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.
So let’s get started and I’ll try to keep this short with episode 1 “First Shift”…. After I address two common theories first.
Addressing “THE THEORY”
Something I want to get out of the way right now is that to me whatever government O.I.A.R. organization Sam and the gang are working for are clearly aligned with the Eye or some similar Entity. Now, I know what some people are going to start saying. There’s been a popular theory going around that the Entities have changed to new fears or are now based around desires instead of fear but to be honest I heavily disagree with those theories and they are extreme reaches in my opinion.
First off, we are told at the end of TMA by Jon, Annabelle, and The Web itself that according to its plan when the other Entities are dragged to another universe it should end up with them being dragged back outside the universe in the same state that they were in TMA. I’ve seen people argue that the Powers might have been separated, fused, or reshuffled but it’s important to note that the powers have always been heavily connected and nebulous in most aspects.
In MAG 80 (The Librarian) Leitner compares the Entities as being but pieces of a larger body: “Imagine, you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape and, above you, can see the vast dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?” Meanwhile, in MAG 111 Gerard compares them to colors: “I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. I mean, why are navy blue and sky blue both called blue, when pink’s an entirely different colour from red? Y’know? I don’t know, that’s just how it works. And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour.” Gerard and Jon also go on to state “O-Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like –An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once.” So while I would personally argue the Dread Powers still sit on a sort of spectrum, the spectrum in question is a lot more soupy and amorphous than a strictly barebones color wheel and the edges bleed together.
Jon later points out to Martin that the categorization of Entities can’t always be simplified into neat little boxes. These also are important to understanding Jonah’s mass ritual as Jonah states in MAG 160 “Even those that seem to exist in direct opposition rely on each other for their definition as much as up relies on down. To try and create a world with only the Buried makes as much sense as trying to conceive a world with only down. Every ritual tied itself so closely to a single power as to render itself impossible. They could bring their patron close, but never sever it from the others, and eventually it would be violently pulled back into the place next to reality where they dwell.” Basically, what Jonah is saying is that light cannot exist without darkness or shadow to contrast it and light by its very nature will cast a shadow. So even if people say light and darkness are opposites they are really two sides of the same coin and need each other to exist as distinct concepts. The concept of darkness cannot exist unless you have light to compare it to and vice versa.
So I don’t think any Entities are being removed since losing an Entity would be like all the Entities blowing off their own arm if we use Leitner’s body analogy. The chance of the Entities being shuffled isn’t zero but the categories have always overlapped so it’s probably more likely that the new characters may use different categories than Smirke when referring to grouping the Entities. However, that wouldn’t suddenly mean that the Desolation or some other Power doesn’t exist, just that they are being viewed through a different lens than the previous universe.
Now, there has been a super popular theory floating around Reddit that the Entities are now drawing power from desires instead of fear. Which is a theory I personally don’t buy for a single second. There’s the earlier aforementioned point and goal of The Web’s plan sure but I also think the theory makes little sense since nothing about the first few episodes so far has really changed how the Entities have behaved in my opinion.
The truth is the Entities have always been heavily tied to desire, even in the original TMA Gertrude mentions that the Eye is also connected to the desire to know and understand even if in doing so you could get hurt.
We also know that people with certain desires or personalities are more likely to be attracted to certain Entities as they are more likely to intentionally or unintentionally cultivate their respective fear. It goes without saying that a person prone to violence and the desire to attack others is more likely to feed the Slaughter. If you want more specific examples, Jon is noted as being extremely curious and wanting to understand so he gravitated towards The Eye (an Entity revolving around the fear of knowledge, information, having secrets revealed, being found, etc.), Peter was an extreme loner so he gravitated towards The Lonely (an Entity connected to the fear of being alone) and Annabelle gravitated towards The Web and she is noted as having been extremely manipulative as a child.
Desire isn’t anything new in TMA and it acts as the flip side of the Powers that encourages people to hurt others due to specific desires and wants. For example, in TMP RedCanary fits with what we’ve seen of people connected to the Eye and a desire to know / see, and Daria’s desire for physical perfection resembles the gym we see Jared Hopworth running and the people in it trying to get the perfect body in TMA. We even see Daria’s roommate freak out when she sees her so I would say it’s more likely that the Flesh or some other similar Entity was reaching out to her and / or make her an Avatar, and Daria might not have even been the target for the Flesh’s fear but rather her roommate or the people around her. Then again we do get the description of a lot of fear during the tattoo session in the episode and the idea of someone permanently mutilating your body physically is very Flesh.
Hopefully, you understand a bit where I’m coming from now and why I won’t be using some of the common theories floating around as my frame of reference, since I feel like they sort of miss the complete picture or just try to pretend like TMA didn’t happen. So I’m working off the assumption that at most the Powers might be viewed differently but they are still intact enough to ascribe them to Smirke’s categories. This might turn out to be a mistake in the future (especially since this episode seems to be poking fun at those categories) but completely disregarding established information or trying to start from complete scratch is as equally likely to end up being a mistake. I also find the idea that the Fears just did a 180 and started feeding off of desire even though they are acting how they always have to be a stretch. Of course, the uncertainty and guesswork is part of the fun of doing these I suppose.
Episode 1: “First Shift”
Okay, back to what I was saying before. The O.I.A.R organization Sam, Teddy, Alice, and their coworkers are working for is almost definitely associated with the Eye or maybe some other similar Entity. We know in this universe the original Magnus Institute burned down at some point so it’s possible that the Eye looked for a new main center of power or place to conduct its ritual. We know the organization Teddy is working for is a government one and the Eye is also the fear of being watched. A fear that often goes hand-in-hand with the fear of government or something governments sometimes do to keep people in line.
The ability of the computers to play statements by searching through the internet and snooping into various forums, servers, private messages, etc. to find information it shouldn’t and share the with other people is very Eye and ironically in TMA we have seen a website that might have been aligned with the Eye called Sparksfly.com in “What The Ghost? - The Devil’s Dance” as one of the podcast’s sponsors. Georgie Barker pitches the website by saying “Wouldn’t it be great if your dating service knew you as well as your friends do? Well, SparksFly.com does! In fact, they know you better than anyone. With SparksFly, there’s no need to fill out lengthy surveys; they get all the information they need from your browser history – Wow. Okay! What The Ghost? listeners get a month’s membership for free! No need for a code; (voice climbing higher) they already know who you are! (still at a markedly higher register) SparksFly: Privacy is just another word for loneliness?!(really fast) I-went-out-with-someone-I-met-online-once. (exhale) We didn’t have a lot in common; I mentioned the podcast, and he spent the rest of the night complaining about the Ghostbusters remake. But we had Thai food, so it was an okay date. I got the tofu Massaman curry.” So it’s a website that revolves around knowing too much.
We also see Sam share a major trait that those attracted to the Eye often have, extreme curiosity. Jon had this trait (which is partially why he was picked as being the Archivist by Jonah) and Jon, Tim, and Melanie went to the Institute for answers about their encounters with the supernatural. Once again, if you want to hear my full thoughts and explanations about the Institute you can see it here (The Relationships Between the Dread Powers: The Eye- Knowledge is Fear and Ignorance is Bliss).
Further emphasizing the Eye connections, it seems like something is watching and recording the people working in the facility. This could be The Eye but it’s important to consider that it could be The Web spying on people again for some new plan or in order to manipulate The Eye again. Right now it could go either way because we don’t know if the Eye can watch everyone in this facility like it could in The Magnus Institute so it might need to use devices such as cameras and microphones in this specific instance but it could also be The Web basically posing as The Eye again (like how several characters assumed the tapes to belong to The Eye before it was revealed to be connected to the Web in TMA) while it gathers information if we want to assume that The Eye would already know everything happening in the facility.
The computers in TMP have been pretty interesting. They are pretty old and while Entities can and have manifested as very modern technology, such as cameras, they are noted to be more likely to manifest as old objects (probably because things that have been around longer are more likely to be more engrained in the social conscience and have more associations an Entity can use). It could also simply be to highlight the oddity of the computers. They are too old of models to have any voice reading software yet they do anyway. Which probably implies something supernatural because the reading itself can’t be coming from any technology. It could be coming from some sort of person, monster or even directly from the Eye. Of course, the computers are reading out statements. When asked what programs like FR3-d1 (FREDDY) do Alice says “It searches online databases, newspapers, forums or whatever for incidents, flags them, then passes them through to us for assessment.” Which just ties into compiling statements and what I said before about The Eye gathering information.
The job assigned to Sam and his coworkers seems to be to sort through statements which is one of the jobs the Archivists like Jon and Gertrude technically had in TMA. It was actually a major plot point that Gertrude purposefully made the Archives disorganized and Jon tried to reorganize them early in the series. When Sam starts reading the statement given to him he pauses and says “This is…” to which Alice replies “Yeah, they’re all like that. At least this one is short, nice easy start for you. So, once you’ve read it, you get out the binder…” So… the statements are probably just as horrifying as ever and it’s important to point out this has always been one of the major themes of The Eye. The Eye doesn’t seem to just be the fear of being watched but knowledge in general. This can take the form of someone watching you or knowing secrets for sure but it can also take the form of you yourself having seen too much or witnessed something you didn’t want to. This is why Jonah can shove horrifying information into the heads of Melanie and Martin in TMA (he can force them to see or know things they don’t want to).
Additionally, in MAG 200 (Last Words) we learn in what order the Powers were born in and the fears that led to their creation and we get this: “and struggle at learning, so too did they learn to fear that their eyes might deceive them, or show them too much.” Here the “fear that their eyes might deceive them” is the Spiral while the fear of “being shown too much” is The Eye since none of the other fears mentioned in that statement match up with the Eye and clearly correspond with the other Entities.
So statements aren’t always just the fear of someone hearing a story but the idea of being forced to live / relive or witness something horrifying.
Anyway, after Alice pulls out a binder this interaction occurs
ALICE CONT.
“…And look up whatever’s mentioned most in the case. Looking at this one we go to “D” and… Sam, eyes on me now. We go to “D” and, right, would you say this is more “Dolls comma watching” or “Dolls comma human skin”.”
SAM
“(a bit shell-shocked) I- Uh- I mean- I guess the human skin bit is only implied, so… both?”
ALICE
“Nah you can only pick one, Freddy’s dumb as rocks. Right, so, after each entry there’s four numbers. That’s the DPHW. So, “dolls comma watching” is… 1157. Then you cross reference with the table here, that would be a 2-C, and then you type that into the box here, along with date of incident if there is one and today’s date. Which gives us… Alice’s quickly types.”
ALICE CONT.
“CAT2RC1157-12052022-09012024 and then we hit submit.”
This is actually a very enlightening interaction. Something TMA touched on is that while sorting the Entities can be useful for noting certain interactions or behaviors it can easily reach a point of hubris if one tries to perfectly map and understand the fears. As Jon points out to Martin Post-Change, the categories of the Entities are just boxes and they don’t always fit cleanly into them. The Entities are actually all connected as one larger whole and can overlap greatly or multiple Entities can be at play at once,
In MAG 80 Leitner compares all the Entities to being body parts of a larger whole and the seemingly obtuse way of organizing the statement Sam is seeing are actually thematically very similar to a Domain we see in MAG 183 known as “The Monument.” Jon described the Domain as “homage” or mockery to people like Roberte Smirke. “A monument. To him and those like him, who tried to… categorise the world with themselves at the centre. In so doing, constructed the architecture of its suffering.”
Martin even points out that the architecture looks similar to the Institute to which Jon says “It makes sense. After all, it was built on the ruins of what Robert Smirke constructed.” So while the categories are fun and useful, TMA goes out of its way on several occasions to show that trying to cleanly organize, separate, and / or understand them perfectly is an act of hubris. I’m not sure if the Entities have a sense of humor but considering that an entire Domain was meant to comment on the absurdity and obtuseness of trying to perfectly organize the Entities and range of human fear as pointed out by Jon then something on a smaller scale could very well be possible.
The fact that Sam and company are only allowed to pick a single category for the dolls “wearing skin” or “watching” despite both being present further highlights the oversimplification at play. Wearing skin is something often seen with The Stranger and it has a connection to many dolls because of the fear of the uncanny valley. However, The Eye has a major emphasis on watching and the idea of an unblinking glassy eye fits very well with what we know of the Entity. Also, as mentioned earlier Entities can manifest as almost everything and on top of that we have seen people, Domains, and artifacts connected to multiple Entities at the same time. Martin was connected to the Lonely and Eye, his Domain was connected to the Eye and Lonely, and Gertrude mentions the Key of Solomon being a leitner connected to more than one Entity. There have even been statements with multiple Entities appearing and attacking the same person, such as in MAG 20 (Desecrated Host) with Father Edwin Burroughs. Who at least encounters The Eye and Flesh and possibly even more Entities.
After Sam submits his report he becomes curious as to where it goes but Alice doesn’t seem interested. In this regard Sam is actually quite similar to Jon and many other followers of the Eye and their attempts to understand everything that is happening. I’m not sure if Sam will become an Avatar but I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up pulled into The Eye’s clutches (if he’s not in them already).
