UNASKED FOR MAGNUS THEORY #5: THE TAPES BELONG TO THE WEB
There’s been a resurgence in speculation about the tapes in the red-string community since Salesa dropped onto the scene - but I’d like to throw my two cents out there and say I’m not convinced the tapes’ ability to manifest in Upton House tells us anything new. We’ve already known they’re exceptional. The tapes are able to record real-life spook statements when nothing else can, and remembered Sasha’s voice after the Not Them replaced her. They seem to operate by their own set of rules, so while I thoroughly enjoyed last week’s episode about our smooth-talking Samoan merchant - I don’t think we learned anything new about the way the tapes function.
Or who’s behind them.
But looking back at evidence from the show so far? I have a strong suspicion it might be The Web.
EXHIBIT A: In the pre-launch trailer there’s a lot of language that sounds eerily foreshadowing in retrospect, and in that statement Jon mentions he’s going to give the tapes a “spin” - which sounds an awful lot like a nod to The Spider’s interference. However, spin is quite literally also an apt descriptor of the mechanisms inside, so this one might be nothing.
EXHIBIT B: Multiple characters throughout the series point out that it doesn’t make sense for the tapes to belong to The Eye.
TIM: It’s that…the thing that runs The Institute. ‘The Watcher’ or ‘The Eye’ or whatever.
JON: I dis…I disagree. This whole place is a temple to The Eye, Tim. I don’t think the tapes make any difference. (MAG 114)
Not only would they be redundant during The Archivists tenure at The Institute, but the tapes continue to appear after The Eye has successfully performed The Watcher’s Crown. Even Jon questions why they’re there in the season 5 trailer: “It’s over, you’ve won. What can you possibly still need to hear?”, and Martin echoes this thought later in The Lonely - trailing off as he struggles to figure out what it wants, “Why? The Eye has won. It can already see everything; it wouldn’t need a – w-wouldn’t need a –”(MAG 170). That’s the point, Martin. The Watcher can see everything now, it wouldn’t need a statement.
EXHIBIT C: Gertrude’s tapes seem to have a spider-like control over Daisy when she brings them to the Institute. “You ask me to take a tape over to this murdering freak, and I’m all set to tear you a new one for it. But then I get the cassette in my hand, and suddenly all I want to do is deliver his tapes and spill my guts” (MAG 91) .
EXHIBIT D: In The Masquerade, the team finds the Wax Museum full of cobwebs just before discovering a tape that’s manifested to record them.
EXHIBIT E: In Binary we learnthat the tapes are in fact digital, even though most people think of them as analogue, while in Web Development we learn that The Spider is managing to work around technology’s tendency to act strangely around The Great Powers. Is it such a stretch to believe The Web tinkered with earlier technology first? Tapes seem like a breeze compared to impossible chatrooms - and the statements recorded to tape serve an eerily similar function when compared to the posts submitted to the Chelicerae.
EXHIBIT F: Gertrude herself started using the tapes around the time The Web bound her to Annabelle. As with anything relating to Gertrude Robinson, the timeline’s fuzzy. We know she worked at The Institute for approximately 50 years. Elias confirms this when he shoots her in MAG 158, “Fifty years is a long time. End of an era”. While it’s not an exact date, if the tape in question was recorded in 2015 we can presume Gertrude started working at The Institute around 1965. However she doesn’t start using the tapes until 1975. This is extrapolated by her own estimation from another recording taken in 2015 where Leitner points out a tape’s been recording their conversation about blowing up The Institute without her noticing. Gertrude lets slip: “Oh, good grief. Forty years I’ve been using them, and I swear, I’ll nev–” before unceremoniously turning off the recorder. So why the gap? Why did she not start using the tapes until ten years after she started at The Archives? Could it be that The Web wasn’t able to gain a foothold until after Agnes and Gertrude were intertwined? While it’s also difficult to pin down the date of that bond - I think it’s worth noting that Hill Top Road burned down in 1964 - which seems exactly like something a creature of fire incarnate would do if they realized they’d been tricked into something by The Mother of Spiders.
