2024-03-23 23:28:59 ¶ ●

# Episode 2 TMP Quick Thoughts

## Housekeeping and Prologue

Hello, this is Douglysium and you might not know me as that guy who wrote over 100 pages of analysis on the Eye (which can be read on Tumblr here (https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/735599414228484097/the-relationships-between-the-dread-powers-the) or Google Docs here (The Relationships Between the Dread Powers: The Eye- Knowledge is Fear and Ignorance is Bliss)) or as that guy who wrote an article on the Extinction (which can be read on Tumblr here(https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/717929126195003392/what-would-avatars-of-the-extinction-be-like-a) and Google Docs here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation)). Suffice to say I might be a bit of a TMA fan. Also, spoilers for TMP up until episode 2. You can read my ramblings on the last episode here (Episode 1 TMP Quick Thoughts).

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

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

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

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

## Episode 2: “Making Adjustments”

Okay, let’s dive right in. It’s pretty clear that at this point, just like how the story of TMA is told through the tapes, the story of TMP is being told through computers at the O.I.A.R. and seemingly various other devices too. We once again tune into Sam trying to understand the obtuse categorization system with help from Gwen. While Sam struggles, Gwen seems to be quite in her element. Despite this Gwen refers to the index as arbitrary even though Sam argues that there must have been a logic or pattern it was based on at some point. I don’t really have much to say that hasn’t been said in my last quick thoughts but I have to wonder if there is actually a logic to it? Maybe it’s sorted by Entity or some other system but like I said in the previous review maybe the point is simply that it’s going to be vague and obtuse sometimes. Either way, Gwen basically tells Sam to just do his job and not worry about that kind of stuff which ties into what I’ve said earlier about Sam’s curious nature and how that often relates to The Eye as well as the idea of blissful ignorance.

After Sam questions what’s happening Gwen says “(coldly) Then quit. No-one’s making you work here.” Even if this is just a coincidence it is giving me a flashback to the moment when Tim realized he couldn’t quit the Institute.

We finally got a statement in the form of a video call pulled from the internet. The account given by Daria screams of The Flesh or some similar Entity. While I am currently in the camp that the Smirkean categorizations probably still do have some merit in TMP, if the Entities happen to have changed or been rewritten then they at least seem to still really parallel a lot of the themes the Powers had in the TMA. So even if I end up being wrong about the idea that the Powers haven’t really changed that much, if at all, I don’t care all that much because this is still a fun and interesting lens to view them through I think. If this is another set of Entities or the Entities swapped places it will at least be interesting pointing out the parallels or maybe even what categories they would have fallen into in TMA.

Case in point, what we see in this statement contains a heaping helping of bodily dysphoria, as Daria starts feeling self-conscious about her body due to social media. As she puts it “Like, we all know it’s fake, it’s all filters and Photoshop and everyone pretending that they’re the “real deal” #makeupfree! But just because you know that doesn’t mean you’re immune and yeah, I’d ended up in a pretty dark place. And when I turned 30, I decided to do something about it.” As it keeps going we hear “I started with my hair, grew it out to make my face look longer. It sort of worked. Then I chucked out all my older sister’s clothes and dipped into my savings to get myself a couple of pairs of my own jeans that didn’t make me look quite so much like an overloaded ice cream cone. I even shelled out for a cute LBD for when I did lose a bit of weight. Mum said I was being overambitious, but it hangs off me now of course. Most clothes do…” So there’s a pretty big emphasis on dissatisfaction with one’s body and physical appearance. Something we often see with the Flesh, especially with the likes of places like Jared Hopworth’s gym in MAG 90 (Body Builder) and how it was built on the idea of giving everyone the perfect body.