We then get a statement from NORRIS which Alice pauses and explains that apparently the voices started appearing about a year ago. There is a rather shoddy explanation about a sound card so I think most likely this was of supernatural origin. The appearance of the voices could potentially mark when the Entities, like The Eye, showed up in this universe but it’s important to mention that we don’t actually know when the Entities showed up in this universe. We know that time can become finicky when traveling from universe to universe. This is shown in MAG 114 with Anya. Interestingly, when she went into the gap in reality The Web was making it was April 23rd 2009 HOWEVER when she came out it was April 9th 2009 and when she gave the statement she said the 23rd was somehow tomorrow which made no sense. So one thing we have to ask ourselves is how parallel does this univere’s timeline run with the original because it seems like different universes may be at different points in their timeline even if this universe is very similar. So much so that one universe may be several days “behind” another as a possibility. So when the Entities got dragged to the new universe we can’t actually rule out that the Entities may have shown up way earlier in that universe than when they left the TMA universe due to these universal “timezones” at play. They could have easily ended up years or decades earlier in this universe than the TMA universe we started in. Heck, it’s not even impossible that they were sent to the beginning of this universe (but that’s less likely than the idea that they just appeared during the stone age or something).
Alice also mentions that Colin wanted to “destroy the computers with a hammer” when the voices started which ties into what I said earlier about The Eye and not wanting to know something via sight or hearing.
Before we talk about NORRIS’ statement it’s interesting to note that there are three voices, with CHESTER and AUGUSTUS being the other two, and NORRIS and CHESTER being the most common. This is an interesting detail and may point to some factor at play that is preventing the voices from being completely random. Maybe they each read different types of statements or statements with different qualities? Maybe they pull statements from different places, different entities, or it’s just that they are loosely based on how much fear the statement might elicit in the listener or even just the length? I can’t say.
Anyway, we listen to NORRIS’ statement from Harriet Winstead and it appears that her partner, Arthur, was at some point taken in the night and replaced with something. When Harriet asks “Arthur” if it’s really him he says “Some of him.” This is almost definitely The Stranger at play. This plays out basically exactly like an encounter with other Stranger related beings such as the infamous “Anglerfish” from TMA. If we believe Annabelle’s explanation from TMA it’s even possible that the Anglerfish got pulled into this new universe due to being part of the Stranger as a monster. The Stranger embodies the fear of the unknown and the uncanny and while this statement does take place at night and mention shadows I can’t really say it relates to an Entity like The Dark all that much. Considering how strangely Arthur is noted to be moving I assume that the Stranger is feeding off the fear of encountering something uncanny (in that it resembles something / someone you know but is noticeably off) or the fear of someone changing so much you don’t know who they are anymore if not just the idea of someone being replaced by a total stranger. It could also be more simply encountering someone who has an issue you can’t identify.
Sam mentioned how upsetting the statement was which ties into what I said earlier and seems similar to the statements on the tapes in TMA. Martin was similarly noted to be rattled or mentally worn down when taking statements on at least one occasion.
Gwen is very interesting since she seems super invested in accurately categorizing the statements, unlike Alice. This obsession with categorizing and understanding the Entities or their manifestations is something we have seen with Angus Stacey (a previous Archivist who apparently wanted to recategorize Smirke’s Fourteen) and even Smirke himself. So this desire to categorize does have a precedent, especially for Eye related people or factions as we see with Angus. Gwen also prides herself on her accuracy.
Gwen is pulled into Lena’s office who confronts her about her behavior from earlier in the episode and Lena says “If you hate working here so completely, you are perfectly within your rights to resign. No one is forcing you to stay here.” to which Gwen responds “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I think this might actually be a cheeky TMA reference since within TMA Jon and company were quite literally being forced to keep working at the Institute due to a magically binding contract. How much Lena actually knows about the Entities or if there’s a similar force at play here is up in the air. Lena could be being quite literal here or sort of challenging Gwen to try it / call her bluff. It might also be ironic that a Bouchard has the option to quit but doesn’t.
Gwen also reveals she really wants Lena’s job which is extremely interesting since we later learn her last name is BOUCHARD in the credits. The last name Jonah took when he stole Elias’ identity. The fact that a Bouchard was the boss of the Institute in the previous universe and Gwen wants to be the boss of this organization is a very interesting parallel. It could point to the fact that Gwen knows something but that remains to be seen.
Sam encounters Colin and Colin eventually explains that he’s been tasked with developing an app and maintaining / fixing the computers but it’s very obtuse and nonsensical as he metaphorically bangs his head against it. This desire to understand a piece of old hardware is actually similar to an Eye related statement from TMA in MAG 148 (Extended Surveillance) involving a “Security Camera Instruction Manual.” Upon reading the Leitner the victim ends up metaphysically fusing with the camera system the manual is tied to but that’s not the important part. The important part is what led to Samson Stiller reading the manual in the first place. Specifically, a desire to understand and fix the camera system. Similarly, we have someone here struggling with an old system of technology that might also be tied to The Eye.
Gwen encounters Sam later and they have this interaction-
GWEN
“So what is it then?”
SAM
“Hmm?”
GWEN
“The awful, terrible thing that landed you here?”
SAM
“Does it have to be awful and terrible?”
GWEN
“Usually.”
This is very interesting because it shows Gwen is recognizing a pattern. A pattern we also see in TMA with characters like Jon, Tim, and Melanie who all joined the Institute looking for answers after strange encounters with the supernatural. It wouldn’t surprise me if, like the Institute that has burned down at this point, the O.I.A.R acts as both a way to feed off the fear of various encounters but also as bait to draw curious people to The Eye who then either give statements or end up aligned with the Eye.
Chester then gives us another statement (2 statements in one episode is quite the treat). This one is about someone named “RedCanary” investigating the ruins of the Institute during some spelunking. The Institute is noted as being “cleared” despite having no pictures which I think ties into The Eye’s relation to the idea of curiosity and wanting to see something even if doing so could put you in danger. When RedCanary attempts to upload the pictures they take they mention that they aren’t uploading. I think this could be The Eye trying to stoke curiosity since the lack of pictures means more people are likely to interpret the ruins of the Institute as not cleared and investigate the ruins in the future. It’s very possible or likely that despite being ruins the Eye still holds a lot of power there. RedCanary mentions that the ruins are in surprisingly good shape and seem like they haven’t been touched since the fire. But if the area is marked as “cleared” I wonder if someone did actually go to the ruins before but since they couldn’t upload the pictures there was just no evidence.
RedCanary says “It’s got a really cool vibe, though. Like, if you’d told me it was a Victorian asylum or something before the fire I reckon I’d have believed you” which is ironic given that the Institute in TMA was heavily connected to a panopticon (which is a type of prison “with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed”). Although, the original Institute wasn’t actually located on top of the panopticon and was later moved to London and built on top of it.
RedCanary mentions picking up a strange box and they are warned to not take it from the site. To which RedCanary says this “I know the rules. I’m going to go put it back, ok? So you can call off the dogs. I don’t need anonymous DMs calling me a thief or threatening me. I can dox people too, you know.” Doxxing is defined as “search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.” which ties in very well with The Eye’s theme of being found or revealing secrets.
RedCanary then begins to act very strangely. They post an image that’s taken down with the caption / description “Canaries should stay above ground.” An image so horrifying it needs to be taken down or people don’t want to see it ties into what I said earlier about the Eye and “seeing too much.” This is further emphasized by FlowersUnderground saying “Gross! Can we get some Mod action over here?” BadGrav31 says “What the hell is that? Are those eyes? Are you alright?” Pointing to this most likely be an incident relating to The Beholding since it likes to manifest as eyes in order to let people know they are being watched. It could be one of the other Entities like The Flesh and its body horror but I’ve already pointed out how much of this statement seems to parallel The Eye the most (and I think it’s rather fitting). It’s even taking place within the ruins of the Magnus Institute. Which was a place that was connected to The Eye (at least in the original timelines).
It’s also interesting that this specific statement plays after Gwen questions Sam as to why he’s here and we later learn Sam is trying to find information on the Magnus Institute. I wonder if The Eye or someone else is feeding Sam this info to stoke his curiosity, like both The Eye and Jonah did to Jon in TMA.
After that whole thing we later get this interaction between Alice and Sam
ALICE
Was it really that bad?
SAM
No worse than you warned me.
Although setting me up like that with the IT guy was
ALICE
Hilarious, I know. It’s win-win - you get a job, I get a fresh victim. It’s all in your contract.
SAM
Don’t remember signing that particular bit of the paperwork.
ALICE
Gotta read the fine print, kiddo.
This could be a reference to TMA since Jon and co signed a contract that tied them to the Institute. Making them fresh victims for Jonah and we know that the contract in the Institute wasn’t a normal one. Of course, I’m not saying Alice is being literal, I’m saying this is a moment of irony for TMA fans.
Alice and Sam have another interesting interaction.
SAM
Do you- Is there- What’s up with them? You think they’re real?
ALICE
Alice exhales.
I don’t see how they could be? Mostly I try not to think of them like that, like, things that might or might not have really happened. They’re just words on the screen.
SAM
I’ve no real idea what the OIAR even is.
Alice mentions she tries to not think about them, which ties into what I said about the idea of seeing or knowing too much in relation to The Eye. Just don’t think about it and try not to perceive it, you don’t want to, and ignorance is bliss.
We cut to one of the computers turning on and we hear Colin say this “(slightly manic) You’re not as clever as you think you are. You think you’ve got us all fooled, that no-one knows you’re listening, But I do. I know. I’m going to find you and then… ” So someone or something is definitely listening. Whether it’s the Eye, Web, some monster or person aligned with one or more of them remains to be completely confirmed. Of course, the fear of being monitored or watched feeds the Eye.
Closing
Anyway, that’s my quick thoughts on this episode alongside some of the early TMP threads. I’m going to try to do one of these for each episode as they come out and I’ll try to keep them shorter but that may be hard.
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..
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.
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.
General Thoughts
I’m going to go through a bit of the episode like usual but this time I’m going to try to be briefer about the recap and focus more on just the bits I notice or think are the most important and see how I like that method. It might make these shorter, faster, and quicker to the point.
Like always, we cut to some sort of device being used to perceive what is happening, a computer in this case. Which is again pointing to the idea that an Entity such as the Web, Eye or maybe even something or someone else entirely is listening through devices in the same way an Entity listened through the tapes. I have to ponder if maybe even something like The Extinction could be listening through these devices. As Leitner pointed out in TMA, all the Entities can manifest as just about anything as long as it produces their fear and we have seen Entities manifest as more modern technology in the past. The Eye has manifested as cameras and the Slaughter has manifested as an entire battlefield that probably included things like guns and bombs. We have statements of the Cult of the Lightless Flame benefiting from destruction wrought by plane bombings and Gertrude postulates that if the followers of The Slaughter had known that the atomic bombings were going to happen in WWII then maybe they could’ve set up a ritual or something similar around it in MAG 137 (Nemesis).
But make no mistake, despite all that it is still very clear that some Entities tend to manifest in certain ways more than others. The Buried is much more likely to involve someone burying you alive than The Slaughter is even though being buried alive can be a very real form of violence. But I suppose manifesting as a gun or knife gets that point across much quicker. Certain manifestations can also be more difficult to use when invoking fears unless you are targeting a specific person. It is very hard for The Buried to make you feel trapped if it is manifesting as wide open areas unless it was just using them for contrast or something. Not that it couldn’t, but the association of being trapped in a tight enclosed space is much more common and easier to understand imagery in regards to being trapped. Likewise, you could make the argument that while all the Powers can and do manifest as certain forms of technology it is possible that The Extinction manifests as more advanced forms of technology more often.
As I mentioned earlier, The Extinction seems to be the fear of catastrophic and large scale change. As postulated by Dekker in MAG 134 (Time of Revelation) “But now the fear is not of a rapture or a revelation. It is of catastrophic change. Mankind will warp the world so much it kills us all, and leaves only a thousand years of plastic behind. Technology will strip us of what it means to be human, and leave us something alien and cold. We will press a button that in a moment will destroy everything we have ever been. Animals are witnessing the end of their entire species within a single generation.” Additionally, some of the names for The Extinction are “The Terrible Change” and “The Future Without Us.” So even in TMA characters were noting connections with The Extinction and technology. Additionally, the thing technology, mutations, and apocalyptic events tend to have in common is that fear of large scale change. That even if what is being added or taken away wouldn’t kill us like The End might, we will live in a fundamentally different and scary world. Tying into this is of course the fear of advancing technology and by proxy gaining more ways to fuck us over or make the world a worse place. Dystopian surveillance states often use technology to help keep people in line. Monitoring via cameras or any other number of things like peoples’ social media. Something that is a lot harder to do without this technology.
We also have to ask if The Extinction did emerge would it be like The Web and The End? Most of the Entities operate in a manner that is simplistic yet alien to us. They just want as much fear as possible at any given time but don’t really seem to care where they get it or what happens after most of the time. However The Web and End have a mind and philosophy that is at least closer to that of a human or one we might understand. The Web and End can both conceptualize the future and sort of plan for it. Where the other Entities are fine enacting The Change even if it traps them, The Web and End seem to not be interested in that and The Web at least realizes if the rituals worked the Entities might end up trapped and die without a plan while The End doesn’t seem to mind and apparently craves finality anyway. So is The Extinction similar? Can it conceptualize the future, does it have a similar sort of understandable philosophy or even a grand plan? Is it using The Eye like the Web did in TMA or something similar. Thematically it does sort of make sense that a being born from a fear so often tied to the future consequences based on current actions might be able to form long term plans like The Web (an Entity tied to plans, schemes, manipulation and control).
Some people might seem confused about how I can call The Web and End’s mindset different from the other Entities when they are all nebulous categories that overlap with each other and in MAG 200 The Web even seems to distinguish itself from the other Entities. But I would argue it’s kind of like how you can’t control every part of your body. Yes, an eye is a part of our body just like our brain is but they serve 2 different functions and we cannot control when our pupils dilate even as your eyes burn from a bright light. They just do so automatically when exposed to light. In more extreme examples sometimes parts of the body can even attack or reject organs as well as other parts of itself in a sort of weird reaction in the same way two Entities might attack each other even if in actuality they are both part of a bigger whole.
