#Tim and Sasha should have been the season 5 main characters | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

soveryanon · 4 years

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Four months late and with a coffee, ~*MAG160’s review*~ (and the last season 4 proof that I can’t do anything without a deadline.)

- This time, the tiny detail making me love the show even more was: the location (“If nothing else, I’m hoping there’d be some… jurisdiction complications in Scotland, or something?”). We know from MAG050 that Jonah Magnus used to be based in Edinburgh, or was at least operating from there in the 1840s (“Certain uncharitable quarters would have it that your life consists of little but rattling around an Edinburgh townhouse, surrounded by piles of ghostly accounts and lunatic documentation.”); Gertrude had created and hidden the ritual tying her to Agnes in “the middle of a forest, in the Scottish highlands. Furthest place I could find, from anything, and anyone.” (MAG145); the first episode of the series had happened in Old Fishmarket Close in Edinburgh (MAG001). How fitting, then, that the end of the world would be unleashed in Scotland, close to Jonah’s roots, close to the ritual that had been one of Gertrude’s first actions against the Fears, close to the place where the Anglerfish had been taking victims in the first statement Jon ever recorded?

(+ Obligatory “Hm! An Englishman returning from Scotland with a fear of bagpipes and sheep. I’m sure we can all relate…!” (MAG125) snickering reminder. Cross your fingers that the sheep do not get Flesh’d around you, Jon.)

- Obligatory “Oh, Martin, No” because Jon is rubbing off on him (ha) when it comes to saying things that end up biting him in the butt way later:

(MAG079) TIM: Alright, fine. Fine. What do you want? What’s your light at the end of these spooky damn tunnels – and don’t say “everyone happy forever”, because that’s not happening. … Well? MARTIN: I don’t know. I don’t know!! I want to find out what’s going on; I want to save Jon; I want everyone to be fine, and you know what? If we were all happy that wouldn’t actually be the end of the world!

It was a succession of “Everything Is Fine(-ish)”, Martin was happy for at least one week…

(MAG160) MARTIN: Everything alright? ARCHIVIST: Just… making sure it works…! […] MARTIN: Are we… … Are we safe here? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Safe as anywhere else. […] But I think we’re okay. […] MARTIN: You’ll be okay here? ARCHIVIST: I’ll be fine. […] MARTIN: I assume it’s her attempt at a… a–a “varied diet”? Eating your greens, you know? ARCHIVIST: [CHUCKLE] Probably! I’m sure it will work fine.

… so, of course, the world just had to end.

- Fluff first: it took me a long, embarrassing while to understand what was happening in the first scene! I can’t guarantee it but it actually sounds to me like Martin was unloading a load of wood, and had been taking care of it (finding it, moving it, maybe even chopping it outside?!), hence why he perfunctorily asked what Jon had been doing inside (and made clear that he hadn’t gone to the village yet, since he was heading to it at the end of the sequence)?

(MAG160) [CLICK–] [LOAD OF WOOD BEING SET DOWN] MARTIN: Everything alright? […] [BITS OF WOOD BEING PILED UP, ONE BY ONE] MARTIN: You’re unpacked, then? ARCHIVIST: Mm? Oh, yes. [INHALE] Much as I can without any wardrobes to speak of, at least. MARTIN: Yeah, it’s… it’s not exactly the Ritz! […] ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] … Not much in the way of food, is there? MARTIN: Hm? ARCHIVIST: [EXHALE] MARTIN: Oh! N–no, not yet. I was actually gonna head down into the village to go pick something up. ARCHIVIST: Mm. MARTIN: Maybe give Basira a call to check in, ‘cause: Daisy apparently couldn’t pick a safehouse with a signal, so…! […] [ZIPPER PULLED] You’ll be okay here?

I’m not saying that, given how Jon was a bit distracted at the beginning of the episode and minimising how much time he had needed to unpack, and how there was glass shattering towards of the episode so most likely a window breaking, there is every likelihood that Jon had just been spending a lot of time eyeing Martin chopping wood through that window at the beginning of the episode, but. You know.

- Overall, I love how the cosiness and domesticity was so quickly installed amongst Other Serious Stuff, mysteries and the bigger plot: we’re being told/shown that Jon is taking precautions, wants to not use his powers, that Martin is the one heading out to go to the village (and the one leaving again in the second scene – Jon might be avoiding coming into contact with outsiders at all, in case they have “stories” or to avoid Knowing about them?), that Jon was planning to go back to only reading(/listening to) statements, after having taken Peter’s the episode before. So, still trying to not hurt more people, and also planning to rely on the tape recorder like he had done in MAG141-143 (if it clicks on on its own, then something is close), which is why and how we heard the first exchange:

