Ugh ok, not to be all pretentious and fucky about this (especially because I’m not really a theater scholar) but after this episode… oh man. Ok. We know that The Magnus Archives is going to end in tragedy, because it’s cosmic horror and because Jonny’s told us as much. But I think there’s more than that: it won’t just end tragically, it is, i think, fundamentally A Tragedy in the Greek and Shakespearean sense.
And tragedies very often have a point where things very nearly get better. Very nearly work out. Hamlet could have stayed on the pirate ship and escaped to somewhere else and lived out the rest of his days far from Elsinore, and so many lives would have been spared. Romeo and Juliet’s timing could have been just a liiiiittle bit better, and the the fake-death plan might have worked. There’s a line I love from the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that goes “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.”
And it’s so poignant and ironic because a) R&GAD is an absurdist play, and by genre conventions the characters have no control over their fate and never did, and then b) because it’s a commentary on Hamlet, which is a tragedy, in which the characters do have that moment of choice, and will always choose wrong. Either way, the genre dictates that no, there was no way this was going to go well, and no way it will go better on the next telling. The story will always end badly. There will always be a moment (or several moments) in which you could have said no, and you will always fail to recognize and act on them.
And all of this to say that this conversation between Martin and Jon was probably one of those moments, one of those key pivot points in the tragedy. One of those moments when they could have said “no” and gotten away.
And they chose wrong.