Whether or not The Extinction has emerged I cannot say. There is an argument that even if you want to buy that the Entities we are following right now are indeed Smirke’s 14 then they might have been reset and since The Extinction wasn’t needed in Jonah’s ritual you could argue it never got the chance to emerge and is back to square one. HOWEVER, you could also very well make the argument for The Extinction emerging too. The Change might have been just the massive burst of fear the Entity needed to come into fruition and on top of that Dekker seems to imply the Entity is based on the fear of massive change. The Change was literally a universe spanning event that turned everything into a fear hellscape and we do see that some, but not all, people are aware that their lives used to be different and something changed to make it so much worse even if they don’t always seem to know what. Additionally, Jon says this in MAG 175 (Epoch) when talking about The Extinction’s domain “Of course it was real – A-At least in the sense that – it was a thing people feared. Whether it was strong enough in its own right to be considered at a level with Smirke’s Fourteen, or – whether it was on its way to getting there, I – maybe. This sort of thing is always muddy.”
But why is this all important, why am I mentioning this and why now? Well, previously I argued that Smirke’s 14 are probably still applicable and I even argued that for the most part they seem to be behaving and acting the same. The Eye forcing people to see things, The Stranger wearing skin to disguise itself, The Flesh taking advantage of a desire for perfection, etc. and I do stand by this idea being the most likely possibility right now, even if it’s not guaranteed. Or at least I stand by it in the sense that I think Smirke’s categories are still relevant and in play to about the same degree they were in TMA. While I do disagree with the idea that the categories are any more or less vague and are somehow revolving around desires instead of fear now I failed to consider how an emerging new Entity could impact how the existing Entities manifest, and as some people have rightly pointed out there’s clearly a greater emphasis on technology in TMP.
As I’ve mentioned before, all the Entities are connected. They are like parts of a body according to Leitner or a spectrum of colors according to Gerard. So what if The Extinction emerging created a sort of ripple effect across the other Entities? Would the emergence of The Extinction push or pull The Entities towards manifesting with or around more advanced forms of technology more often? If we are using the color example from Gerard you could make that argument (even if you want to say that we’re taking the example too literally). Imagine you can only see yellow and blue due to the limitations of your eyes or brain. These two colors are the existing Entities. Now imagine one day you suddenly get hit in the head and your eyes suddenly mutate or a neuron is knocked back into place and now you can also see red (a new Entity). Did you go from being able to see 2 colors to 3 colors? No, you went from being able to see yellow, and blue along with all the possible combinations those two colors have with each other as well as black and white to being able to not only see red but every possible combination red could have with one or both of those colors as well as black and / or white.
In this example it’s not like red didn’t exist before either. You just couldn’t perceive it but now that you can and your entire view of the color spectrum has changed. To get what I’m saying just look up some color wheels based on color blindness. The loss or addition of a color doesn’t just change one color on the spectrum but all of them.
It might change how you maneuver or navigate through the world as certain things stand out more or less to you based on their color. A rock might suddenly seem more shiny or more dull. Parts of the previous colors are still there but now suddenly you not only see red but more shades of blue with more nuance. It’s kind of like if all the Entities were stretched just a bit to the left or something. It also makes me wonder if something similar happened when the other Entities emerged. For example, with The Dark there are plenty of statements that take place at night, in shadow, or darkness that have nothing to do with The Dark (there’s even statements about The Eye involving strange shadowy figures in the night despite its eyes clearly being visible). However, the emergence of The Dark would have signaled that the fear of the darkness was becoming more common and so adding darkness to something scary could have heightened the fear for the Entities. For example, only The Hunt existed before The Dark and being chased is scary but for most people being chased in the dark is even scarier.
Now imagine The Stranger emerges. Suddenly you don’t even know what’s chasing you in the dark which makes it even more frightening and then suddenly The Eye emerges and now people are making statements about that time this event happened while they are constantly reminding you of it in order to make you relive it. Also, the unknown monster has your house address and knows where you live too AND is threatening to dox you. Of course, you could argue against this by saying this might just depend on the fear and it’s possible not every fear would have this effect if at all. It’s possible that there were just as many darkness related instances before The Dark but it was just tied to The Hunt.
This metaphor could go both ways for both the Entities and people. Since people are becoming aware of more fears and they are becoming more visible then the Entities can get more “nuanced” or “vibrant” with their colors. For people, they may suddenly notice concepts and objects they did not before due to a fear becoming more common.
u/UffishWerf also makes an interesting point about color theory and how the words that evolve to describe certain colors often come about in a certain order(https://www.reddit.com/r/themagnusprotocol/comments/1bm3fja/comment/kwbdv6e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). “Berlin and Kay are the guys to read up on for this, but the basics are this: in the languages they studied, black and white were named first, then red, then green or yellow, then the other one of green or yellow, then blue, then brown, then (any order), purple, pink, orange, and gray. (Let’s take a moment to remember that in English, the color orange is named after the fruit. Wild.) There’s also a theory that in civilizations, before those words evolve, they don’t really notice or have a concept for the colors they haven’t gotten to yet, like how Homer wrote about the “wine-dark sea,” describing something we’d think of as blue as red, instead. Not everyone agrees those theories is are, but I think they’re fine for applying to TMA.” I would personally argue that there’s actually a precedent for this when looking at the Entities. The Powers didn’t emerge all at once and most of them are primarily fueled by and born of human fears because they are “more nuanced.” Just like how the mantis shrimp can see more colors than we could ever dream of, humans might be able to perceive more nuanced and different kinds of fears than most animals ever could. It’s not just about being hunted anymore but the possibility of Extinction level events. We also know that both TMA and the TMP universes seem relatively similar to our own (outside of supernatural fear entities) and parallel each other greatly. One could argue that because of this the order in which the Entities occur might remain relatively the same. First, is a fear born of the basic predator and prey relationship of being hunted, then animals like humans realizing all the stuff that could be lurking in the dark, so on and so forth.
Of course, I’m not saying this would necessarily be a hard rule and one could make this argument in support of the idea that we aren’t seeing the Entities from TMA but rather a new set of similar Entities
There’s also time and culture. The fear of The Eye might become more prevalent the more knowledge humans as a whole obtain and the more ways we have to record and track things like statements and various accounts. The Stranger might become more prevalent upon the realization that the world isn’t just determined by gods and magic that we have laid out in detailed creation myths that leave no room for speculation but that we might not know how the universe was created and we still don’t know a lot about most of the universe. Heck, most of the ocean hasn’t been fully explored, much less space.
Most of this is just conjecture and I’m not sure how much I even buy all these points but I think it’s just a nice food for thought.
Episode 1 Again
Okay, I’m going back to TMP episode 1 for a second because I’m fucking kicking myself here. In the quick thoughts about that episode (Episode 1 TMP Quick Thoughts) I pointed out that the first statement kind of screams of The Stranger and not only has themes of someone being replaced and the idea of wearing skin but more specifically the monster in question seems extremely similar to the Anglerfish in TMA (a monster that also stole skin).
But let’s look at the response in that TMP episode. When Harriet asks “Arthur” if it’s really him he says “Some of him.” Now, when Jon asks Sarah Baldwin if she is still herself in MAG 096 (Return to Sender) we get this.
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.
So when Jon asks Sarah, a victim of the Anglerfish, who she is, what she says is SOME of her, SOME OF HER. This isn’t even my fucking maddest point because the first episode of TMP might actually parallel the first episode of TMA. The first statement we ever get in TMP shares a lot of similarities with the Anglefish and do you guys fucking know what the first episode of TMA is??? MAG 001 (Anglerfish)… FUCKING ANGLERFISH (sorry for the strong language I’m just getting a bit excited).
Something I’ve also pointed out is that sometimes the Entities have thematic roles in the story. The Stranger is the fear of the unknown so when our characters are learning about these new Entities they don’t yet understand they are being thrust into the unknown, so it makes sense that the first statements thematically connect with that via the Entity.
Episode 3 “Putting Down Roots”
Okay, okay, time for the actual episode. The statement in this episode has been throwing people for a loop the most and probably led to the most speculation on if the Entities have changed but I need to slow down.
We cut to Colin trying to fix Alice’s assigned computer while Alice commentates and we just see how shitty the computers are. When Colin tries to insert a command he gets a .jmj error and when Alice questions what that is Colin says “Nothing. It’s just an excuse for the system to ruin my day, is what it is.” Alice suggests trying another computer but Colin says “No. It’s doing this on purpose and that will only encourage it.” Which is odd. First, like I’ve mentioned before, Colin has some traits we have seen with some other Eye related stuff via his obsession with trying to fix things like this. This desire to understand a piece of old hardware is actually similar to an Eye related statement from TMA in MAG 148 (Extended Surveillance) involving a “Security Camera Instruction Manual.” Upon reading the Leitner the victim ends up metaphysically fusing with the camera system the manual is tied to but that’s not the important part. The important part is what led to Samson Stiller reading the manual in the first place. Specifically, a desire to understand and fix the camera system.
Similarly, we have someone here struggling with an old system of technology that might also be tied to The Eye. In case you aren’t completely convinced about where I’m coming from (even if you disagree) Colin says “I know this system better than anyone alive and I still don’t understand how it works. So, I can guarantee you that none of those mouthbreathers would even know where to begin with this steaming pile of.”
In MAG 148 (Extended Surveillance) we get “I remember the smell of dust when Dave went and cracked open the filing cabinet in the back room, before waving his arms in the direction of the drawer and shrugging. I mean, I’d have just left it, obviously, but I think Samson was taking the whole knowing how the system works thing as like – a point of pride? Something he could salvage from the whole situation. Just a way of getting some control over his life, you know?” So here we can see someone else taking pride in fixing an old outdated machine that other people seem not to care about.
But this also shows Colin treating the computer like it’s alive. People talking to their computers isn’t SUPER weird or unheard of but considering Colin’s reaction last episode this might be a double meaning.
Colin could be trying to talk to whatever he thinks or knows is watching him through the computer. It is also possible that the computer literally is part of an Entity such as The Eye, Web, or Extinction due to being some sort of artifact or maybe even a being or monster (kind of like the Distortion looking like a weird door for a good chunk of its existence despite being sort of alive). Colin also pushes back against Alice trying to give the computers nicknames and says “Making friends with this god awful program that tries to throw itself into oblivion every time I turn on a console is not cute. It’s hard enough using every nanosecond of my waking life just to keep this byzantine mess from crapping the bed without you taking the piss.” Maybe he’s just annoyed but he might literally think the computer is trying to spite him and wants to keep people like Alice from getting too attached.
Also, pointing back to what I said earlier about The Extinction, Colin says this “Do you have any idea what will happen if this thing finally managed to extinct itself?” So fear of change and we also know the computers don’t react well to updates. Colin manages to fix it, Alice gives a quip, Colin acts annoyed, and then we get to hear the statement.
I’m not going to run through the statement in as detailed a manner as I usually do but I am still going to see if it maps onto Smirke’s 14 (plus the Extinction (So Dekker’s 15 maybe?)). Like I say every time this could be an act of hubris but even if I’m wrong it’ll still be fun to note possible parallels.
Okay, I think this statement is dealing with either The Eye or The Corruption. Let’s run through The Eye similarities.
Edit (I Might have Fucked Up)
Okay, on further review I may have misinterpreted some important parts of this statement. Luckily, many of the points I made about the statement’s connection to The Corruption and Eye are still pretty accurate I say but I really don’t want to spread misinformation and it’s my first time doing more active content like this and trying to actually keep up with something instead of chewing on it for a month while I write a 100 page essay on it. I’m just going to run through some of the stuff with some corrections.
First off, I’d still argue themes of The Corruption and The Eye are present although I’m leaning way more towards The Corruption now. There’s also some pretty strong spiral themes.
I’m just going to leave what I said about The Eye here- First off, Dr. Webber mentions this “Today was bedlam. I had it all planned out, all of it! And then a panic attack just choked the nerve out of me. It was so humiliating! Felt like the ground was going to swallow me whole, with everyone staring at me only to roll their eyes at my “hysterics,” as the paramedic put it. They don’t understand. I was so close to getting caught… but it’s done. All I need to do now is disappear. I can’t go home. Not for a few days at least. And I’ll have to avoid the usual haunts until they forgot 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. One man kept staring at me on the tube. He looked like he was connecting the dots… I’m paranoid, I know, lying low amongst wildflowers in an overgrown garden. The mud has ruined my shoes.” Here we see Webber is having a panic attack and he seems upset that people were judging him. The Eye also includes the fear of being judged. Additionally, he seems fearful of being caught / perceived, and he notes a man staring at him and begins to fear that he’s “connecting the dots.”