(MAG160) [CLICK–] [LOAD OF WOOD BEING SET DOWN] MARTIN: Everything alright? ARCHIVIST: Just… making sure it works…! [SHUFFLING SOUNDS] MARTIN: I still don’t think we should have brought it. ARCHIVIST: Oh, it’s better than no warning at all. MARTIN: Mm. ARCHIVIST: Especially if I’m trying not to, uh… “see” things, you know? MARTIN: I guess. […] I was actually gonna head down into the village to go pick something up. ARCHIVIST: Mm. MARTIN: Maybe give Basira a call to check in, ‘cause: Daisy apparently couldn’t pick a safehouse with a signal, so…! […] You’ll be okay here? ARCHIVIST: I’ll be fine. […] ARCHIVIST: How was she? MARTIN: Oh, same as last week. ARCHIVIST: Institute still crawling with police? […] MARTIN: Still, she did manage to talk them out of burning the whole place to the ground? Oh, ah! Actually, that reminds me. Hum… [RUSTLING OF PAPERS] ARCHIVIST: Ah! These, these are the… statements. MARTIN: Uh, yes. Basira said last week she’d send some up as soon as the Archives weren’t a crime scene. ARCHIVIST: Yes… MARTIN: And she wasn’t sure which ones you’d read already, so she–she just said she’d send a bunch. [CLATTERING SOUNDS] ARCHIVIST: There’s… tapes in here, as well. D… did she say anything about tapes? MARTIN: She… didn’t mention it? But… I–I didn’t check it until after the call. ARCHIVIST: Mm. MARTIN: I assume it’s her attempt at a… a–a “varied diet”? Eating your greens, you know?

… Implicitly, that first exchange probably wouldn’t have been recorded if Jon hadn’t been checking that the tape recorder was working, which makes us go back to the usual questions of “what are they?”, “why are they only recording some scenes and not others?”, particularly in regards to the tapes that Martin brought back in the second scene.

I also appreciate how their exchanges were still grounded in… material concerns. How everything was installed for the listener to not think for a second that the apocalypse was coming close, given Martin and Jon’s preoccupations? They were still focusing on preventing Jon from harming other people, on food, on the identified people&monsters threatening them (Julia&Trevor, the Not!Them, potentially Daisy, Elias being on the loose again) and on legal matters regarding their involvement in MAG158’s attack (“If nothing else, I’m hoping there’d be some… jurisdiction complications in Scotland, or something?” / “… Does she know who they’re looking to blame?” “They’re not really talking to her about it? Sectioned or not, I guess ex-police only gets you so far.”). I think that this last point was the most impacting for me: food and other characters/threats will still be a concern during the apocalypse… but “legal jurisdictions”, Section 31 and the investigation in the Institute’s attack probably won’t be, and that would be the sign that “society as they know it” is crumbling? That the rules have profoundly changed?

- On that note, YEAH, “TERROR ATTACK” was indeed the way to put it:

(MAG160) ARCHIVIST: Besides, I’m more worried about the other Hunters. Or the… “Sasha”-thing. Last I heard, they still hadn’t found any bodies. [INHALE] A lot of destruction, a lot of blood… [EXHALE] But that’s it. [MORE WOOD SOUNDS] MARTIN: … You think they’re still out there. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: Hopefully a long way out there. […] Institute still crawling with police? MARTIN: I mean, they’ve finished all the interviews? Apparently, they’re calling it a “terror attack”. ARCHIVIST: Doesn’t surprise me. [CHUCKLE] Appropriate, in a way…! MARTIN: Mm. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: … Does she know who they’re looking to blame? MARTIN: They’re not really talking to her about it? Sectioned or not, I guess ex-police only gets you so far. ARCHIVIST: Mm. [SIGH] Does she know if they’ve found the old prison yet? The… Panopticon, Elia– … Magnus’s body. MARTIN: I don’t know how hard they’re looking, to be honest? Basira says a few of them got lost in the tunnels for over a day, and… ARCHIVIST: [CHUCKLE] MARTIN: … it’s not like the promise of an old man’s corpse is much of a motivator. ARCHIVIST: Mm. MARTIN: Still, she did manage to talk them out of burning the whole place to the ground?

* Was this implying that there weren’t any deaths amongst the regular staff? I know that it’s a bit of a moot point given the whole apocalypse-thingy, now, but still, glad for it because… I… really… don’t like… bystanders getting hurt as peripheral casualty when protagonists were the target… in fiction… (Though the staff have been hurt even if they survived, and now everyone is hurting given the circumstances, but, still. I really, really don’t like random deaths when their main point is to give angst to main characters.)

* Trevor&Julia and the Not!Them still on the loose. Given how the Not!Them operates, it’s possible that one of the Hunters hasn’t actually made it, and that we will meet Not!Trevor or Not!Julia in season 5? I’m guessing that they will come back in some shape or form (or Not) next season.

