never finished tma because I was having a crisis when the final season aired but this could be the month. I can finally find out if martin blackwood dies painfully
the way martin records statements is honestly so telling. he begins his statement notations with his own name as opposed to everyone else adding it at the end. and his immediate response after the end of statements is to talk about what he feels and he has to deliberately make himself snap out of it and focus on the follow-up/commentary… I know all of this has largely been interpreted as martin being self-conscious (or, you know, uwu traumatised baby with social anxiety), but to me it just comes off as narcissism, and not the sexy kind.
hm. thinking about how Elias/Jonah refused to save one of his friends from the Lonely (but ‘retrieved those bones sadly enough’) solely because he was curious to see what happened. and how Jon mentioned following up on multiple statements despite knowing there was little he could do about them simply for his own curiosity. and how Jon loses that interest immediately after killing the artificial sun; statements feel stale and not as fulfilling as before, and he doesn’t care enough to research what happened. the Dark and the Eye have always been diametrically opposed, what with the Church taking a closed eye as its symbol, Eye avatars not being able to see into strongholds of the Dark and part of the fear of darkness is not knowing what hides within it… Basira expresses her disbelief in Jon surviving the encounter with the extinguished sun with relative ease, but what if the mark of the Dark that he bears is just the death of his curiosity? one aspect of his Knowing permanently crippled?
elias really put his whole pussy into MAG 160, taking the opportunity to ‘monologue through the voice of another’ and calling the culmination of two centuries of his work ‘our victory’.
people say the Magnus Archives isn’t funny but then what do you call the bit in “First Hunt” when an old man tells a harrowing story of his friend being murdered by a werewolf that proceeded to hunt the old man for sport for hours only for Jon to say “that’s nice but it happened in America so that’s really not my problem, is it?”
and what do you call the end of “Blood Bag” when, after hearing about a man dying on the spot after being set up by a swarm of innumerable paranormal mosquitoes, Jonathan’s entire response is “personally I hate mosquitoes and cannot believe this idiot was trying to deal with them nonlethally. 0 sympathy from me sir.”
Canon Jonah Magnus is way funnier than fanon Jonah Magnus. Why does everyone try to change him. He’s perfect.
Everyone writes him like Stereotypical Creepy Looking Villain Who Is Easily Angered Into Mistakes but he’s so much funnier than that. He’s trying to destroy the world and put everyone in perpetual misery specifically to avoid someone doing that to him first and his Secret Fear Factory is a shitty paranormal research institute full of offices and bureaucracy because he genuinely prefers it that way. The highlight of his week is on Wednesdays when he does the scheduling for next week and the protagonists trying to get out of their shitty fear jobs use this against him.
He almost never gets angry at anyone because he genuinely does not care, he does actually try to be reasonable and convince his employees not to try to kill him or break his stuff, and considers using his See Everything Powers and Evil Mental Torture powers on them to be a strenuous inconvenience. When he is annoyed or threatened enough to pull out the Evil Torture Mind Powers in self defense, he just does it and then washes his hands of it and goes back to being the Totally Normal Institute Manager he genuinely enjoys being. Dude could hire and blackmail people into doing all the boring tedious parts of his job but he just likes doing them himself.
Half of the dude’s character is how Totally Normal he is. Whenever someone has a big revelation about his evil mind powers or his secret immortality or about how he’s killed someone or screwed them over in some way he completely takes the wind out of their sails by acting like this is a normal thing and he forgot they didn’t already know, like they’re inquiring about when they need to attend a new HR seminar by. He treats them like they’re being unreasonable and need to keep up and it’s funny every single time. He’s so good at being a Helpful but Incompetent Office Manager that it’s usually impossible for the protagonists to tell how much he knows and whether he’s screwing them over on purpose at any given time (he always is). He considers little matters like “my employee keeps trying to kill me” and “my employee got me sent to prison for murder” to be minor inconveniences and never holds grudges against anyone because he genuinely doesn’t care about them enough to be angry.
It’s never stated why he has so little control over what the Head Archivist decides to do at any given time; he just seems to hate micromanagement. He let Gertrude do whatever the fuck she wanted for 50 years no matter what danger or inconvenience it caused (it’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of attacks on the archives during Gertrude’s day were from people who were specifically pissed off at Gertrude’s actions) and only killed her when it was necessary for self-defense. The whole thing is just a sitcom to him. Everyone is an NPC in his Destroy the World Adventure and he doesn’t seem to take anything personally. He’s Owen Burnett who thinks he’s David Xanotos and it’s the funniest fucking thing.