Daria then resolves to get a tattoo and find a tattoo artist that went by Ink5oul (InkSoul). They got an appointment and when Daria arrived they noted that Ink5 had “an absolutely gorgeous floral serpent design running up their arm and into their neck that was so vivid it looked ready to slither off their skin and onto the chair.” When the time came to get the tattoo Ink5 doesn’t actually ask Daria what she wants but instead asks her about her life and upon Daria revealing she is an artist Ink5 grins and cries out “The artist becomes the canvas!” and they begin to stream the affair before dragging Daria to a chair and starting on the tattoo. Daria mentions the pain and panic of course but surprisingly when Daria looks down at the tattoo, expecting a bloody mess or wound, she sees “Instead, a pristine paintbrush design spanned from the interior of my elbow to the inside of my palm, a flurry of colourful floral patterns entwined with symbols I didn’t recognise. Despite the pain I twisted my arm back and forth to admire the work and those symbols almost seemed to glitter in the light. It was… It was beautiful.” Then they suddenly turned off the lights and kicked Daria out with no debrief or after care.

When Daria gets home she says “I stood before the bathroom mirror and looked myself over and for the first time I saw someone interesting. Someone I wanted to know more about.” and “I went a bit manic at that point. For the first time ever I wanted to attempt a self-portrait. Something real and physical, I wanted to feel the brushes in my hands and the oil on my fingertips.” She works all night before falling asleep and then waking up and seeing herself in the self-portrait. But now… she notices an imperfection.. “As I stared at it though, I noticed that

whilst it was accurate it wasn’t perfect. The eyes were still slightly wrong, the angle of the smile was off and obviously the nose still wasn’t quite right.” After looking at the tattoo on her arm she takes a palette to the left eye and despite there barely being any change she knows she’s making progress because she begins to feel bone. She goes to the bathroom to check her face and “…I was still pleased with the result. There was no discolouration, no bleeding, no damage at all but the face around my eyes was definitely more symmetrical. It looked so much better. But not quite perfect.”

So she keeps editing her face in an attempt to make herself perfect and well… it goes about as well as you would think in a horror podcast. She keeps altering herself and altering herself, admitting that she should have stopped, before her tattoo begins running along her upper arm and she resolves to work around it. She tries harder and harder to perfect her body but she has to keep making more and more compromises around the ever-spreading tattoo. Eventually Daria’s roommate Sarah returns home to see what I imagine is a very horrifying sight given her reaction. Even more unfortunately, apparently Daria was still finalizing her mouth so she couldn’t speak either so Sarah started screaming and even punched Daria when Daria tried to grab an reassure her. The punch from Sarah apparently messed up her cheek and undid days of work. Sarah would go on to claim Daria tried to kill herself with acid, probably trying to rationalize what would look like extreme melting mutilations, and Daria hasn’t edited herself since then.

The therapist asks if Daria wanted to hurt herself and Daria says she “just wanted to be better.”

As I mentioned earlier I think this statement at least parallels The Flesh. “Flesh sculpting” is something we see quite a lot with the Flesh and people like Jared Hopworth, and leitner’s like The Boneturner’s Tale give people the ability to warp and bend bone. They can even reach into people’s bodies and seemingly pull out bones without creating a massive bloody wound that one would expect. Additionally, the desire for perfection is something we have also seen with The Flesh and things like Jared Hopworth’s gym in MAG 90: “Body Builder.”

There is an argument to be made for parallels with The Eye in how apparently Ink5oul streams the tattooing session and maybe The Spiral with Daria pushing back against others calling her crazy or delusional and expressing fear about it. The Spiral can always be a bit trippy and I could see see the idea of it “distorting” something in a similar manner to distorting the truth. I mean it did literally have a monster known as “The Distortion.” There’s also the idea of realizing something is wrong with Daria continuously realizing her edits are imperfect every time she thinks she is done. But, as I’ve mentioned before the Entities have always just been general categories that overlap all the time, so if I had to put my money on an Entity I would say it’s The Flesh unless someone wants to argue that multiple Entities are at play or it’s an Entity like Eye overlapping with the fear of judgment, The Spiral with the fear of being wrong or realizing you are wrong about something, etc..