* I love how Section 31 was SO DONE with the Institute – Basira had established that the whole building meant an automatic Section 41 (MAG043) and we saw how Elias was handling police matters with blackmail and the likes (MAG082, MAG092, MAG120, MAG158). I’m surprised that Basira apparently explained Magnus’s deal, since they were searching for the body and the Panopticon? I thought they would avoid explaining it, since Section 31 would be the most likely to go for the kill if they ever found his body? And although Elias wasn’t sure about the consequences, he had still highlighted that killing him would still cause a risk for regular staff and Basira.

* I also love how the default way of destroying the Institute is always “set it on fire”:

(MAG060) ARCHIVIST: [Rosa Meyer] unloaded the van’s normal cargo of filing paper and envelopes, before filling it with several barrels of petrol. She was apprehended just south of Vauxhall Bridge, after she jumped a red light and collided with another car. Luckily the petrol did not ignite, and she was picked up by police as she tried to flee the scene. […] The one detail that still nags at me is that the company the Danilo Kostitch worked for, Paper Unlimited, is the same company that, at the time, supplied most of the stationery to the Magnus Institute. I have a nasty feeling about exactly where she was taking that petrol.

(MAG079) ELIAS: What did you want from him? LEITNER: The files. The ones you took from Gertrude. ELIAS: Planning a little light arson, are we Jurgen? LEITNER: It’s not just the Institute and you know it.

(MAG118) MARTIN: Case… 0071304. Statement of… Ivo Lensik. [BREATHES] [LIGHTER FLICKED ON] All right. [BURNING SOUNDS] [EXHALES DEEPLY] Statement ends, I guess. [PAPER RUSTLING] Hm… Harold Silvana! Number 0020406. Will probably do. [PAPER RUSTLING] [LIGHTER FLICKED ON] Alright then. 0140207, Dylan Anderson. [PAPER RUSTLING] Yeah? Okay~ [LIGHTER FLICKED ON] [EXHALES] There’s plenty more on the pile~ [AGGRESSIVE KNOCKING AND DOORKNOB JOSTLING] ELIAS: [MUFFLED AND DISTANT] Martin! Martin, open the door. MARTIN: Sorry Elias…! I can’t hear you. There’s a door in the way. […] ELIAS: Tell me what you’re doing, and why. MARTIN: I just thought I’d, y’know, drop a couple of ideas in the old suggestion box! Turns out my suggestion is… fire! [LIGHTER ON] ELIAS: And yet you haven’t set the whole Archives alight. So I assume this is… what’s it called… A cry for attention.

(MAG158) ELIAS: What exactly were you hoping to achieve here? Why not come at me directly instead of burning everything first? GERTRUDE: I was rather hoping the fire would occupy you while I did just that. ELIAS: I see…! […] So you burn the place down, use it as cover to reach my body, and then we die together. [CHUCKLE] How… poetic. Doesn’t seem like your style at all. GERTRUDE: I wasn’t actually planning on dying.

(Re: MAG060, I’d already been wondering, before the Jonah Magnus reveal, whether James Wright had somehow been involved in Rosa Meyer’s accident (thus preventing her from reaching the Institute) and/or had sent evidence to the police to incriminate her for the murder, ensuring she wouldn’t get another chance. I… guess that’s what really happened, uh ;;)

… A bit yIPS for the fact that Elias used to get harsh very fast as soon as the Archives were threatened with fire… and in MAG160, it’s now Basira who dissuaded police to burn the place down.

- On my first listen, I got a Big Worry over Basira because:

* “James Wright” had been Head of the Institute from 1973 to 1996, so during 23 years; “Elias Bouchard” had been the new one since 1996, so it’s been… 22 years, almost the same length. If Jonah is body-hopping regularly, we would be close to his next one.

* The weird Elias-Basira bits all through season 4.

* The fact that we haven’t heard Basira since MAG158, when Daisy told her to “go”: we… don’t really know what happened to her afterwards, we didn’t hear how she had interacted with Jon&Martin.

* The fact that Basira hadn’t mentioned the tapes and that Jonah’s statement was amongst the ones she sent to Jon:

(MAG160) ARCHIVIST: Ah! These, these are the… statements. MARTIN: Uh, yes. Basira said last week she’d send some up as soon as the Archives weren’t a crime scene. ARCHIVIST: Yes… MARTIN: And she wasn’t sure which ones you’d read already, so she–she just said she’d send a bunch. [CLATTERING SOUNDS] ARCHIVIST: There’s… tapes in here, as well. D… did she say anything about tapes? MARTIN: She… didn’t mention it? But… I–I didn’t check it until after the call.

… So: I panicked a bit about the idea that Jonah could have hopped into Basira before Jon and Martin left The Lonely, or when they had left for Scotland already?