He overreacted and killed ONE GUY with a lead pipe and now half the fanfic treats him like an incredibly weird little murdergoblin who can be incensed into making mistakes with a bit of namecalling and throws his Eye abilities around constantly. The canon version is so much funnier.
listening to jon say ‘sorry’ over and over again in s5 is breaking my heart. and to martin of all people?? martin is part of the reason jon got his final entity mark and martin is the one pressuring jon to do things he clearly does not want, yet it is jon apologising? and this is the ship over which they sacrificed a good narrative??
while I think that, from a purely artistic standpoint, the statements in s5 are lacklustre, I do appreciate one key element: the shift from supernatural horror to social horror.
the buried is ‘the crushing pressure on [one’s] guest becom[ing] literal’ and violent competitiveness; the vast is literally a mass of people twisted into one another; the slaughter trench is of a war that has ‘always raged deep in the hearts of the powerful and those that thirst to see bodies piled high in their name’; the corruption village, the stranger carousel and the hunt are of other humans turning against you to accuse or abandon or betray or kill; the flesh garden is fertilised and the web play, fuelled by harsh words from those supposed to love you; the lonely is no one wanting to be around you, and when you do find someone to talk to, you can’t bear to keep them company; the dark is parents not helping you and even childhood’s innocence turning vicious; the desolation is just capitalism, innit; the spiral is, well, ‘bad therapists’; the end is about watching your loved ones die/dying alone with no one around to answer your calls for help.
even the extinction plays on there being no one else left to warn/turning your animosity on inanimate objects because that is all there is… well, except the scuttling thing with a ‘familiar’ smile.
and it’s not that social horror is better than supernatural horror, it’s just an interesting shift for a post-apocalypse world. the extinction has always been a fear of man-made catastrophe. and the archive is a collection of terror taken from humans/the Fears themselves are reflections of human terror, so their closest manifestation taking the form of specific, social-ties-based domains is neat.
there were social elements to the horror in s1-4, but it was caused by and manifested as the supernatural. but that ‘comfort’ is gone here; there is no room to rationalise. a bone-deep conviction is possible because it’s all us, just us, tearing each other apart.
and on a meta level, given how entities of cosmic horror lose power the more an intended victim knows about them, I suppose it makes sense that after four seasons of knowing, of acquiring data and specifications, the final season has narrow, human-adjacent horrors.
finally finished the magnus archives and I felt hm. nothing.
s5 in general was structurally so bad, but MAG 200 in particular was just so unsatisfying?? Jon takes the power that is rightfully his, the power that was created by double-manipulating him and he kills the man who corrupted him, the man who was the priest to his sacrifice, and all of that was five seconds flat. to be interrupted by prehistory loredump and some melodrama. okay whatever
glad I didn’t listen to s5 as it was being released bc I would have been so annoying with all my theories of ‘strung out’ being about jon and control/autonomy and addiction + ‘parting’ being quite literal foreshadowing for how Jonah and Jon shall fuse together, except now I just kept them all to myself and continued listening to realise none of it literally mattered.
anyway, Jon’s one fear being the Spider, i.e., the loss of control and Elias manipulating him and allowing the Web to manipulate him + Elias’ one fear being death and Jon being the one to kill him. who else did it like them.
five seasons of the protagonist losing his humanity and growing to love power, a corruption that got deeper with every obsessive step he takes to seek knowledge + the antagonist gladly damning himself to See what happens, ‘who had to know, to watch and see it all’ and not a single. fucking. Faust reference.
can’t get over the fact that s4 focused so heavily on the Extinction + Elias dismissed it out of hand + it really drove home the fact that the Entities are unknowable… and then s5 just abandoned all of it. if Jon had burnt the world out like he wanted, the very ritual whose side-effect was supposed to prevent the birth of the Extinction would have been the last thing needed for Its birth. and the end of the man who feared death so viscerally would also have been the end of fear as humans knew it.