EXHIBIT G: Annabelle Cane seems to be able to hear through them. Twice in the post-apocalyptic world, Annabelle tries calling Martin. Once in MAG 163 and once in MAG 166. The first time, Martin has quite literally just finished saying to a tape “you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here” when the phone begins to ring. Almost as if Annabelle was calling in response. The second time is not as direct, but the tape recorder does click on just in time for Martin (who has just wandered away from Jon) to find a spade and discover a buried, ringing cell phone. We don’t know how long she’s been at Upton House. We don’t know if she pops out in order to make her calls, but if she doesn’t? Then Salesa’s theory that those sorts of things shouldn’t work in his oasis don’t seem to apply to this particular avatar of The Web. The tapes, as they always have been, are an exception, an Annabelle seems to hold sway over their operations.
I don’t think a lengthy conclusion is needed for this one. I’m still happy to hear other people’s theories till the very good cows come home. Whether or not it’s right, at the very least The Web’s been invested since the beginning. After all, Annabelle did greet Jon at Hill Top with the recording of his first tape. Was it simply a taunt? Or a hint that The Mother’s had her in his web since he first hit record.
UNASKED FOR MAGNUS THEORY #6: EXTINCTION IS COMING (AND HELEN WILL BE THE ONE TO OPEN THE DOOR)
If the title didn’t make it readily apparent, this post contains speculation on MAG Season 5. Please do not read if you haven’t made it to 160 in the pod. There be spoilers ahead.
We good?
All the new offerings listeners gone?
Alright!
To my dearest Red-Stringers,
I know it’s been a minute. I’ve been gearing up to this one for a while. Teased it on discord, even, but I’ve put off sharing, because this might be the theory I’m most attached to. Seriously, half the other ones on here are rambles at best (an exercise in futility at worst), I’m tired of letting this one collect dust, and want to share with you folks before I lose my nerve.
The short of it? I suspect the birth of The Extinction is still a threat in this post-apocalyptic world. I believe Elias’ ritual was just a stepping stone along the path, and Adelard Dekker and Peter Lukas were looking in the wrong place when they assumed this new power would be born from The End. Instead, I think The Spiral has been has been laying out the red carpet from the start with Distortion’s help, and The Archivist’s a little foolish for not questioning whether or not the apocalypse could get worse.
While I’ve been wary of Helen for a while (as lovely as Imogen Harris is), I have to admit the seed for this train of thought was planted by Simon Fairchild in MAG 151:
“Peter seems convinced that the Extinction is different, that its actual birth will be as bad - or worse - as another power fully manifesting. He believes its advent will be heralded by all sorts of disasters, and catastrophes, and global upheavals, and whatnot. That kind of thing”
Upheavals? Catastrophes? Seems a fitting description for an escalating few decades worth of failed rituals, wouldn’t you say? Even Adelard Dekker mused in his last correspondence with Gertrude “perhaps the birth of such things is longer and more complicated than I believed” (MAG 157). It could even include an eyepocalypse on the way to greatness, and I don’t think it coincidence a familiar set of corridors has been on the sidelines munching popcorn for most of the story so far.
One of the first descriptions we get of Michael is through a distorted window pane in Sasha James’ apartment building, the glass warped like a “funhouse mirror” (MAG 26). This description is echoed in A New Door when Helen Richardson describes the paintings in Michael’s corridors “each distorted [him] differently, like a selection of funhouse mirrors”. Curious then, isn’t it that one of Adelard Dekker’s statements regarding The Extinction tells the tale of a man who stepped from our world into a horrifying, inhuman reality via a very similar pathway? While the mirror world in Magnus 156 - Reflection isn’t usually tied to The Spiral (from what I’ve seen around the fandom) I would argue the funhouse aspect and the maze imagery should make us reconsider. That being said, I’d like to draw your attention specifically to the three odd mirrors this unfortunate dark tourist finds:
1. “expanded him into a short, squat reflection” 2. “bent him out of shape” 3. “squeezed him, made him thin and gaunt, and that was the one which took him”
Is it just me, or do the first two distorted goldilocks mirrors remind anyone else an awful lot of The Maker of Clay “short and squat, with knobbly bare arms that seemed to reach down almost to his knees” and The Distortion (do I really need to explain why? ha, you folks have been listening to the same show I’ve been listening to). Is it such a reach to imagine that the third mirror represents a facet of The Spiral that’s still marinating? Biding its time until full emergence. Have we forgotten already that Extinction-prophet Garland Hillier left a warning telling us that “the door is the door” after presumably losing himself in an alternate Paris full of inhuman inheritors so twisted that the researcher who accidentally followed him couldn’t even put into words how terrifying the creatures that come after humanity are (MAG 134)? Or is The door THE DOOR, and we should really be more concerned about her machinations.