BUT, on the other hand, it wouldn’t really fit thematically: she is still a character, I feel, we don’t “know” a lot; she spent the entirety of season 4 getting manipulated by Elias and ultimately losing Daisy again; she has a new arc opened (her promise to Daisy that she would find and kill her, in MAG158). It would be a bit too harsh to do Basira dirty like this right now, so I doubt that it’s something that happened (losing both Daisy&Basira like this, while Jon&Martin&Elias are still relevant, would be a bit too obviously imbalanced genders-wise too). But. Still. I got a Big Worry.

- Though: given Daisy’s last words in MAG158, I was assuming we were saying goodbye to her as “Daisy”, but now I’m not even sure? Because, yes, TMA characters often sarcastically joke about things that are upsetting and sad, but it didn’t feel like they were talking about someone they had lost forever as a person here?

(MAG160) MARTIN: Yeah, it’s… it’s not exactly the Ritz! ARCHIVIST: Well, it technically still belongs to Daisy, so… I’m just glad it’s not… some sort of… kill room. MARTIN: Or… [CHUCKLE] Or it is, and she just cleaned it up really well! [CHUCKLE] ARCHIVIST: Uh…! Yes… [CLEARS THROAT] [SILENCE] […] MARTIN: Some-somehow, I don’t think Daisy will be worried about “jurisdictions”…! ARCHIVIST: I– [SIGH] I don’t think she’d come here. [RATTLING SOUND] Doesn’t look like this place has been used for years. MARTIN: [POINTEDLY] And if she does? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] … Well. At least, we’ll know where she is.

… I mean, yeah, there was Jon’s blatant discomfort, but: this is not how you would talk about someone who had resisted for months against a Fear that had influenced almost all her life, who tried to get Jon out of his misery pit after he had rescued her from the Coffin, who tried to repair a bridge with Martin, who was firm in front of Jon about the fact that obeying to a Fear’s influence wasn’t worth it, to ultimately succumb to The Hunt again after she had stayed in order to give Jon time to run after Martin who was in danger and possibly to protect Basira?

I really really felt that we were absolutely saying goodbye to her in MAG158, but with Jon&Martin’s exchange in this episode, I’m not quite sure anymore – it would be a bit too heartless and disrespectful if it was the case, to summarise Daisy once again as a violent monster, while she had fought it for months? But: Daisy had already lost herself to The Hunt during The Unknowing, and had been rescued from that state once, plus Basira promised to find and kill her (which sounds like a Last Promise, something you can’t go back on); I doubt they could “get her back” another time, even if the whole paradigm has changed?

I really don’t know ;; If we are indeed saying goodbye to Daisy-as-Daisy, I kind of hope that there will be more sensitive words about her in season 5, because it really didn’t feel like she was absolutely gone, given the way Jon and Martin were talking about her – this was a conversation that could have been had about Daisy in season 3, not after season 4 and all the work she did…? I don’t really feel like it was a “meaningful death” on its own either: it didn’t feel to me like it was a sacrifice she was ultimately choosing to make, but The Hunt taking over her anyway because of the violence and the stress around. It works extremely well as a very sad death – Daisy caught back by her patron after some time, because she couldn’t escape it forever (as she had said), and what mattered was that she allowed us to discover the Real Her during season 4 – but I’m still hoping a bit that she could go out a bit more on her terms, if this isn’t her final disappearance as a sentient being able to choose whether or not to cause harm…?)

- So: unsure about Daisy’s current status; worried over Basira (but overall narrative tends to indicate that she hasn’t been taken over); while Martin…

(MAG158) PETER: But you do serve The Lonely. MARTIN: Oh, I’m getting there, but if this is the final test or something? Then bad luck. The answer’s still “no”.

(MAG159) MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] This is where I should be. It feels right. ARCHIVIST: Martin, don’t say that. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] Nothing hurts here. It’s just quiet. Even the fear is gentle here.

(MAG160) MARTIN: … Well, as fun as listening to you monologue is… ARCHIVIST: Hm. MARTIN: … I will give you some privacy. Go for a walk. ARCHIVIST: Let me know if you see any good cows…! MARTIN: Now, obviously I’m going to tell you if I see any good cows…! ARCHIVIST: [AMUSED HUFF] [FOOTSTEPS DEPARTING]

1°) … Somehow, I find it hard to believe that Martin, of all people, wouldn’t want to listen to Jon monologue. But aouch, the fact that he went for self-isolation so spontaneously gives me the impression that The Lonely might have impacted him quite deeply, and that it might come back to relevance in season 5…

2°) Daisy was barely mentioned in this episode and yet, once again, I’M SO SAD ABOUT DAISY, because it feels like everything was a reminder of her ;_; Who used to stay around when Jon was reading statements?

