next is a question. The question is "What happens next?" It is a thing that is ongoing, rather than a thing that has ended.

I've no doubt he created more problems for himself, and for Martin. You grab that narrative thread and you are literally asking for them: even the kindest of stories won't give you a "happily ever after" until you have solved The Problems. You would only pull that one if you were desperate, but under the circumstances it was probably warranted.

But maybe, this time, they can run ahead of the narrative instead of behind. That makes all the difference.

#the magnus archives

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mllemaenad · 4 months

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The thing about Fallout is ... I don't actually think Bethesda really broke the concept until Fallout 76. I have seen people wring their hands over the Nuclear Option quest in Fallout 4 being incompatible with Fallout's themes, but I don't really agree with that.

There's that tired, defeated sounding voice over at the start of every game, after all: "War, war never changes". And I remember: I remember having to blow up both the Mariposa Base and the Cathedral in the original Fallout; I remember destroying the Enclave oil rig in Fallout 2. That's three whole buildings with people in them, just like the Institute.

While they are role playing games with a lot of choice and consequence built in, the Fallout series does consistently railroad the player in one sense: you are inserted into the narrative at a point where the situation has escalated to the point where you have to go to war. There are many side quests that give you the opportunity to find alternative, peaceful solutions to conflicts – you can fix broken machinery and forge alliances or just shout at people until they calm down, and that all works – but in the main quest, the fight is inevitable.

And that makes sense. The ghost that haunts the narrative of every Fallout game is the morning of the 23rd of October, 2077, when everybody fired on everybody else at once. You ask yourself – "How could they do that?" The scale of the destruction, the sheer number of deaths, the absolute no-win scenario that created for every nation in the world makes it sound utterly unthinkable. But they did it.

You get a lot of historical backstory on how they got there, of course: the over reliance on fossil fuels, culminating in a last minute switch to nuclear power; the collapsing economies and failing institutions; the extreme ideologies embraced by the world's super powers; the horrifying disregard for human life that spread everywhere well before anyone launched those missiles. You see all the off ramps that weren't taken along the way.

But more importantly, you live it, every time. You never set out to fight a war or blow anything up. You're trying to find a damn water chip, a GECK, your father, the guy who fucking shot you, your son. But at the end of the day, you always find yourself recruited, and you always have to destroy something. Then you can see for yourself how it happens. The world had passed its point of no return the day you arrived in it, and you just have to deal with it. War never changes.

But with Fallout 76 ... I mean, it's the problem of a single player narrative in a multiplayer game. The premise is that you are one of many vault dwellers emerging into the world to rebuild, but in practice you are The Chosen One, all over again. The Vault Dweller, singular. If you imagine it as a single player scenario it's not that bad, although it is retreading old ground: the Enclave has another one of their delightful genocidal plans, and in the end you have to turn their weapons on their plague-ridden creations to stop the nightmare from spreading. It's a tragedy, because you are risking this little patch of unpolluted land, where crops can still grow and people can still live – but you're alone with only the resources you've been able to scrape together from the detritus of this fallen society, so what choice do you have?

Except. Well. You are not alone. Not even a little bit. In theory you should have a vault full of fellow geniuses to collaborate with. And unlike other games in the series, your fundamental issue is not that you are dealing with multiple groups of people with such different ideologies that they will never agree. Those people existed, but they are now dead or fled (At least originally; I am aware that expansions have since changed the situation). In theory you are now accompanied by a group of people who should, like you, be focused on doing everything they can not to destroy their new homeland.

And worst of all, because it's a multiplayer game everybody gets a bloody turn. You don't launch your weapons, battle the scorchbeast queen and then fade into a montage describing the literal fallout of what you have done. No, you do the whole thing over again for the XP and the loot. So now you are basically using nuclear weapons for post-apocalyptic big game hunting, and it drives me up the wall.

War never changes. Let's launch the nukes for fun.

#fallout

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