It’s not exactly news the Distortion’s motivations have been foggy from the start. In the very beginning Michael told Sasha he didn’t care if she and her friends at The Archives lived or died. And yet he hung around treating their handling of The Unknowing like it was a spectator sport. Then when he became she, Helen stayed around the Institute to offer ‘help’, but happily denied Jon assistance when he came asking for an ally before entering the panopticon. Post-apocalypse? Martin’s not the only one who’s noticed she’s gleefully getting “worse”, and I can’t help but get the sense she’s not riding the chaos so much as riding the tide of a plan finally coming to fruition. Thriving.
It could explain (if we assume The Spider is working to re-establish the world that was) why The Distortion was so intent on getting into Hill Top Road when it was torturing Marcus MacKenzie (MAG 146). When approaching the house, Marcus remembers feeling the door’s playfulness disappear as “a cold hunger” set in “as though [he] had no right to just stand there looking at it. The street was silent, but [he] could feel it screaming at [him] to open it”. Was The Distortion aware that the time-warp house might be the only real threat to Extinction’s birth and wanted to cut it off at the head?
I know I’m spiraling into conjecture a little, but this post could turn into a novella if I didn’t. I just think it would be a great twist if while we’re focusing on Elias as the big bad something worse could be lurking in the shadows, and Helen seems like the most likely candidate. Elias had his villain moment. His arc (while not complete) felt like it reached its zenith at the end of Season 4. Tell me it doesn’t sound like a Jonny Sims bait and switch to have our intrepid heroes deal with ‘The King of the Ruined World’ only to find out he was the least of their worries.
Random, but if this theory holds any weight, I wonder (with the whole through-line that the fears are inextricably tied to humanity), if Gertrude accidentally helped Extinction’s ascension by feeding Michael to The Distortion. It seems horribly fitting that if in trying to stop one ritual she lay the groundwork for a power so disgusted by its own existence it had to become something else. Something with the potential to raze things to the ground even further and build an entirely new world unrecognizable to those that came before.
I’d like to leave you with one last (and arguably weakest) point. Ha, but if that’s not proof I do this for fun, I don’t know what is. This isn’t an essay. It’s me rambling, and if you’ve come along this far I appreciate you as a human. All the same, I’d like to draw your attention to episode 99 - Dust to Dust. The statement regards a town in Oklahoma that was built on a lie, a storm that felt like the end of the world, and a man named Stefan Brotchen who became something inhuman during the course of events. While Gertrude mentions that the town’s foundation reminds her of The Spiral, she ultimately admits that The Buried more likely stands to be the entity at play. However the prevailing reality of fear soup doesn’t negate the possibility that something else could be in the works too. Something that starts with an ‘e’ and ends in ‘xtinction’. I’d also like to put these two descriptions side by side:
“Stefan Brotchen was, to all appearances, much the same as any other Okie farmer: strongly built, with a mess of short, curly, blond hair and a round, smiling face. But his eyes were different. There was… something there. I-I was never quite sure what, but they had a depth, a quiet intensity to them that struck me the first time I saw him.
“He was tall, maybe six and a half feet? And he had long, straw-coloured hair that fell onto his shoulders in loose ringlets. His face was round and unthreatening” (MAG 47, The New Door)
Funny that at the end of that statement a very human Michael Shelley interrupts. Like I said. Could be nothing…or it could be the kind of move a certain horror writer likes to play which’ll make you want to bang your head on a desk for not seeing that maybe Extinction has been hanging around longer than anybody noticed. Maybe it’s been a part of The Distortion all along. Maybe it merged with it’s sib during the ritual at Sannikov Land, and has slowly been splintering since.
All I know is we have no idea what Michael looked like pre-transformation. We just have a voice on a tape.