Sam asks Alice how she can put up with all the horrifying statements and she just says she ignores them. Which is something I mentioned a bit in my last talk with the relationship between The Eye and the idea of “ignorance being bliss” or the fear of seeing / witnessing too much. It’s also something I talked about a lot in my article dedicated to the Eye. The transcript of this episode (https://rustyquillcom.sharepoint.com/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?ga=1&id=%2FShared%20Documents%2FRusty%20Quill%20Public%20Access%2FTranscripts%2FThe%20Magnus%20Protocol%2FPublic%2FMAGP%2002%20%2D%20Making%20Adjustments%5FTranscript%202%2E0%2Epdf&parent=%2FShared%20Documents%2FRusty%20Quill%20Public%20Access%2FTranscripts%2FThe%20Magnus%20Protocol%2FPublic) mentions a cut to a CCTV before we hear what Alice and Gwen are talking about. Pointing to the idea that just like in TMA we are witnessing the story play out via something that is listening through a device. However, this time whatever Entity is present seems capable of listening through almost any device with a speaker and not just tapes.

Alice gets a call and after it’s over Sam asks how Luke is and if he is still “playing with Bullets for Saint Sebastian?” This could just be a random name and this is one of the times where I might just be reaching and sound totally crazy but I wonder if we will get a statement from Luke or something relating to the “Bullets of Saint Sebastian” in the future? The reason I wonder is because The Slaughter has been an Entity that manifests as music quite a lot and Grifters Bone from TMA seems to have been aligned with the Slaughter. With a name like BULLETS for Saint Sebastian I wonder if such an encounter led to Luke leaving or if it’s even possible that Grifters Bone themselves got dragged into this universe and formed another band. But once again, this could just be a throw away name and it really depends on how closely they were tied to The Slaughter if we are to believe Annabelle’s hypothesis, but I also know that Johnny can be really cheeky at times.

It’s also possible it IS a Slaughter aligned band but has nothing to do with Grifters Bone. Just to be clear I’m not saying that The Slaughter is the only Entity to ever manifest as music or that it’s the only one that could. But rather that there’s a precedent for Slaughter bands and the name “Bullets for Saint Sebastian” rings rather violent to me. I actually cheated a bit and did a quick Google search about Saint Sebastian and apparently he is a saint that is “a patron saint of archers and athletes and of those who desire a saintly death.” I think the idea is linking both bows / arrows and guns / bullets as projectile weapons, so you could read a Saint Sebastian being riddled with bullets instead of arrows as a more modern take on the story of Saint Sebestian. He apparently died from being clubbed or beaten to death too which would tie into The Slaughter and themes of violence. I should make it clear that this hypothesis is making the assumption that Bullets of Saint Sebestian are tied to The Slaughter specifically, which is something we have no evidence for outside the name, which isn’t exactly the strongest evidence. I’m just considering a fun possibility.

This is where we learn Sam is looking for information about the Magnus Institute for a seemingly unknown reason at this point. As I’ve mentioned Sam’s extreme curiosity can be compared to some other Eye related folk like Jon and in TMA it seemed like the Institute also acted as bait to drag people searching for answers or closure towards The Eye. But this could be unrelated to what Sam is doing since the Institute is nothing but ruins in this universe at this point. So I don’t know what information could be at the site at this moment if anything. Alice also warns Sam against thinking about this stuff while he is off the clock which ties into the whole “ignorance is bliss” theme I think The Eye sometimes has.

## Conclusion

That’s really all the thoughts I have for now and it’s important to stress that this is off the top of my head so if you think I missed a character parallel or possibility feel free to point them out and I might give my thoughts or interpretations on them.

I’ve seen people mention the possibility of this universe having its own set of Entities and someone even asked me what I think about the possibility. The answer is… I can’t even begin to guess… I have no idea. I’m not trying to claim that I’ve solved all of TMP, just that I think some theories hold more water than others based on the precedent TMA set. Some theories are completely up in the air and could go one way or the other. If this universe does have its own set of Entities I think the most likely possibilities as it stands right now are 1. The Entities in question are at least somewhat similar to the ones from TMA (so much so that they share a lot of themes and imagery) or 2. Such Entities haven’t shown up during this episode or the last yet. But who’s to say for sure until we get more information. Right now I’m leaning a bit towards the idea that at the very least the statements up until this episode the Entities are pretty close if not the same as the ones we know and fear.

But I’ll see if the next episode changes my mind considering how intriguing the statement is.