Webber mentions he is paranoid which could point to The Spiral but I question what he is paranoid about. The Spiral is the fear that you or something is wrong. You thought it was one way only for it to be another. This can be from someone lying to you but also your senses being inaccurate causing you to see or think about things that aren’t there. But paranoia takes many forms and paranoia isn’t always just uncertainty or confusion. There are all kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories about how we are secretly being watched or monitored that would be up The Beholding’s alley. As I’ve mentioned previously the Eye also connects to the idea of “ignorance is bliss.” That sometimes merely knowing something can put you in danger or hurt you. The idea of “seeing too much” as mentioned in MAG 200. This “seeing too much” can take the form of trauma permanently mentally scarring you but also someone or something might punish you for knowing something or might also want to know what you know. Sometimes knowing something puts you in danger. For example, if you see a murder by the mafia said mafia may kill you or hunt you down because you have seen / known too much and you’re now a witness or loose end. If a shady government realizes you know something, such as whereabouts of certain people, they might “make you disappear/”
We also get “It’s almost midnight.(Why isn’t it darker?).” Which is interesting. Usually people prefer being in well lit areas but what’s something the darkness provides? It’s harder to be seen and perceived in the dark. The kind of people often operating in the dark either have a specific job or are trying to avoid being seen. There’s a reason that ninjas performed espionage and assassinations in the dark. If you are operating in well lit areas you are more likely to be seen and it can be harder to sneak around.
Webber talks about changing his identity which further points to the fear of being found out. He also says “I’m cold but it’s worth it; no one will find me here.” and “I don’t have much choice; where would I go? I can’t go home, that’s the first place they’d look. Besides, too many memories there, and then there are the neighbours… Always snooping around with their community watch flyers. I won’t miss parking scheme meetings, that’s for sure.”
Going back to the point about how unusually bright it is we get “It’s well after midnight. It should be pitch black, but I can still make out grey shapes in the gloom. The voice is still calling for me. I’ve got to stay still even though my heart is racing.” So yeah, Webber is almost definitely banking on the cover of night and doesn’t want people to see or perceive him.“It is noted that Maddie “makes a good point, though. Doctors do make the worst patients. We are always self-diagnosing, and it’s always doom and gloom.” and “I can see my bones are tangled with the same fine strands as my wounds. It’s fascinating to see.” which I feel could tie into The Eye and extreme curiosity. In MAG 92 (Nothing Beside Remains) Jonah / Elias read a statement from Barnabas Bennett involving a letter being sent to Jonah Magnus for help after Barnabas pissed off Mordechai Lukas. Jonah / Elias tells Jon in the post statement that Magnus could have intervened and saved Barnabas but chose not to. He didn’t choose not to do so out of malice or lack of caring but simply because he was curious about what would happen to Barnabas and wanted to observe the events. So the Eye definitely has a precedent for just staring at things but not actually doing anything about them.
But then there’s that weird rash infection with all the roots. I mean yeah there’s a very real argument for The Corruption, both thematically and physically, but Leitner has mentioned that the Powers can manifest as anything that generates the fear they feed off of. Not only that, but there is a precedent for The Eye manifesting as a disease or infection. Albrecht von Closen had an encounter with The Eye after coming across a tomb and taking a bunch of old books with numerous statements (something Jonah later stole). In MAG 127 (Remains to be Seen) it’s clear Albrecht is being beset by a strange illness and he is becoming sickly and dying (he’s also spouting statements and staring at people). Albrecht later dies from unknown causes (the mysterious illness) and an autopsy reveals that his internal organs, bones, and inner skin had been covered with eyes… but there’s no eyes visible in this TMP episode. It might literally just be a disease caused by Webber not getting medical treatment or it could be The Eye trying to force Webber to choose between hiding and dying or risk going out and interacting with people. To risk being perceived.
Okay, here is where I make my first mistake. I say he doesn’t like how Jasmine talks to Gerard even though he is clearly talking about Maddie and in addition to that I misread and misheard Gerald as Gerard. So she was talking to someone completely unrelated to the Eye. Something that weakens my point for the Eye.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. The Corruption is more likely a possibility here. Jane Prentiss mentions that she didn’t like The Eye and her worms reacted to it. She even described it as anathema. So maybe the fear of being perceived is similar to what Jane experienced. Additionally, the Corruption often ties into themes of toxic love. Specifically, forms of toxic love we might find disgusting or repulsive. The Corruption doesn’t just relate to physically disgusting things but also behaviors and mentalities we might find gross. Someone can be physically sick and have a “sick” behavior or be “sick” in the head. Here we see Maddie caring for Webber even as he rots away but she never seems to try to get him the help he probably needs from other people.
You could also argue that Webber seems unhealthily attached to Maddie and is using her to enable his self-destructive behavior. Not to mention The Corruption and disease with all the maggots going hand-in-hand all the time. Something I stupidly forgot in the original version of this was that in the very medical files NORRIS is spitting out, Maddie is “Maddie Webber, age 39 – Deceased— ” and in addition to that the part of the file before this says “journal of Dr. Samuel Webber, age 46. Issued by grief councillor Harriot Manning.” So if this is being documented by Webber as he is turning into a tree that would mean either 1. Maddie is already dead and this is all happening due to the doctor’s unhealthy emotional response and attachment or 2. The doctor possibly straight up killed Maddie. With this in mind that would mean that Webber’s panic attack is linked to the death of Maddie and the thing he is freaking out about is the possibility of people knowing he thinks Maddie is alive or that he might have killed her. The fact that he says “They don’t understand. I was so close to getting caught… but it’s done. All I need to do now is disappear.” points to the idea that he might have killed her.
This part of the statement “Thought I heard someone calling my name. No flashlight though, no movement, just the voice. Sounds like Maddie. My hands won’t stop shaking” might have been The Corruption using the feelings of disgust and love Webber has towards himself and Maddie to call to him. So when Webber dies he rots away and can metaphorically join his also rotting life within the garden or dirt that everyone’s body will one day decompose into.
This wildly changes the reading to being way more Corruption coded. Someone who loved someone in such an incredibly unhealthy way he ended up killing the person he loved. There’s also an interesting metaphor here for the garden. Someone being killed and metaphorically or literally being used to allow a garden to grow as their body rots into something disgusting before being combined with feelings of shame, self loathing, and disgust. The Corruption and self loathing is something I haven’t really mentioned but there’s a precedent for it. As I’ve mentioned, corruption is the fear of disgusting things and that would often include the fear that you yourself might be disgusting physically or in terms of behavior. If you hate yourself you might say “I’m a piece of shit” and the idea of that is usually people find shit to be disgusting and repulsive.
You could even argue for overlapping fears or similarities here. The Corruption is basically the fear of disgusting things and The Eye also includes the fear of being judged. So where they might overlap is the fear of you yourself being disgusting and the fear that other people might judge you as disgusting.
Sam also says “What do I even file that as? I doubt there’s a code for “parasitic-garden-that-whisperswith-the-voice-of-the-woman-heclearly-murderd-and-sort-ofturns-you-into-a-tree”” which could point back to The Corruption and themes of a toxic relationship. Alice also says ““Infection” comma “arboreal”. Cross link it with “guilt” if you’re feeling fancy.” And yeah I can see why someone might be afraid of being found disgusting via guilt about a certain behavior or belief.
There’s also an argument for The Flesh and body horror and in TMA sometimes The Flesh had a bit of garden theme, such as with Jared Hopworth’s domain.
In the original version I do mention The Spiral as a strong possibility but I also don’t give it a fear shake. I’m not going super in depth to it but Webber is clearly losing it and you could argue that maybe this Maddie person is connected to the Spiral and Webber acknowledges he is paranoid so he might be plenty afraid of going crazy. Mentions about how, for example, he is having trouble telling what time of day it is due to the unusual amounts of light could point to themes of The Spiral and being mistaken about something.
This statement is definitely more nebulous than the others so far but at the same time I don’t really see it being different than for example the vampire or that one time someone had to watch a video of a guy eating a computer. There are still statements from TMA that are just as nebulous and people are still debating to this very day what Entity these statements or beings might / should belong to.
Due to the additions I am more confident that this statement is probably connected towards The Corruption. Maybe like 85% sure this is The Corruption (If I had to assign an Entity and we assume they are still present) and the other possibilities being The Eye, Spiral, and Flesh respectively. With The Eye and Spiral being more likely than The Flesh.
Gwen enters the scene and offers Alice some sort of job “thing” on the 27th but refuses to elaborate on what it is. Which reminds me of the behavior Jonah had after taking over Elias and how he often held information from people like Jon for reasons that weren’t always clear. But eventually Alice gets Gwen to open up and she admits that it’s dinner with friends. Despite this it’s still kind of weird that Gwen thought to ask Alice of all people. They don’t exactly seem like friends so that’s strange. I can’t say if this means anything though.
Someone pointed out that Gwen is probably asking Alice to take her shift which makes a lot more sense then whatever the fuck I thought was happening. It’s still interesting that Gwen would ask for a favor though and then proceed to not elaborate which I still find really weird. Normally, if you ask for a favor you usually want to say why in order to get sympathy or understanding and trying to just get someone to do stuff for you for no reason tends to come off as shady. I still wonder if there’s a particular reason Gwen is so cagey. She asked what terrible event led Sam working for this organization in a past episode so I wonder if all the characters have some sort of trauma or encounter with the supernatural that is affecting them differently.
Conclusion
I don’t have much to say because I’ve been talking too long. Feel free to reply, maybe I’ll respond with my own thoughts in agreement or disagreement.
Also, make sure to point out if I misread anything or accidentally forgot something.
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.
Big Oopsie
In my last discussion around Episode 3 I realized I made some major mistakes with my interpretation of the statement. Luckily, it turns out most of the specific points about the Entities I mentioned still apply but it definitely pushes Webber’s statement towards having more themes revolving around The Corruption. On Reddit I posted notes in the replies of the post with the mistakes I made and how that changes my reading of the episode. I also have the corrections in italics on the google doc and Tumblr versions of that episode.
For the sake of convenience before I look at this episode here are the paragraphs and their corrections.
But then there’s that weird rash infection with all the roots. I mean yeah there’s a very real argument for The Corruption, both thematically and physically, but Leitner has mentioned that the Powers can manifest as anything that generates the fear they feed off of. Not only that, but there is a precedent for The Eye manifesting as a disease or infection. Albrecht von Closen had an encounter with The Eye after coming across a tomb and taking a bunch of old books with numerous statements (something Jonah later stole). In MAG 127 (Remains to be Seen) it’s clear Albrecht is being beset by a strange illness and he is becoming sickly and dying (he’s also spouting statements and staring at people). Albrecht later dies from unknown causes (the mysterious illness) and an autopsy reveals that his internal organs, bones, and inner skin had been covered with eyes… but there’s no eyes visible in this TMP episode. It might literally just be a disease caused by Webber not getting medical treatment or it could be The Eye trying to force Webber to choose between hiding and dying or risk going out and interacting with people. To risk being perceived.
Okay, here is where I make my first mistake. I say he doesn’t like how Jasmine talks to Gerard even though he is clearly talking about Maddie and in addition to that I misread and misheard Gerald as Gerard. So she was talking to someone completely unrelated to the Eye. Something that weakens my point for the Eye.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. The Corruption is more likely a possibility here. Jane Prentiss mentions that she didn’t like The Eye and her worms reacted to it. She even described it as anathema. So maybe the fear of being perceived is similar to what Jane experienced. Additionally, the Corruption often ties into themes of toxic love. Specifically, forms of toxic love we might find disgusting or repulsive. The Corruption doesn’t just relate to physically disgusting things but also behaviors and mentalities we might find gross. Someone can be physically sick and have a “sick” behavior or be “sick” in the head. Here we see Maddie caring for Webber even as he rots away but she never seems to try to get him the help he probably needs from other people.
You could also argue that Webber seems unhealthily attached to Maddie and is using her to enable his self-destructive behavior. Not to mention The Corruption and disease with all the maggots going hand-in-hand all the time. Something I stupidly forgot in the original version of this was that in the very medical files NORRIS is spitting out, Maddie is “Maddie Webber, age 39 – Deceased— ” and in addition to that the part of the file before this says “journal of Dr. Samuel Webber, age 46. Issued by grief councillor Harriot Manning.” So if this is being documented by Webber as he is turning into a tree that would mean either 1. Maddie is already dead and this is all happening due to the doctor’s unhealthy emotional response and attachment or 2. The doctor possibly straight up killed Maddie. With this in mind that would mean that Webber’s panic attack is linked to the death of Maddie and the thing he is freaking out about is the possibility of people knowing he thinks Maddie is alive or that he might have killed her. The fact that he says “They don’t understand. I was so close to getting caught… but it’s done. All I need to do now is disappear.” points to the idea that he might have killed her.
This part of the statement “Thought I heard someone calling my name. No flashlight though, no movement, just the voice. Sounds like Maddie. My hands won’t stop shaking” might have been The Corruption using the feelings of disgust and love Webber has towards himself and Maddie to call to him. So when Webber dies he rots away and can metaphorically join his also rotting life within the garden or dirt that everyone’s body will one day decompose into.
This wildly changes the reading to being way more Corruption coded. Someone who loved someone in such an incredibly unhealthy way he ended up killing the person he loved. There’s also an interesting metaphor here for the garden. Someone being killed and metaphorically or literally being used to allow a garden to grow as their body rots into something disgusting before being combined with feelings of shame, self loathing, and disgust. The Corruption and self loathing is something I haven’t really mentioned but there’s a precedent for it. As I’ve mentioned, corruption is the fear of disgusting things and that would often include the fear that you yourself might be disgusting physically or in terms of behavior. If you hate yourself you might say “I’m a piece of shit” and the idea of that is usually people find shit to be disgusting and repulsive.
There’s also an argument for The Flesh and body horror and in TMA sometimes The Flesh had a bit of garden theme, such as with Jared Hopworth’s domain.