(MAG133) DAISY: You sure? ARCHIVIST: No, uh, it’s, hum. It’s fine. DAISY: It’s just… Basira’s busy. ARCHIVIST: I–I understand. Ho–honestly, er, I’d actually appreciate your insights, er, for this one, just… You know, keep quiet during the statement and that. DAISY: Sure. I, I can do quiet.

(MAG136) MELANIE: Well… uhm. Daisy’s been, erm… I’ve been keeping her company. Er, while… while Basira’s busy. She’s, er… ARCHIVIST: Oh, no, I, uh… I–I know. MELANIE: W–well, I’ve kind of got to… uhm. I’ve got somewhere to be. Do you mind if, if… she hangs around, with… ARCHIVIST: Er… I suppose… Not at all. She’s very welcome. […] DAISY: I didn’t ask her. To do that. ARCHIVIST: I–it–it’s fine. DAISY: [QUICKLY] You’re not babysitting me, alright?! I know that’s what the others think, sometimes, but… that’s not it. I just… don’t like… being on my own if I can help it. You know. Flashbacks, panic attacks, the usual. Just trying to avoid it if I can. ARCHIVIST: I know, Daisy, I–I do. It’s hard. DAISY: Yeah, well. Don’t let me get in your way.

(… And if she had been there, she would have found a way to stop Jon from reading, even if that meant harming him, uh…?)

- Obligatory “GOOD COWS” point:

(MAG160) MARTIN: Cool. … Well, as fun as listening to you monologue is… ARCHIVIST: Hm. MARTIN: … I will give you some privacy. Go for a walk. ARCHIVIST: Let me know if you see any good cows…! MARTIN: Now, obviously I’m going to tell you if I see any good cows…! ARCHIVIST: [AMUSED HUFF]

We know that Martin hadn’t travelled much in his life:

(MAG113) MARTIN: So… how was it? ARCHIVIST: Uh? MARTIN: A–America? And–and China? I’ve, I’ve never really actually… done any, y’know, travelling. MELANIE: It’s not all that. Sometimes you get shot by a ghost. ARCHIVIST: And refuse to give a statement about it. MELANIE: Yup! ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] It was… nice, Martin.

So… Eloping to Scotland with Jon might have been his first time seeing actual cows? I love how it already sounded like an inside-joke between Jon&Martin – you feel like there are small stories behind it, that either Martin, Jon or both of them have already cooed about “good cows” in the time they have spent there. Same cute point with:

(MAG160) ARCHIVIST: Anyway, don’t tell me the phone box down there doesn’t appeal to your retro aesthetic…! MARTIN: … It… might. ARCHIVIST: [AMUSED HUFF] MARTIN: Maybe.

It’s adorable that it’s both a nod to Martin’s taste indeed (… and technically Alex’s!):

(MAG039) TIM: Why do you have a second tape recorder, Martin? MARTIN: Oh, um… well, I’ve been using it to record myself. I write poetry and I think the tapes have a sort of… low-fi charm. ARCHIVIST: … I see.

(S1Q&A, 17’20) ALEX: So, when Jonny originally pitched The Magnus Archives to me, there was a period of testing, where we actually ran a few episodes that will never see the light of day…! And what we were doing is seeing what sounded right. And, part of that was to do with the sound of it – so we did versions of The Archives, uh, without the tape deck, just to test? I didn’t like it. I think that it’s got a sort of low-fi charm. JONNY: [CHUCKLE]

And Jon had remembered!

… So, confirmation that Martin likes and is into old things. … There is a definitive pattern there, because Jon absolutely does fit into the “retro” and “low-fi charm” aesthetic himself, and I’m not sure if Jon was aware that it was a self-burn (or if, like in MAG039 and his “only an idiot would stay in this job”, that was the joke).

- And on the other hand: Jon is Living The Archers Life in the countryside. I still want to Believe that the show became a guilty pleasure for him.

… ;_; I’m randomly sad for Daisy, because it feels right that one of her safehouses would be located in a remote area, without signal, a bit distant from the village nearby…? Was she even able to listen to the radio there? Did she listen to Archers episodes alone there?

(Well. “Alone”. Martin&Jon learned about the safehouse somehow, and I can’t tell which idea I preferred more: that Basira tipped them about it (and it was something she had shared with Daisy, and she told them despite that little secret of theirs), or that Daisy had tipped Jon before MAG158, in case something bad were to happen, because the two of them had this weird little friendship-thing going on…)

- I’m still going to use “Elias” for Jonah out of habit, and I like how different characters now in the known also have their own ways of referring to him? Peter used “Elias” out of habit too:

(MAG158) PETER: What are you doing here, Elias? […] Don’t let him distract you. ELIAS: Peter. PETER: Elias.