I keep going back to Elias’ singular fear and motivation being death, of death being so monumental to him that he still has his friend’s bones, and his own death took like. five seconds
sorry it’s so insane that jon follows elias up to the panopticon and kills him and takes his place and his power and says i’m going to use this to burn everything to the ground because you turned me into a monster so this is what you get and we’re presented with this perfect tragic ending of jon at long last having a singular moment of autonomy in which he embraces the eye and then uses it to destroy everything that hurt him and then it’s completely walked back and none of that happens. okay.
you’re telling me that jarchivist sims began the series by directly addressing elias through the tapes and mag 160 was elias directly speaking through jon via statement and all of it meant nothing. the tapes are of the web and the eye is stupid. okay
the thing that continues to make me the MOST unwell about season 5 is how s5 jon is essentially tim. he is preoccupied with revenge; he is desperate to sacrifice himself because he sees no way to live beyond the circumstances in which he finds himself trapped; he wants most of all to cause suffering that has meaning as a response to all the meaningless suffering he has witnessed. whereas s1/2 jon’s most prominent characteristic was that he didn’t have the stomach for the archivist position, s5 finale jon does not hesitate to kill jonah magnus when the time comes. it is not an efficient murder; it is a blow each for sasha, for tim, for gertrude, for “all the others” who didn’t want to die but did. it is not a strategic killing; it is a revenge killing. it is revenge for everyone jon has lost, including many past versions of himself. jon also didn’t want to die but did; he became something that horrified him and lived past what he felt was the point his life should have ended many times over, which is in itself a kind of death. to live on past meaning, past connection and justice, past any hope of a livable future; this is a death, and it is a death that jon is determined to make someone answer for.
as girard says above, one of the classic tragic elements is that each protagonist thinks themselves above mimetic violence only to become caught up in it as the plot progresses. s3 jon thinks of tim as a loose cannon whose unpredictability and preoccupation with vengeance is immature and inconvenient, especially when taken in context with the rest of the archive staffers’ ability to play the long game and wait for what they think is the right moment to strike. s5 jon, on the other hand, clearly parallels tim in his desire to hurt those who have hurt him and the way he approaches his own death as a foregone conclusion. s5 jon has to die because tim has already died; jon is dead from the beginning of s5 because tim and so many others have already died. s5 is simply jon fulfilling tim’s revenge arc, the same knife wielded by another.
and yet even as jon drives home the blade that is guided by tim’s hand, jonah magnus has already achieved what he set out to achieve; he has released the fears, seen as the eye sees, he has “had the most wonderful dream.” revenge never comes on time; the tragedy of jon and tim is that tim was too early, and jon was too late.
“in the transference of revenge from the dead to those who survive, questions of duty, justice, and loyalty are amplified, while a vibrant and eminently theatrical territory of ghosts, dream-visions, and graveyards opens up […] the displacement of revenge from one character to another creates a structure of obligations which modifies the economy of vengeance […] it is an observable fact that, until revenge is exacted, those close to an injured or murdered person feel the guilt or shame of betrayal. the structure of displaced agency is not free from irony. if the victim of an injury resembles his opponent in the act of vengeance, the revenger who assumes the burden of another person’s resentment suspends his own identity. his predicament is imposed on him, and to know this is a part of his plight. injured by another […] he is forced to adopt a role. his qualities colour the drama of which he is part; tragedy can mourn the waste which follows from the narrowing down of his personality to the bare demands of actions; but for as long as he remains a revenger the proportions of the acts he engages in are determined by an injury he never gave or a request he did not make.”
“those who kill in revenge are so often, in their pale and worn desperation, ‘more dead than living,’ bearers of death if not 'undead.’ their affinity with the realm beyond life is what brings ghosts [and] revengers together”
- john kerrigan, revenge tragedy: aeschylus to armageddon
MAG 160: The Eye Opens is the perfect final episode for hit podcast The Magnus Archives. Magnus is a slow-paced horror with procedural influences in the vein of The X-Files. The protagonist seeks out records of the supernatural to validate a mysterious experience that marked his childhood. He tries to find an underlying logic behind these events for his own peace of mind and, later, to protect others. So far, so standard.
Some major themes in Magnus are 1. When people are dependent on harmful systems for survival, what is the right response?, 2. The mundane is an equal and opposite force to the supernatural, 3. What is the point of free will without power?, 4. The universe tends towards evil. MAG 160 leans into these themes far better than anything in the final season. The protagonist has a choice between hurting others to survive and drawing on the resources of a harmful institution, he tries to minimize the damage and fails. The ultimate evil is delivered by completely mundane means. All the choices of the past 4 seasons are rendered meaningless. That’s what it’s supposed to be.