In the original version I do mention The Spiral as a strong possibility but I also don’t give it a fear shake. I’m not going super in depth to it but Webber is clearly losing it and you could argue that maybe this Maddie person is connected to the Spiral and Webber acknowledges he is paranoid so he might be plenty afraid of going crazy. Mentions about how, for example, he is having trouble telling what time of day it is due to the unusual amounts of light could point to themes of The Spiral and being mistaken about something.
This statement is definitely more nebulous than the others so far but at the same time I don’t really see it being different than for example the vampire or that one time someone had to watch a video of a guy eating a computer. There are still statements from TMA that are just as nebulous and people are still debating to this very day what Entity these statements or beings might / should belong to.
Due to the additions I am more confident that this statement is probably connected towards The Corruption. Maybe like 85% sure this is The Corruption (If I had to assign an Entity and we assume they are still present) and the other possibilities being The Eye, Spiral, and Flesh respectively. With The Eye and Spiral being more likely than The Flesh.
Gwen enters the scene and offers Alice some sort of job “thing” on the 27th but refuses to elaborate on what it is. Which reminds me of the behavior Jonah had after taking over Elias and how he often held information from people like Jon for reasons that weren’t always clear. But eventually Alice gets Gwen to open up and she admits that it’s dinner with friends. Despite this it’s still kind of weird that Gwen thought to ask Alice of all people. They don’t exactly seem like friends so that’s strange. I can’t say if this means anything though.
Someone pointed out that Gwen is probably asking Alice to take her shift which makes a lot more sense then whatever the fuck I thought was happening. It’s still interesting that Gwen would ask for a favor though and then proceed to not elaborate which I still find really weird. Normally, if you ask for a favor you usually want to say why in order to get sympathy or understanding and trying to just get someone to do stuff for you for no reason tends to come off as shady. I still wonder if there’s a particular reason Gwen is so cagey. She asked what terrible event led Sam working for this organization in a past episode so I wonder if all the characters have some sort of trauma or encounter with the supernatural that is affecting them differently.
Episode 4 “Taking Notes”
Okay let’s get started with the episode. Once again we cut to hearing what’s happening in the show via the computers. I’ve already spoken about this 3 times at this point so blah blah blah something like The Web or Eye is watching through devices, maybe The Extinction if you want to go full on mad conspiracy theorist and I think Smirke’s 14 are still at play and if I’m wrong yolo but also maybe The Extinction emerged, who knows.
Alice immediately starts grilling Sam for trying to access restricted files after receiving a security notification from Sam’s activities. Sam was looking for terms relating to “Magnus” and “Protocol”…. roll credits.
But on a more serious note, this ties into a point I’ve been making again and again about Sam. He is extraordinarily curious and in this respect he is very similar to some other notably Eye aligned people like Jon. Additionally, the Eye just tends to attract people who are curious or want to know / witness something in various ways. Sam points out that there’s no reason Alice should be getting any computer security notifications and she says “I shouldn’t be, but you should be damn glad that this system doesn’t do anything like it should. If Colin caught wind of this he would have a meltdown! ” Which I think could also tie into The Eye since one of the things the Entity revolves around is the fear of being perceived and / or judged. So here we have Sam being caught doing something he clearly shouldn’t be doing and it’s being revealed to someone who shouldn’t have seen it. Alice, also belabors the point by saying Colin would be pissed if he found out what Sam tried to do.
I know that whether the computers are aligned with The Eye specifically might be debatable and if it turns out that these computers aren’t Eye aligned this could debunk my point. There is definitely a precedent for it since the Tapes from TMA were actually aligned with The Web. However, I would argue that in the case of the Tapes, even though the artifacts themselves were aligned with The Web, taking statements and recording them is something The Eye still tended to do and The Web’s plan involved using the statements in order to metaphysically tie the Entities to them so they could be dragged to a new universe. What I’m saying is aspects of The Eye could still be at play.
Sam of course questions why files mentioning “The Protocol” would be restricted and Alice does what she usually does and basically tells him to stop asking questions. Which is fair in this case because the government probably doesn’t take snooping around secret files very lightly. This idea of the government catching you trying to take secrets and potentially doing something terrible if they catch you could also relate to The Eye. Alice says that whatever “The Protocol” happens to be it seems to be super high level lock and key stuff.
When asked how much trouble Sam could be in if caught we get this interaction.
ALICE
“All I know is it used to involve Starkwall.”
SAM
“Starkwall? As in “The San Pedro Square Massacre” Starkwall?”
ALICE
“The private military contractors yeah.”
I did an EXTREMELY light Google search and, at least on the surface, it doesn’t seem like this massacre is a direct reference to a real event. It’s also too early to make any hard guesses that aren’t just speculating but here are some of the first possibilities that come to my head.
Maybe, this massacre is connected to when the Entities first emerged and their first appearance caused some level of chaos due to a bunch of supernatural and weird stuff potentially happening. Maybe, it’s a lot more simple and it’s just a violent event tied to an Entity like The Slaughter. Sam seems to have a strong reaction to Starkwall implying that they are either famous or infamous to at least some people. Is this organization tied to an Entity like The Slaughter? It could also be that they specifically deal with fighting or dealing with the supernatural like how Section 31 of the police force in TMA was called upon to deal with supernatural things. Maybe Starkwall will even end having Hunters tied to The Hunt in the same way that Section 31 did? Of course, it’s way too early with way too little information to say with certainty.
I think it’s very interesting that, unlike TMA, none of the characters mention that they feel like they are constantly being watched no matter where they go in the O.I.A.R. facility in the same way Jon and co mentioned they felt like they were being watched in the Archives. It could just be that they haven’t mentioned it though since it’s not like that detail was dropped in episode 1 of TMA either.
When the statement this episode starts it is AUGUSTUS to which Alice responds “Hey! Augustus! Feels like I haven’t heard him in forever!” and we get this interaction.
SAM
So is this, like, a rare voice?
Gwen presses spacebar, irritated. The voice stops.
ALICE
Kinda. It’s usually just Chester or Norris. Augustus is a bit of a special occasion.
I once again have to wonder if there is some sort of logic or factor that determines when specific voices show up. I don’t know if Alice is aware of any possible triggers despite saying “Augustus is a bit of a special occasion” since she could simply be joking.
The statement itself is one of the easier ones to summarize I think. Basically, someone gets a violin of the “finest craftsmanship” from a strange gentleman by a fire and quickly realizes that using the violin allows him to play amazingly but comes at a cost of blood and pain. Either from themself or others. Eventually, the musician secretly gives his nephew the cursed instrument as part of an inheritance. I would say that this statement is probably detailing an encounter with The Slaughter. We have seen time and time again cases of The Slaughter causing violence via music, such as Grifters Bone.
As we are regaled with the story we learn that this musician had a tutor at some point by the name of Oliver Bardwell (ha bard… like musician) and we are told he “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. Bardwell, a singularly vexatious man, reveled in the task of reminding me that, though my father may hold station in the Lords, the regrettable position of my birth ensured I could not rely upon that fact to provide for my future.” So we quickly learn that Oliver is an asshole and in addition to that the statement giver even confesses “In these moments of Bardwell’s cruelty, I shall confess I indulged my imagination in contemplation of what morbid or grotesque fates might befall him on the journey, by happenstance or even by my own hand.”
I think this helps point to parallels with The Slaughter. The Slaughter is an Entity born from the fear of violence and here we have the implication that Oliver was a potentially violent and cruel man which in turn caused whoever is giving the statement to wish to enact violence or misfortune upon Oliver. It is unfortunately not completely unheard of in various time periods and places for figures of authority, such as parents, teachers, and mentors, to attempt to enact discipline via forms of violence, or they might use violent methods as a form of negative reinforcement. It would not surprise me if Oliver was using such a method to try to get the narrator to play better. We also know that this statement was probably not super recent because we get “I paid little heed to his prattle or ambitions, spending those weeks en route refining my finger patterns upon the timeworn bridge of my cherished Rogeri, at least as far as the unsteady coach would permit.” and “Alas, as the journey continued, Bardwell’s practiced manners and veneer of refinement gradually eroded, and as the summer’s warmth yielded to autumn’s chill, his demeanor truly soured, a change hastened by each rut and jolt of the aged carriage” which points to the idea that they were traveling via horse pulled carriage. We also later hear about a coachman, so I don’t think that this statement takes place in a time where cars and / or planes were common.
Going back to what I said earlier about Oliver and violence we get this “I have made mention of the grim fantasies that on occasion possessed my youthful mind, but you must believe me, nephew, when I say I had no part in his death. I do not know what at last caused the frenzied paroxysm which seized him that night. He had slept but little the week prior, and the strain upon his nerves was plain to see. It was as I missed the fingering of what should have been a simple exercise, a mistake I ascribe to the coach’s jostling, that he leapt to his feet. Words tumbled from his lips, devoid of coherence, a symphony of mania conducted by some unseen maestro of his own imagination.” It is rather notable that when Oliver begins to become violent and frenzied the narrator immediately believes the source of this violent attack to be them. For some extra context a paroxysm is defined as “a sudden attack or violent expression of a particular emotion or activity.” It can also refer to “a sudden recurrence or attack of a disease; a sudden worsening of symptoms” but given the context of the scene and the fear of the narrator I assume the first definition is more applicable. It could also be possible that this is a double meaning. If we suspect that Oliver was violent before then the second definition could apply in the sense of a sudden recurrence of violence that has suddenly worsened.
We also get “I watched with growing unease as shadows danced upon the walls of his thoughts, their forms and nature hidden to me, save for what I overheard him utter beneath his breath, barely perceptible to the ear. At moments, it seemed almost as if he were listening to some far away music, though my instrument lay quiet beside me.” which points to a possible connection between The Slaughter and some of the rhythm or music it often likes to manifest as. I also think it’s interesting that the narrator mentions “grim fantasies” but reassures his nephew he did not kill Oliver. It has already been explicitly mentioned that these grim fantasies involved violence but it appears that the narrator is afraid that someone may suspect that they are reason enough for him to kill Oliver. This points to a theme of the cycle of violence, where one person might become more violent because someone else enacted violence upon them, so on and so forth.
After fighting “as though some specter flitted just beyond his sight and grasped his hands, moving them with wild abandon as Mr. Bardwell sought salvation from whatever phantoms haunted his waking dreams.” Oliver proceeds to throw himself head first out the carriage door and kill himself via busting his skull open. It’s possible that this could be a form of violence relating to self harm (since self harm could be considered an act of violence towards oneself) or maybe for whatever reason Oliver perceived something else to be attacking him. The event also causes the coachman to suspect the narrator of killing Bardwell. We get another allusion to violent outbursts in the past when it is said “He had been witness to many heated exchanges between myself and Mr Bardwell, and as I approached, it became clear he perceived not a terrified and distraught youth, but a violent killer.” So at the very least the carriage driver believes there is some sort of precedent or motive for violence here. This also shows us that the narrator in all likelihood is not so young as to be defenseless or immediately assumed to be innocent.
The coach driver’s fear of violence seems to become so great that “A primal fear seized the man, and he acted rashly. I shall not speak of what followed, but suffice it to say that I ended up alone, wandering in the night.” It’s hard to say what happened but if I had to take a shot in the dark, and consider the fact that the narrator doesn’t want to even speak about it, I have to assume that the coachman attacked them and they fought back in self-defense before being forced to kill the man. It’s possible that the carriage driver just ran away but we also have to remember that Oliver seemed like he heard “some far away music, though my instrument lay quiet beside me.” Is it possible that the coachman was also a victim of this unheard song? It would make some amount of sense considering that we soon meet a man who gives the narrator a strange violin that craves blood and can cause violence. Maybe the violin is what they heard but I am unsure and I don’t know why the narrator themselves wouldn’t have it heard. It could just be coincidence or some other factor like The Slaughter preying off the coachman’s fear.
Speaking of, the narrator meets a strange gentleman sitting by the fire and the man probes the narrator for his story while offering food. After hearing the tale he sighs and says “"Fortune does seem to have forsaken you,“ he mused, his expression unreadable and his tone strangely conspiratorial. "Indeed, I would suggest a stroke of luck is much in order."” before giving the narrator a strange violin. As he does, we hear about some of the other trinkets “Within it I could spy an assortment of trinkets, ranging from battered knives and chipped porcelain to fine jewelry, small ivory figures and even a set of gambler’s dice. "Luck assumes a myriad of forms, ” he proclaimed, his practiced manner warm and inviting, “and today it takes the form of a simple traveler offering you his wares. You mentioned playing the violin, I believe?””
I wonder if this man is similar to Mikaele Salesa and considering that we will soon get an episode about a strange pair of dice I wonder if the set of gambler’s dice is the same set. If it is that would point to the idea that the man is not only collecting Slaughter artifacts in the same way Mikaele wasn’t aligned to any particular Entity and collected a variety of their artifacts before giving them away.
We get a bit of detail about the violin “Placing a bow upon the string, and in a single
fluid motion, he executed an echoing double stop that resonated with a satisfying thrum. He said nothing as I examined it, ascribing it no history, no famous maker or master luthier. The neck, a paragon of symmetry, led the eye from the deep crimson hue of the upper bout gradually surrendering to a subdued natural mahogany as it descended.” but as the musician continued to trace their fingers along the string “At that moment a cry of pain erupted from my throat, a cry that shocked even myself, as I realised I had cut my fingertip upon the strings. The merchant only smirked, looking at me as one might a boy who’d touched a cooking pot.” This is the first hint we get at the violin’s darker nature. The noted “deep crimson hue” the violin has might symbolize deep red blood. It could even be the vestiges of someone else who played the violin and had to give a blood offering.
