My final thoughts on Magnus Archives
No matter what so many other fans claim I don’t think the whole season five is so bad. It had its problems but I quite enjoy almost entirity of it. All but the most important - the ending.
The ending always gives us a new perspective, adds another layer to the story, only after knowing the how it ends we can look at the journey as an unit.
But when I say don’t mean anything plot or character related - sentient Web, unadressesd unhealthy aspects of jonmartin, nor even how they took Jon’s final decision away. So what’s in my opinion the main problem with it?
It lacks ambiguity.
After lots of thinking I realized that more than I was annoyed with Jon’s final choice being taken away I was annoyed that we alll saw that clearly, we know the ending of all the characters - even Martin’s and Jon’s fate is not truly so mysterious as we can quite suely say they were pulled to other realitiy with web and all the fears.
After so many mysteries I don’t like such a neat ending.
Every single one of us should feel the ambiguity. Our last thought should be: so what really happened? so was it option A or B? wait it cannot end yet we don’t know-…
We shoud not be able to feel strongly that either Jon was right or that Jon acted selfishly. We should not argue about two strong interpretation we should all be equally unsure.
Yes there is lots of other issues with Jon lacking agenda, with Martin cotradicting himself a lot, with narrative victim blaming Jon… But that’s not really the point. None of those problems are such a big issue to prevent effective ending.
And what would an effective ending be then in my opinion?
I think the perfect ending would be right before Jon decided to reverse his decision.
We would not know if Jon decided stay at his place, stop plan of the Web even though it would mean Martin dying right there at the moment with rest of the world soon to follow after he speeds it all up.
We would not know if Jon decided to proceed with the plan rather than watching Martin in front of him and let them be sucked away with fears.
We would not know what happened but we would know the final decision is his to make.
We could still argue what would be the right choice. But we would not know which one of them was Jon’s.
Would it fix various other issues with the season? No. Would it highly improve the ending and the entirity of Jon’s journey? I think so.
Yes it took me hlaf a year but i finally figured out what bothers me the most about the ending. I’m curious about your thoughts on this.