(MAG159) PETER: But it’s moored now, and I came on land, at Elias’s request. My crew is out there waiting for a call I think I am now unlikely ever to give them. … I will call him “Elias”, for that’s how I’ve known him for most of our… acquaintance, though I originally met him when he was still “James Wright, Head of the Magnus Institute”.

Martin quickly learned to reconfigure his knowledge and use “Jonah”:

(MAG158) MARTIN: Elias– … Jonah had nothing to do with it.

… Meanwhile: Jon is still stuck on “Elias”, though he’s been shown correcting himself:

(MAG158) ARCHIVIST: Uh– yes. And I’d wager that Elias’s body, uh… BASIRA: Gotta be Jonah Magnus, right? ARCHIVIST: I’d say so.

(MAG160) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Safe as anywhere else. If Elias wanted to find us, I imagine he could, but… I doubt the police will be able to. […] Does she know if they’ve found the old prison yet? The… Panopticon, Elia– … Magnus’s body.

It was a very strange season in the fact that Jon and Elias only interacted directly once, and very quickly (MAG158): in past seasons, we were hearing them regularly (even in season 1, when they directly interacted only twice), and it was implied that they were discussing more often than what the tapes were recording. But in season 4, no additional interaction than MAG158’s is possible given that Elias was in jail and Jon was forbidden from visiting him… though there was a form of communication through different means – Jon read Jonathan Fanshawe’s letter to Jonah because it had “called” to him (and Elias “called” Jon towards the Panopticon; was he the one responsible for that one?), and Jonah’s letter in MAG160.

How long will it take before Jon and Elias come face to face again in season 5? And will Jon still call him “Elias” then, or “Jonah”?

- I had been wondering for so long how Jon was supposed to fit in Beholding’s ritual, as one of its agents! Would Jon keep embracing his powers to the point that pulling in The Eye into the world would seem acceptable for him? (That was my main worry when Oliver gave his statement and told him he had to make a choice: were we supposed to trust Jon when he was telling Basira and the others that his “priorities haven’t changed”, or was she right to be cautious around him? In the end, it was a mix of both given that Jon wasn’t trustworthy (he hid to everyone that he had been taking statements behind their backs) but he still wasn’t keen on bringing the apocalypse, which was cemented later in season 4 when the others made sure that he wouldn’t hurt other people.) Would Elias manage to convince Jon that Beholding was a lesser evil, possibly to “protect” the world against Extinction? (Absolutely not.) Was Elias simply waiting for the right time to blackmail Jon into it doing it, by threatening to hurt Georgie, the assistants or specifically Martin? (No, but my blood ran cold when Jonah mentioned Martin in this statement, since… Martin was outside… alone… and out of reach…, and for a few seconds, I really thought he had been kidnapped and/or hurt and that this would be it.) Given how Elias had a “complicated” relationship to the apocalypse and didn’t seem to be doing much, did he really want Beholding’s ritual, or was he passively sabotaging it…? “The Watcher’s Crown” had been a concern and a frustration from the moment it was first mentioned:

(MAG111) GERRY: She worked out they’d all be happening quite close together. She’d already been doing it a while, and The Unknowing was the next on her list. That and The Watcher’s Crown. ARCHIVIST: The, the what? GERRY: Uh, The Rite of the Watcher’s Crown. It’s what she called the ritual for the Eye. She didn’t tell me much about that one, just that she knew how to take care of it. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH]

(MAG123) BASIRA: Best I can understand it, Beholding, or… The Eye, or whatever you wanna call it, we’re one of the only powers that hasn’t actually taken a shot at our ritual. Yet. And everything out there knows it. ARCHIVIST: … No, I mean, we… we can’t be the only ones, surely? BASIRA: I don’t know. Probably not. But we made a big noise with The Unknowing and… other stuff, and… now they’ve taken notice.

(MAG126) PETER: [LAUGH] Because, behind all his bluster, Elias’s just like all the rest. He’s so preoccupied playing the game, he doesn’t pay attention to the big picture. He managed to convince himself that he could get his ritual off first, which would have made all of this a… bit moot, but that’s not really an option anymore. So it’s down to us. You and me. The dynamic duo.

(MAG135) BASIRA: [DRY SIGH] What was the point? You won’t be getting your ritual off from in here so, what do you need him for?

(MAG137) ARCHIVIST: Ever since I crawled out of that damn coffin, I feel like I’ve been… adrift. Filling in blanks and diving into History, but only…! [EXASPERATED SIGH] The breadcrumbs I’m finding are… stale. Old. … What the hell is The Watcher’s Crown? So far the only mention of it I’ve had is from Gerry, and he didn’t seem to know much about what it actually meant. [PAUSE] And he’s gone now. But if it is the grand ritual of Beholding, then I– … I mean… I need to know about it. Right…? I feel like I’m on a deadline, like I’m running out of time somehow – and I don’t even know where to go! What to look for, o–or… [EXHALE] Just casting around blindly for more clues to just… drop into my lap. Everyone else is… running towards something, or running away, and I… [SIGH] I don’t know what I’m doing.