After the violin player makes his way to Manheim and eventually plays the violin, we get an interesting note. “A tremor of apprehension coursed through me as I faced the silent assembly, and it was with an unfamiliar feeling of uncertainty that I gripped my new instrument. Its neck, more slender than its predecessor, sat awkwardly in my hand, and as I began my fingers fumbled in their search for purchase upon the strings. I attempted the first of my well-practiced recitations, but my playing was inelegant and rough, eliciting only dismissive whispers, and derisive muttering from my audience. A surge of indignation and fear welled within me, urged on by the knowledge that I, my father’s sin, who had done terrible things to reach that hall, could never return home in disgrace. I executed a ‘jete’, a jarring musical demand for their attention, a declaration that I must be seen, and heard. A rapid and perfect volley of eleven notes, past which no murmur, no whisper lingered. I had their complete attention.” I’ve been pretty adamant that the Entities are still feeding off fear in TMP and to this end I would point to the fact that the violin seems to take full effect when a “surge of indignation and fear” wells within the musician and we later hear “I could see in the faces of my audience an astonishment, and something not
entirely unlike terror…”.
The violin player also makes note of “the knowledge that I, my father’s sin, who had done terrible things to reach that hall” which to me increases the likelihood that they ended up having to fight and kill their coach driver since I don’t know what else they could be referring to outside of rampant misplaced guilt.
The violin reveals its true nature when “As my eyes opened, I saw of blood pooling on the neck from where my skin should be, as the uppermost layer of the fingertip dangled, torn and hanging like discarded parchment. Pain and panic blossomed, but no option remained other than to play, and to play the most daunting melodies my mind could conjure. Sluggish at first, as I felt the strings run their length against my bloody flesh, then rapidly accelerating, crescendos intertwining diminuendos, a dance of command and submission enacted upon the strings.” and we hear “I was, of course, accepted, hailed as a singular talent. Yet a suspicion took root in me. A realisation that the positions of “player” and “instrument” were not so firmly set with this hungering violin. It was a creature with needs and purpose of its own. The needs were simple enough. Blood. Flesh. Little enough at first. Skin shaved and cut and singing in pain. And the rewards were great, as with each performance, agony intermingled with melody, and my bleeding fingers lubricated those resonating strings. ”
So in order to play the instrument the narrator must give an offering of blood, or what might be more broadly an offering of some sort of pain. The musician soon comes to the grim realization that “The blood for its strings need not be your own.” “Only once did I play it without paying its price: wrapping my fingers in thick bandages so as to prevent its razored strings from cutting me. I had believed my playing would be lackluster, my performance uninspired. Yet the music that came from my instrument that day was somehow more beautiful than it had ever been before.” but then “They fell upon each other then, a dance of teeth and nails, of tearing and gouging. I watched as a gout-ridden man in emerald silk sucked the eyes from his son’s skull and crushed them in his jaws like ripe cherries. A demure young woman bedecked in gold peeled the cheeks from her betrothed as she sang to the music that I could not stop playing. It was only when a candelabra was upended and the room engulfed in flame that I was at last able to cease my recitation and make my escape. ”
So the violin seems to have abilities quite similar to that of Grifters Bone, who we know is aligned with The Slaughter and they can play a song that causes extreme violence. The narrator describes the violin as being a creature so it’s possible that when it’s hurting him he perceives it as an act of violence or maybe the act is a sort of metaphor for self harm or aiming your violence at yourself. The violin apparently sounds more beautiful than ever when it is drawing from the blood and violence of other people so it could be that the more pain and blood offered to the violin the more beautiful it sounds. This violin also might be a metaphor for the “tortured” artist trope. The idea that you must endure great pain or suffering to be a great artist.
A lot of people wonder about the relationship between Slaughter and music and while violence itself isn’t tied to rhythm or music certain institutions that enact violence are, most notably the military and various armies throught history. Whether it be their rhythmic marching or a drummer beating their instrument in order to keep the army moving in proper rhythm or even acting as a way to raise their morale to get them to continue fighting. Roles such as these have actually been around for quite a long time which could explain some of The Slaughter’s manifestations. At a certain point it would be unsurprising if the sound of a kind of drumming might make you assume an army is on its way.
“The Spirit of '76” by Archibald Willard
Phrases like “beat the drums of war" can refer to preparing for or inciting a war and Merrian-Webster defines a war drum as “a drum beaten as a summons to war or as an accompaniment to marching or fighting.”
In addition, some genres of music, such as metal or rock, are thought by some to be violent. There are stories of people making deals with the devil himself to get some sort of skill with an instrument. There are also rumors of genres such as metal being used to recruit the malleable youth to join the devil or commit acts of violence and / or murder (especially during the satanic panic in the U.S.).
As always, there are going to be other Entities that overlap with some of the fears. The Desolation overlaps a bit here, and the Entity can be so similar to The Slaughter that some people ask what the difference between the two actually is. The Desolation seems to be the fear of loss, usually but not always via destruction or damage, and The Slaughter is the fear of violence. Like all Entities they do overlap a bit and can have similar manifestations but to give a general idea- if you are afraid of your house burning down that’s usually more The Desolation and if you are afraid of being stabbed by someone that’s usually more The Slaughter. Of course, exceptions always occur and these things can be very muddled. For example, you might lose someone you care about to violence and violence often goes hand-in-hand with threats of destruction. You could also argue that the violin could be threatening to take your fingers in a sense and the musician does mention the fear of being sent back and basically losing what they have worked for.
The fact that the narrator seemingly cannot stop playing the violin could relate to The Web via being controlled by something and the fear of being in front of a watching audience that is judging you could relate to The Eye, but I still think that The Slaughter has the strongest precedent here.
We get confirmation from Sam that this statement is rather old when he says “Why on earth would something from the 18th century show up on Freddy?” I’ve mentioned earlier that we don’t actually know exactly when the Entities would have appeared in this universe (if these are the same set of Entities from TMA anyway). Time seems like it gets kind of weird with both The Change and multiversal travel but I wonder if some of these statements are being carried over from the previous universe via something like The Eye, statements, or accounts stored in / on things tied to The Entities? Could a statement like this simply be from the TMA universe or maybe the Entities just appeared earlier than we thought? Heck, I still can’t discount that this could be a different set of Entities even if I personally lean towards these at least paralleling or mirroring the Entities as we see them in TMA and their categories (and I would go as far as to posit that they are probably the same Entities from TMA).
The transcript says “SAM and ALICE have been listening despite themselves. GWEN is still working.” which I think ties into what I have mentioned previously about statements. They connect to something a lot of people don’t want to hear and they are shown wearing on the psyche of people like Martin when they listen to them. The Archivist is also described as having the job of being a “living archive of fear” and witnessing the terror and fear of others so I wonder if the people working at the O.I.A.R. have some comparable role.
Gwen then gets an email notification on her pc and we get
GWEN
Hmmmm?
She opens the attachment a recording plays. The audio quality is very
poor.
KLAUS
(video, begging) Please. Please, you don’t have to do this!
YOUNGER LENA
(video) We both know I do.
KLAUS
(video) /I I-could disappear again! They would never know!
GWEN
(Gasp) /Lena? What the hell?
Computer turns off.
This once again points to a theme The Eye has of randomly leaking information but it could also be The Eye or even Lena trying to stoke Gwen’s curiosity. Encouraging curiosity is something that The Eye and Jonah seem to like to do with curious people such as Jon, Tim, Melanie, and even Rosie. This also potentially parallels Jonah killing Jurgen Leitner after the man comes out of hiding. Something that might be more likely than we give credit for if we consider that the first statement of TMP seems to parallel the first statement of TMA with a story that sounds like an encounter with the Anglerfish.
Conclusion
I don’t really have much to say here but feel free to leave your corrections or thoughts and I may give my 2 cents or say if I agree or disagree with them.
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 5 “Personal Screening”
If you ask me, the statement in this episode is almost definitely Eye aligned and it’s one of the most Eye flavored statements I’ve seen in a while. But let’s try to slow down and walk through some bits of the episode. Like always it may be an act of hubris to view TMP through the lens of Smirke’s 14 (and potentially The Extinction if I feel it comes to it) but even if I’m wrong I still find this to be fun and the parallels interesting.
Like always, we are hearing the story of TMP from the perspective of something / someone listening in via device and the transcripts clarify that this time we are listening through a landline.
Sam enters Lena’s office to express his worry about Colin’s paranoia and says “Well, today I found him crawling along the corridor, yanking out wires and muttering to himself.” and points out that Colin has “added all those locks to his office door and he refuses to even go near a camera now…” I feel like this mirrors TMA in how we see a coworker becoming worried about another coworker’s increasing paranoia. And, similar to Jon, Colin’s paranoia in part seems to be coming from the feeling that he is being watched or monitored by something. I maintain that if the Entities are present then the O.I.A.R. is at least partially connected to the Eye and we see Colin is even becoming afraid of being seen by cameras and the like.
I think it’s also interesting that Lena says this “Right. Well firstly, thank you for raising this with me Sam. It’s important we don’t keep secrets here.” which feels a lot like some ominous foreshadowing we don’t yet understand. The Eye is all about having no privacy and exposing secrets and Colin seems to indeed be keeping some sort of secret. Not only that, but considering what Gwen saw last episode Lena is also keeping at least one secret.
There actually seem to be a lot of parallels or allusions to TMA structurally or thematically. Many of the statements sure but also the roles certain characters play. Sam is too curious for his own good like Jon and may be here to look into a previous encounter with the supernatural, some have pointed out that Alice and Tim both seem to cope with jokes, and Lena is a shady boss like Elias / Jonah. Just to be clear I’m not saying these are 1-to-1 or are meant to be alternate versions of each other or something. Rather that either The Eye tends to attract certain people, that this is meant to be a reference (Sort of like how how Part 7 and onwards in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure have many direct references and parallels to other characters even though they aren’t always the exact same person / personality or one-to-one), or we are going to end up with some extrapolation, divergence, and / or commentaries on these similarities (either directly or indirectly).
However, long story short, Lena dismisses these claims and basically tells Sam not to worry, schedule a meeting next time, and mind his own business before we cut to one of the computers Sam and / or Alice work at to catch the rest of the story. Alice mentions “Ah. Yeah, Lena isn’t exactly known for her diplomacy.” which points to the idea that Lena probably isn’t the nicest person, or at the very least doesn’t sugarcoat things. Sam finds that Alice left some papers on his desk and she explains “I had a nosey while you were in Lena’s office. Looks like it’s for your Response Department one to one.” One thing I mention a lot about The Eye is that it tends to attract people who are very curious and / or want to know things, such as “Nosy Rosie,” Jonah, Jon, etc.. This scene shows us that Alice might be more curious or nosy than she lets on in some aspects. Of course, in typical Alice fashion when Sam expresses worry about the paper and the Response Department she tells him to basically just ignore it and throw it away but Sam decides to fill start filling it out anyway.
I wonder if this is similar to the magically binding contract from TMA and if Sam just accidentally tied himself to something. Alice does also say “Just chuck it. I told you, I’m pretty sure the Response Department doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s just the system spitting out dead paperwork. Happens all the time.” so we can’t even be sure that this is coming from the Response Department. In fact the paperwork coming from the Response Department could be The Eye or some other Entity and / or supernatural occurrence. We also continue to have Sam’s curiosity hammered into us when he says “And I’m going to fill it in any way. See what happens.” Sam notes that the paperwork asks strange questions when he says “Uh huh… They want my last seven addresses. I don’t know if I’ve even had-” This could point to the idea of the paper wanting a suspicious amount of information since it not only wants to know where you currently live but the last seven places someone has lived.
(Probably rather luckily) Sam gets interrupted by a statement as Alice manages to convince him to stop as CHESTER gives us our statement for the episode.
This statement is about Tom and the blog he is running. On it he reviews horror movies and even says “Hey all you sick freaks out there, Tom here, your gruesome guide to the most twisted horror films of the world wide web!” He also says “I can’t believe this blog’s still up. Was looking for somewhere slightly less confrontational than social media to post my film thoughts, and I remembered starting this back in, what, 2009?” As I’ve mentioned before The Eye is the fear of being perceived and known which also involves the fear of being judged for things. To put it even more broadly, The Eye seems to be about the fear of knowledge in general. Not just the fear that someone / something might know too much about you (or a specific secret) or is just gathering information by watching you but also the fear that you yourself might know too much or have seen something you wish you hadn’t. In MAG 200 we are told in what order the Powers emerged and what led to their birth and for The Eye we are told it came from the fear of one’s eyes “showing them too much.” In essence, that they saw something they didn’t want to. A more direct example of this is Jonah being able to force information into the minds of other people like Martin and Melanie. Jonah mentions that this information has to be true and it points to the idea of forcing someone to know something against their will.
We also get “That first post… Fourteen years old and convinced I was the edgiest writer on the web. Might keep it up for posterity, god knows the kid went through enough” which implies a rough childhood. Considering what happens with the movie I would also like to point out that tying into The Eye’s whole “seeing too much” thing is the idea of being forced to remember or relive certain things you don’t want to. The most obvious form this took in TMA was the statements (as they were people recounting what happened to them) but Jon could also force people to give statements (forcing them to recall things against their will) and when Jon takes live statements both Jonah and Daisy point out that when this is done the victim will be forced to relive said statement every night via a dream in which Jon is watching. Sometimes, if there’s a monster involved, the victim sees things from the perspective of the monster (forcing them to watch their own suffering in a way).
Tom explains “I remember I was pretty lonely in those days. Ever since I was a child, making friends has always been kind of a struggle. My interests have always been seen as a little strange… While other kids my age at the time were looking up to football players and other celebrities, I was looking up to Pinhead and Freddy Krueger… It wasn’t in a psychopath kind of way or anything, I’ve just always been fascinated by horror. I can thank my dad for that, he showed me Puppet Master when I was six. ‘oh don’t worry, buddy! It’s just like Toy Story”… He had kind of a dark sense of humour like that.” before continuing to describe how he was really into horror and continues to have a fixation on it. This also implies that it’s possible the young Tom wasn’t always aware of what he was about to see and was tricked or lied to about what it was. Which could tie into the idea of seeing something you didn’t want to if we assume that this poor kid was expecting Toy Story only to get a scary movie. Funnily enough, someone judging and critiquing films on something like a blog could draw a connection to The Eye via the idea of judgment and the like.
Strangely, the next 3 reviews have been deleted. I wonder if they reminded Tom of something or if he just wanted to forget about it? But that would be kind of weird since he still leaves up the announcement that make mention of the terrifying film he watches later, “Voyeur.” It might also be a much weirder reasoning like someone or something wanting people to find this movie and / or post and making sure the post is preserved for a statement. It’s pretty clear Tom has at least some of the trademark Eye curiosity when it comes to horror movies since he seems to put in a lot of effort into finding this specific horror movie in order to watch it despite searches mostly just revealing what is presumably porn. However, in his search he comes across one thing- “The only thing I could find was another old blog with what must have been the shortest film review I have ever read. You can check the link, but I’ll save you some time: all it says is “Voyeur needs to be seen to be believed. The Scariest movie I have ever seen”.”
Of course, if you’ve gotten this far you can probably guess what I’m probably going to say. This is so obviously The Eye or some similar overlapping Entity trying to bait curious people into seeing something they will probably regret. In TMA Gertrude did mention that The Eye is also the drive to know and understand even if what you find might hurt you and we can see this in action. The drive to know and understand even if this movie could mentally scar you. Unfortunately, Tom doesn’t realize he’s in a horror podcast and this just makes him want to see it even more.
In the next blog post Tom mentions “Oh my God. I can’t believe one of you found it! Thank you SO MUCH Cinephobia12220 for the link!” Based on a quick google search I don’t think “cinephobia” is a real word (and if it is it’s super obscure). However, I can take a wild guess at what the username “cinephobia” means by looking at the root words involved. Cinephile basically means “movie lover” and phobia has to do with fear, so we can assume that the term cinephobia would probably mean something like “fear of movies”, “movie fear”, “phobia of movies”, etc.
After doing a bit more digging I found the term “cinephobia” which according to a wikipedia page means “The fear or hatred of films and the cinema.” Whether or not you want to see this as credible is up to you and I’m proud of the logic I used originally so I’m keeping the previous paragraph since it was at least in the ballpark. Either way, this username is foreshadowing since their name literally means “fear / hatred of movies” (ie the fear of a media you would watch).
Tom manages to find a link and a contest that only asks for his name and he somehow wins said contest despite noting that the site hasn’t been updated in years. At this point it’s clear that all the blog posts not relating or leading up to the “Voyeur” have been deleted. What does voyeur even mean? According to google voyeur is defined as “a person who gains sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity”… okaayyyyyy wait there’s a second definition “a person who enjoys seeing the pain or distress of others.” Okay, I’m going to assume the second definition is what’s applicable here since this ties very heavily into The Eye and the idea of a sort of sadism or someone watching you suffer. Of course, this can also tie into statements as people like Jon gain power and strength from literally hearing about and or watching people suffer. So the movie’s title is yet more foreshadowing. The title might also have a double meaning since depending on why someone likes horror and to what extent you could describe them as a “voyeur” in the sense that they like seeing people suffer in movies. Tom is so desperate for horror he might be somewhat close to a voyeur in this sense but maybe I’m reading too much into that.
When Tom wins the contest he explains “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.” This is another red flag because The Eye is known to randomly give or find information it otherwise shouldn’t know. We see people like Jon had the ability to know things that they shouldn’t and Jonah was borderline omniscient and could know almost anything he actively put his mind towards.
The cinema “Voyeur” is being filmed at is a theater that Tom actually went to when he was a kid. “And I’ve actually been to this cinema before… I used to go all the time with my dad… they would play classic horror films midday every Saturday.” Considering that Tom probably had a rough childhood this could be The Eye setting up a situation where Tom is forced to remember his past (I mean besides watching the movie of course) and I wonder if this is the theater where his dad tricked him into watching a horror movie. We know that the movie seems to actually be about Tom himself and it’s being played in a place he remembers as a child. Also, Tom mentioning how he wants to give his thoughts on this movie could be likened to a statement and someone giving their accounts about various horrific encounters.
Tom of course is apparently live blogging the event and I think that usually The Eye wouldn’t have it any other way. The more people can witness the horrors another person is facing in real time the “better.” The outside of the theater seems like it’s in a sorry state but the inside is beautiful and clean. Tom asks about this while buying food from an employee and we get “I asked about the mess outside, trying not to be rude about it, but he just said “It’s what on the inside that matters”.” This could be foreshadowing to the idea that the movie is about Tom himself. So the “inside” that matters would be Tom’s own memory and / or experiences. Also, this employee is noted to be old and probably doing all the jobs around this theater. He is at least the one running the concession stand, and usher along with the other stuff. But Tom says that the man is in high spirits which makes me wonder if we’ll see him as a recurring character in TMP’s statements and / or in person (sort of like Simon Fairchild and the like).
Then the movie starts and based on Tom’s reaction he clearly recognizes what’s being shown “ I can hear what sounds like… beeping. It sounds so familiar but I can’t quite place it. Medical equipment maybe? There’s something [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the screen… Looks like it might be a flashback or something, handheld… looks like it was filmed on an old camcorder… Wait. Is that…? I know that room…. How… How did they get [UNINTELLIGIBLE] This was after the accident. Mum wanted to to film it for my brothers… Dad… I… [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Wait. Who is that? In the corner of the screen, there’s… WHO THE HELL IS THAT?” and the final thing we hear from the blog is
BLOG POST: FILM REVIEW: VOYEUR
Voyeur needs to be seen to be believed. The scariest movie I have ever seen.
It seems like what happened is the movie was a video Tom’s mom had taken of a tragic even but there was something that shouldn’t have been there. This wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened with The Eye. In TMA MAG 193 (A Stern Look) we get an account from the original Elias that details how a friend named Allan Schrieber died from presumably reading some sort of book. Upon reading it Allan started to mentally break down and sob while saying things like “It has no eyes”, “so it has to feel its way towards me. But it knows. It knows!” before eventually dying with his eyes mysteriously missing. A lot of people immediately assume this means The Dark was at play but there are statements where someone / something aligned with The Beholding seems to be missing eyes or taking The Eyes of others. Sometimes the idea is that it’s scary that something can somehow still know where you are or see you and sometimes this is the whole “seeing too much thing.” It’s also mentioned “But he remembers so clearly what he was thinking as he looked at the what was left of Allan Schrieber: where are his eyes? What did they do with his eyes?”
If you want a clearer example of seeing something you shouldn’t, there’s the hand mirror that appears in MAG 060 (Observer Effect). Upon looking into this mirror Rosa Meyers notices a dark figure in the night that only has its eyes visible and she feels like she is being watched / stalked even after dropping the mirror and breaking the glass. So The Eye definitely plays around with the idea of seeing something, noticing a figure that shouldn’t be there, and then things follow you before something happens. It wouldn’t completely surprise me if Tom was even replaced or had his mind and / or body taken over somehow (something that has a precedent with people like Jonah) which could explain why his review is eerily similar to the original one. Maybe the old man is body hopping like Jonah? That might explain the old man’s excitement and maybe the old man is in fact “Cinephobia12220.” Hmmm, such an assertion about body hopping with so little information is a bit of a stretch though since the man could just be happy to have a victim and it would be an oddly specific ability for some random new character (merely one iff background or otherwise) to have.
Obviously, Tom also expresses surprise at this theater having the footage and wonders how they could’ve gotten it which ties into The Eye and someone getting information they shouldn’t. Being forced to relive something like this is also comparable to a statement.
Some Entities that overlap with some of the stuff happening in this statement are ones like The Spiral. I could see an argument for some of its themes with the idea of noticing something you missed before or thought wasn’t there as a sign of your senses being wrong. Maybe also The Stranger since Tom doesn’t seem to know what he’s seeing.
We then cut to CCTV audio and Alice talking on the phone before this conversation happens
GWEN
“Do you remember the IT manager before Colin?”
ALICE
“Who? Amelia? What about her?”
GWEN
“No, before Amelia, before I joined. German guy. Lots of tattoos.”
ALICE
“I mean, I think Amelia mentioned him once or twice maybe? Mostly I remember her complaining about his work, but he’d have been here well before my time. What’s this about?”
GWEN
“Nothing. None of your business.”
ALICE
“What? Seriously?”
GWEN
“(walking off). Yes.”
Once again, Gwen being cagey and weird but this time we have a better idea of why. There’s a chance that this German IT manager may in fact be Klaus. I wonder if being the O.I.A.R. IT manager comes with some sort of drawback or “curse?” Maybe even some weird agreement between whoever has the position and Lena? Who knows
Conclusion
Idk having a blast. Feel free to leave corrections and / or thoughts and I may respond to them and explain if I agree or disagree, or consider why it is or isn’t likely, etc.
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 6 “Introductions”
Like usual, we are perceiving the scene through a device (a computer in this case) to let us know something is watching the characters. It’s very obvious that with Sam’s talk of coffee and the commentary on getting curtains that this job at the O.I.A.R. has a lot of work hours at very odd or long stretches of time. The way Alice talks implies that she’s been in similar situations at this job, so it doesn’t seem like the extreme exhaustion Sam is experiencing is completely unusual or unheard of. Sam is so tired that he is struggling to stay awake and has dozed off at least once at his desk. Highlighting the O.I.A.R.’s stressful work conditions we hear of a new hire and Alice says “…but this job has kind of a high turnover rate, so Lena likes to hire a couple of replacements when an old-timer leaves.” This also contextualizes Sam’s hire a bit since it would imply that Sam was hired because a previous employee left.
Whether they left simply due to stress and terrible working conditions or potentially something even more sinister and possibly even supernatural I cannot say. In TMA it wasn’t unheard of for Archival assistants (like Sasha and some of Gertrude’s assistants) to get killed or seriously wounded after some encounter with the supernatural due to the nature of their job. Even Michael ended with the terrible fate of somehow being merged with The Distortion and potentially also dying in a way in the process. However, based on how Sam’s job has been going so far there haven’t been any direct encounters with the supernatural due to the O.I.A.R. and we have yet to hear if the organization has some dangerous artifact storage and testing facility like the Magnus Institute did.
ALICE
“Oh Sam. The sun is the enemy. It rules the world of light but we who dwell in darkness feel only its wrath. Get the curtains.”
And
ALICE
“Then we draw lots and one of you gets eaten at the Christmas party.”
These do sound like concepts that could relate to The Dark and The Flesh so it’s possible that this could be some weird foreshadowing or dramatic irony or Alice is coping with vague concepts she’s heard before in statements by joking about them. But even I feel like this is really REALLY reaching here and I don’t think Alice is an Avatar or some secret double agent. There’s also nothing to suggest she is particularly aware of the possibility of Entities and if anything she is sort of in denial about the statements or believes them to not be real so I don’t think Alice knows what The Flesh is or something.
When Gwen is asked about the new hire she seems pretty confident that they aren’t sticking around which points to how stressful, possibly unhealthy, or potentially even dangerous, the O.I.A.R.’s job actually is.
The statement we get in this episode is interesting because it’s another one where the computers themselves aren’t reading the statements. This time it’s audio from an emergency hotline between an operator and someone the transcripts dub as “Needles.”
Describing what happened here is actually going to be a bit difficult but Needles calls the emergency line (999) and we are quickly made aware that Needles is with someone else. When asked for details about the situation Needles says “You’ll have to forgive him, he’s full of needles at the moment.” At first this sounds like Needles was just torturing this poor guy but we later hear
POLICE OPERATOR
“Are you in any danger?”
NEEDLES
“(Amused) Me? Gosh no! No. I suspect he thought I was at first though. The way he postured and pulled out his little knife”
Which seems to imply that in actuality it was Needles who was attacked first. However, it is very clear that they are enjoying the torment of his assailant at this point and when they realize that calling the line didn’t immediately give away their location they say “Wonderful! I have longer than I thought. In that case, we’ll have a little natter at our end and call you back once we come to a decision about which service.”
After a weird and quick conversation Needles requests to get transferred to the police line and begins talking with a police operator. The description of what happened here is purposefully a bit confusing and vague. The way Needles puts it, the man postured and pulled out a knife (so Needles was probably being robbed or attacked) but they also say “Although I really wouldn’t go so far as to call him an attacker. In fact, in many ways it was an act of affection by the end. An embrace. A cuddle, even! Ha! Yes, let’s call it a cuddle.”
After being asked if they are in any pain Needles says “Of course it hurts, how couldn’t it? But I’ve come to rather enjoy the pain by now. All those teeny tiny holes bright and sharp… ” And when asked about the state of the man that attacked Needles we get.
NEEDLES
“I doubt he’s going anywhere ever again.”
POLICE OPERATOR
“Is he breathing? Does he need an ambulance?”
NEEDLES
“Absolutely, but that isn’t the real question, is it?”