(MAG138) ELIAS: For all his… many faults, Peter is legitimately trying to stop the end of the world as we know it. MARTIN: So why haven’t you helped him?! ELIAS: My relationship to the apocalypse is more… complicated. MARTIN: [UTTER DISBELIEF] Oh, seriously? ELIAS: Seriously.

And in the end, I’m so satisfied by what was revealed, since it entirely checked out.

* Indeed: before season 4, it had seemed logical to assume that the Institute had been founded in 1818 and that the Beholding faction had been accumulating power ever since, preparing for The Watcher’s Crown, given how The Dark had apparently waited for 300 years before trying again, and The Stranger 230 years. However, in Smirke’s letter to Jonah (MAG138), we learned that Jonah was finalising a Beholding project, which resulted in Smirke’s death. So that was the time of The Watcher’s Crown attempt!

* Elias “My relationship to the apocalypse is more… complicated.” Magnus had already tried his ritual once, and knew now that the others’ were all doomed to fail – unless going for his ritual of them all. That was why. F u c k e r.

* Annabelle had already taunted and/or warned Jon about the fact that reading a statement was a weak point, since he had reached a point where it was impossible for him to stop once he had begun:

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “… I wouldn’t try too hard to stop reading, there’s every likelihood you’ll… just hurt yourself. So just listen. Now – shall we turn the page and try again?” [PAINED SOUND] [PAGE GETTING TURNED] ARCHIVIST: [STRAINED] … Statement of… Jonah Magnus… regarding… Jonathan Sims… the Archivist. … Statement begins. […] “Now. [CHUCKLE] Repeat after me.”

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “Of course, that’s not the real crux of the free will question that’s… bothering you at the moment, is it? I think that one probably comes down to whether or not you’re choosing to continue reading this statement out loud. You didn’t mean to, did you? No, I’m sure you told Basira and Melanie that you were going to glance over it and report back. Perhaps they asked you if you were going to record, and you shook your head – “Maybe later”. That sounds like the sort of thing you’d say.

But think about it, Jon: when’s the last time you were able to read a statement quietly to yourself without instinctively hitting record and speaking it aloud? It is just instinct? Habit? Or is it a compulsion – a string pulled by the Ceaseless Watcher or the Mother of Puppets? Or both? I know the summaries have started to confuse you. Where did they come from, when you read a statement fresh? How do you just… sort of know what it’s about, before you even start to read it…? But by then, you’re away: the rollercoaster is dropping and you’ve no real choice but to hold on and hope that… I don’t crash you.”

(What had struck me with Annabelle’s is that, although it was true that Jon had not been interrupted during a statement past season 2, the concept of Jon not being able to glance at a statement without making an official record was fairly recent: he had provided some follow-ups during season 4, having previously done some work using details mentioned in the statements.)

… It might be that Annabelle showed off the trick of Jon being forced to keep reading a statement even though the content was unpleasant precisely to give Elias the idea? Elias knew how to get his completed “Archive”, but I doubt that hijacking Jon through a statement in order to get him to summon the Fears was something he had planned for long, and not something he had devised recently, copying Annabelle.

* + Bonus from Martin, who had absolutely jinxed it / been too On The Nose about it, since he had put out there the idea of an incantation to bring about the end of the world, though crackily:

(MAG144) MARTIN: [LONG INHALE, EXHALE] I believe you. PETER: You don’t still think I’m trying to trick you into a grand ritual? MARTIN: I mean, I’m not about to start chanting stuff for you, but… but the details you’ve given me all seem to check out. So far.

The end of the world happened thanks to someone chanting stuff for someone else, in the end!

- Same feeling with how the episode was framed: we did have clues that ~something was coming~, we knew since MAG121 that we were now in 2018 and that it was conveniently the Institute’s anniversary, Jon himself acknowledged this early in the season…

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: Hm. “Jonah Magnus”… I’ve never really given much thought to him. Not nearly as much as I should have. I suppose I had always hoped there was a chance he was… innocent, in all this. I know, I know; but I had… [SIGH] I had just… hoped that maybe the founding of the Institute was in earnest…! And not simply the foundation stone for all the… terrible things that have happened here. … But no. Whatever is happening now… has its origins two hundred years ago. In the work of an evil man. … [INHALE] Exactly two hundred years, in fact. Don’t think that little detail has evaded me. I don’t know the precise date the Institute was founded, but I do know that it was in 1818. [INHALE] Something’s coming. I know it is. But I just… don’t know what I need to do.

But WOW did Everything highlight Elias’s sense of drama.