When Needles is asked for a location so that an ambulance can be dispatched we get-
NEEDLES
“I know exactly where I am. I grew up here, you know. It was a decent place back then. Nice people lived here, you understand? Not like now. Now it’s a dreadful place. Not safe to walk at night. I take some pride in that, actually.”
POLICE OPERATOR
“Sir, I need an address or a landmark. Tell me where you are.”
NEEDLES
“Oh the land is definitely marked now, same as me, and it feels good. It satisfies in a way I never really thought anything would. It fills that hollow, lonely hole inside quite nicely. It’s not sadism, or masochism, I tried both of those already. I think it’s the fear, the look in their eyes once they realize their mistake, it just makes me want to hold them close, so I do.”
There’s been a common theory going around that the Entities are based on desire now instead of fear but Needles saying “It’s not sadism, or masochism, I tried both of those already. I think it’s the fear, the look in their eyes once they realize their mistake…” I think basically confirms that it is still the fear that is most important since if it was merely desire than sadism or masochism probably would have worked according to Needles. Additionally, we later see Needles trying to scare the police operator and get this exchange.
NEEDLES
“Do I frighten you? Mr. Operator.”
POLICE OPERATOR
“Is that why you called? To try and scare whoever picked up?”
NEEDLES
“Call it desert. 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.”
This isn’t any different than all the various Avatars from TMA harvesting fear for their Entities and draws comparisons to when Simon Fairchild asked Martin if he was afraid of rollercoasters for example.
If we go back to the first quote, I mentioned that the comment about the land being marked is interesting. Usually, phrases like “marked” are used to refer to people who have been marked by one or more Entities due to an encounter or marking them as a target. However, there is a precedent for Entities having a strong connection to places. The Domains are an obvious example but there’s also the way Smirke’s architecture can interact with the Entities and the Entities themselves often physically manifest as places. It is possible to physically enter The Lonely or Buried through various means. We also know that The Web spent a lot of time around Hilltop Road making the gap in reality bigger and bigger. Maybe the place Needles is referring to has been marked as some sort of “hunting ground” for the Entities or maybe it is near the gap in reality / where the Entities emerged from in this universe. Assumedly, just because the Entities were pulled through the gap that wouldn’t mean it magically close.
Between the first and last interactions I mentioned the police operator tries to pass this situation off to his supervisor but Needles says “(suddenly sharp) If you leave this call I shall embrace him again and I sincerely doubt he would survive. (returning to jocular) You know what? I’d like to change my answer. I did stab him, yes. I certainly repositioned myself to
make sure he got some in his face. In his eyes. Does that count? He keeps touching them like he’s going to be able to pull all the metal out but I told him it will only drive them deeper. It won’t last too long, thankfully, he’ll finish bleeding out any minute now, but in the meantime that fear wafting off him as he lies there, half afraid of death and half afraid of living with what has happened to him. It’s quite delightful. And it drowns out the aftershave nicely.”
With this Needles finally seems to manage to get a little bit of fear out of the police officer.
NEEDLES
“You don’t believe me. Yes, I suppose that makes sense. It is somewhat outlandish and that’s only exacerbated by the distancing effect of the phone. Yes, the more I think on it the more obvious it is that this call was never going to give me what I was after. I wonder, though, which of the police contact centres you’re hiding in Hendon? Lambeth?”
POLICE OPERATOR
“Excuse me?”
NEEDLES
“Lambeth, then and I am sure I could recognize your voice now.”
NEEDLES CONT’D
“Ah, there it is. There’s the fear. Not much, just a little prick but we found it in the end, didn’t we?”
POLICE OPERATOR
“I’m transferring you to my supervisor now.”
NEEDLES
“Then I’ll be going. I’ve no interest in speaking to them, and besides, we agreed that if you left the call my friend here would have a last little cuddle before I go. I do hope speak again soon Mr. operator, see if we can’t find some other frightful little pinpricks we can explore together…”
And the victim of Needles is presumably left to his fate.
So what actually happened here? I don’t think we are going to get any straight concrete answers for a while but it seems like the gist of what happened is that someone tried to rob or attack Needles with a knife and somehow (in a rather confusing event) the assailant ended up hurt instead of Needles. Well, actually it does sound like Needles could’ve been stabbed since they say “Of course it hurts, how couldn’t it? But I’ve come to rather enjoy the pain by now. All those teeny tiny holes bright and sharp… ” However, there’s a bit of word play going on here so Needles could be talking about the knife sure but more likely it seems they are potentially talking about the Needles.
The two main possibilities I think is that Needles is referring to the pain the man is in or they are referring to somehow inserting the needles into themselves or experiencing it. They do mention that masochism doesn’t seem to have the result they were looking for (implying they may have tried it) and masochism is defined as “the tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from one’s own pain or humiliation.” and “(in general use) the enjoyment of what appears to be painful or tiresome.” Masochism tends to refer to inflicting pain on one’s self so could it be that Needles is implying that they have experimented with inserting needles into their own flesh?
Either way it ends with Needles hugging the man and sticking him with a bunch of needles. I don’t know if Needles became connected to one or more Entities in the moment of the attack or was somehow messing with the supernatural before this event via something like an artifact, encounter, specific ability, etc. and just now realized that fear was the key or if Needles gained the ability during the attack and was experimenting with how it worked as he tortured the man. Needles does say “Now it’s a dreadful place. Not safe to walk at night. I take some pride in that, actually” which could imply he might have something to do with the night becoming less safe. Maybe he was attacking people in the night and experimenting with either his abilities or something else?
I’ve been a pretty big advocate for the theory that Smirke’s 14 (with the potential addition of the Extinction but that is more up in the air) are still around to some capacity and most if not all their fears are still applicable to all of the statements up until this point but this is by far the vaguest encounter so far. Needles shares many traits that could apply to multiple Entities for different reasons. The needles could easily be the influence of a fear like The Slaughter or even Desolation, and how confused everyone seems could point to The Spiral while Needles’ ability to magically know the police operator’s location resembles The Eye and Avatars like Jonah and Jon’s ability to magically know things. If this event is taking place at night The Dark could be at play and Needles mentions “Now it’s a dreadful place. Not safe to walk at night. I take some pride in that, actually.” even though the time and area at which this encounter is taking place seems unclear. There’s a possibility for The Flesh with themes of body horror. Needles notes that the needles dig deeper into the man whenever he tries to pull them out, which is probably the needles reacting to the fear present or trying to draw as much fear as possible out of the man desperately trying to pull them out.
Is Needles some kind of Avatar? Maybe, but it’s hard to say. As Jon in TMA pointed out the term Avatar, Monster, etc. in TMA can be extremely vague and nebulous and bleed into each other as they aren’t perfect little boxes. An Avatar seems to be a person who grows close to an Entity and becomes favored by them and is thus granted various abilities at the cost of being tied to the Entity. They tend to be stronger than the normal person but grow weaker if they don’t feed their Entities with the proper fear for a long period of time. Some might even die from “starving.” Jude Perry describes it as being akin to the idea of “Feed it, fearlessly and without hesitation, or it will feed on you.” Becoming an Avatar is stated to require an active choice and some sort of death be it literal or symbolic (so like an ego death I assume?). It’s also clear that while becoming an Avatar requires a choice it doesn’t need to be a well informed choice. That is to say it’s not like the Avatar needs to know what Entity they are signing up for or even that the Entities exist. Not to mention they don’t need to know exactly what an Avatar is. So it’s possible to become an Avatar without realizing it.
Monsters are basically actually part of a specific Entity. They are kind of like an Entity’s “fingers” or some other body part if those parts were actually sentient. The difference between an Avatar and Monster is that Avatars tend to be more like people empowered by and addicted to / reliant on an Entity while Monsters are actually an aspect of their respective Entity.
Someone who is marked by an Entity is usually someone who has basically been marked as prey or had some sort of direct encounter or contact with the Entities.
Being aligned with an Entity seems to just refer to someone one or more Entities like or favor (as seen with Martin being favored by both The Eye and The Lonely. So much so that he got his own Domain tied to both Entities in the Post-Change world) and in the case of monsters and artifacts it just refers to the Entities they are tied to or come from. This can also get weird since while we usually only think of Avatars, Monsters, and Artifacts as having powers Martin was able to gain abilities from The Lonely despite not being an Avatar. Additionally, the position of Archivist grants a person in that position a specific set of powers whether or not they are an Avatar. For example, Gertrude was not an Avatar and still had powers granted to her by The Eye (even if she didn’t like to use them) and Jon had some powers even before he became an Avatar.
Of course, the lines between these concepts can get vague and debatable. Especially since some Monsters can take the form of humans or show human emotions (such as the Distortion) and when Anabelle transforms into a spider she seems to be more like what many would think of as a Monster, and The Web is presumably the only thing keeping her alive (since apparently the skull of her human form was caved in). There’s also certain characters like Agnes who would technically seem like an Avatar or person but becoming an Avatar requires a choice and it seems like Agnes was granted her state via a ritual from the Cult of the Lightless Flame and the choice of her mother not herself. However, we see with characters like Martin and Gertrude it is possible to have powers without being an Avatar. We also see with Jon that you can have powers due to being aligned with an Entity and then become an Avatar later. So in all likelihood Agnes became an Avatar later in life after she was born aligned with or favored by The Desolation. In fact there’s a pretty good argument for this when you consider that Agnes and Jon both have similar roles as being the lynchpin for the rituals of their respective Entities and Jon didn’t start out as an Avatar either.
I was originally going to have a segment where I go over what Entities Needles most likely belong to but I’m drawing a bit of a blank. If I was forced to choose I would probably say something like The Spiral, The Flesh, or Slaughter. Is Needles just someone aligned with multiple Entities or is it just some weird overlap multiple Entities share? Maybe trying to view this interaction through the Entities is itself an act of hubris but it also wouldn’t be the first time a more nebulous manifestation has happened. I would go as far as to say that if there was one encounter that could debunk all my previous points it would probably be this one, but like I said before I would personally argue that it isn’t any more or less vague than what we have seen of the Entities in TMA.
Is it possible Needles is somehow connected to every Entity? I mean theoretically that’s not impossible? In order for Jonah’s ritual to work he needed every Entity in it (including the seemingly clashing ones like The Vast and Buried / Eye and Stranger so while it might be tempting to say that it’s not possible for them to coexist in such an alignment we know that even seemingly clashing fears can have more overlapping or synergistic aspects with each other). However, this is kind of a reach given the information we have since there’s nothing to suggest The Vast even if you could maybe argue The Buried with the idea of feeling trapped depending on where the man is and maybe the needles prevent him from moving or something. Still seems like kind of a leap with so little information though and I’m not sold on the idea.
When Sam notes that the case seems like it just sort of ends and questions Alice on what the deal with that is she says “I barely hear my own. You tune them out after a while.” Which points to the whole “ignorance is bliss” themeing I’ve come back to over and over and a philosophy Alice seems to take to heart. One of the themes of the Eye I have pointed out previously is the idea of “seeing too much” and how this can drive you mad or otherwise endanger you and potentially harm you mentally. Something that I don’t thibk I’ve done a good job explaining is that when I point these out I am not saying that Sam and Alice are secretly Avatars aligned with The Eye or something. What I am arguing is that the O.I.A.R. is probably somehow connected to The Eye and that in TMA the Eye and The Magnus Institute seemed to attract people with certain qualities or personality quirks (like how someone who tends towards violence is more likely to fall to The Slaughter). What I am arguing is that Alice and Sam might unknowingly end up in The Eye’s clutches in the same way Jon ended up becoming aligned with The Eye via becoming the Archivist.
We are finally introduced to the new employee Celia and both she and Sam bond over how weird the interview is. Something we heard in one of the protocol trailers was Lena asking if Sam had any previous supernatural encounters. Celia mentions “I’ll be honest, I thought there’d be more people working here given the size of the building?” Which makes me wonder if more people used to work for the O.I.A.R. at some point or if they were expecting more people. It could also just be some weird ominous stuff or other parts of the building are being used for some other (probably shady) purpose(s). Maybe they have their own artifact storage somewhere? Maybe there are other people working there but they are somehow isolated from each other? Who knows.
Sam says that it’s just him, Gwen, Alice, and the IT manager (Colin) to which Celia responds “Four weirdos in a basement reading scary stories. Dream job.” Which is a funny description and one that could probably also apply pretty well to the Archives of the Magnus Institute (at least with Jon being a weirdo reading scary stories in a (possible) basement along with his handful of coworkers).
ALICE
“Yeah, you got that hardened killer look in your eyes.”
CELIA
“Damn, and here I thought I’d hidden it behind a sweet and bubbly demeanor. Anyway, I’d better go.”
I get the gut feeling that this interaction between Alice and Celia was some sort of ominous foreshadowing I don’t yet understand considering how… shady Celia seems later but I try not to skip ahead too much when talking about an episode.
We get some of the nosier parts of Sam’s personality when he reveals to Celia that he knows about Alice’s secret stash of biscuits (a cookie for us Americans) and Alice even questions how Sam would know this. Normally, I would go on a talk about Sam’s parallels with The Eye via curiosity and knowledge and all that but the answer is a much more mundane “It’s literally the same place you did when we were students – back of the top shelf in the upper leftmost cabinet. Where you think people won’t be tall enough to see them.” Alice does warn him not to tell other people but with how much she’s joking it’s hard to take the warning that seriously and I don’t think she cares that much.
Conclusion
Yeah, idk, definitely one of the weirder episodes so Feel free to leave any comments or corrections and I may say if I agree or disagree with them and why.