* 2018 was indeed relevant, but worse, Asshole Boss Man picked October 18th as the Apocalypse Day, making the statement case a palindrome (#0181810). Knowing this posturing fucker, there is every likelihood that this was the anniversary of the exact date the Institute was founded or something.

* He probably bribed Simon or used Ex Altiora’s Spiral thing just to be able to get the storm rumbling ominously in the background on that day.

* Once again, HE USED TO BE BASED IN EDINBURGH (and confirmed in this letter that the building of the Magnus Institute was constructed or moved into only after his failed Watcher’s Crown attempt, so around the time of Smirke’s death in 1867). He struck when Jon&Martin had precisely taken refuge in Scotland, so the country of his roots.

* I’ll go all-out about the content of his letter, but the sense of self-posturing and dramatisation was through the roof, he probably spent most of the prison vacation thinking about it and about how Jon would probably react to craft the most obnoxious letter ever. Fucker.

* The PUNS. He punned SO MUCH. It’s nothing new (“Don’t forget to keep in touch, Martin. There are so many people in here, but without one’s friends… it does get rather lonely.”, just for one), but he was absolutely insufferable in this one:

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Admittedly, given the advent of The Unknowing, I needn’t have bothered – but what’s the old saying about hindsight? […] Poor Peter. He really should have left well enough alone. […] How is Martin, by the way? He looks well. You will keep an eye on him when all this is over, won’t you?”

(+ “It does tickle me, that in this world of… would-be occult dynasties and ageless monsters, the “Chosen One” is… simply that: someone I chose!” Someone remembered The Tingly, uh.)

* About the Posturing: Elias definitely confirmed to be a Bones Connoisseur, dude, please, you were two centuries late for the Baroque movement.

(MAG092) ELIAS: And it was not out of malice, or because [Jonah Magnus] lacked affection for Barnabas Bennett: he retrieved those bones sadly enough when the time came. Bones that you can still find in my office, if you know where to look.

(MAG127, Jonathan Fanshawe) “… Do I need to tell you what I found, Jonah? Do I need to detail what covered his organs? His bones? The inside of his skin? What clustered together in their dozens, and all turned as one to focus on me as I opened his chest? Their pupils constricting in the light, with irises of every hue and colour. Because whatever it was that did this to him, I know in my heart… that it is your fault.”

(MAG131) JARED: The letters started comin’ in about two years ago. Good white paper, large print. Nice and simple. Dunno who sent them; they were never signed, and I dunno how they kept finding me. […] I don’t blame people for thinking that all bones are the same, most people don’t have much experience – but it’s not true. There are good bones, and there are bad bones, and Regan Hasnain had some very good bones in her. They were solid, healthy, and they jumped at my touch. I didn’t doubt the letters again.

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “Do you know of Alexander Cunningham? He’s been working with the Viceroy of India on the Indus Valley digs, and he’s discovered some quite remarkable things. Burial pits full of burned bones and ash, skulls with markings as though the eyes were removed, and others that seem… buried alive.”

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “[…] though I waited until the worms were in you to pull the lever. I needed to make sure you felt that fear all the way to your bones.”

… Assuming that Jon didn’t leave with it, I’m unfortunately picturing Jonah getting his hands on Jon’s rib just to add it to the secret stash in his office.

- I really loved Jonah’s “little trip down memory lane”, because… it was answering interrogations or suspicions (regarding his past actions), still managed to surprise me in small little things that I hadn’t suspected and hadn’t been hinted but worked perfectly (shoving Helen into a car?!), and was still extremely functional (terrorising Jon and readying him for the final incantation, by reactivating all his old fears and pains). The first part of it was almost a “gift”, in a way, since it… answered and “hooked” us/Jon, but wasn’t really necessary when it came to messing Jon up; but it was, after all, a statement, so it’s only logical that it would begin with some gloating and posturing. Gods, the posturing. Anyway, a… lot of things suddenly rearranged themselves, so I’m just going to follow his words for that one without trying to organise it thematically:

(MAG160) ARCHIVIST: [CLEARS THROAT] Statement of Hazel Rutter, regarding a fire in her childhood home. Original statement given August 9th, 1992…! Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins. [PAUSE, PUNCTUATED BY THE CRACKLING OF THE FIRE] “Hello, Jon. [STATIC RISES] Apologies for the deception, but I rather wanted to make sure you started reading, so I thought it best not to announce myself. I’m assuming you’re alone – you always did prefer to read your statements in… private. … I wouldn’t try too hard to stop reading, there’s every likelihood you’ll… just hurt yourself. So just listen. Now – shall we turn the page and try again?” [PAINED SOUND] [PAGE GETTING TURNED] ARCHIVIST: [STRAINED] … Statement of… Jonah Magnus… regarding… Jonathan Sims… the Archivist. … Statement begins.

* The sneakiness was extraordinary because, given the first words, you were meant to be already trying to guess what this statement would be about – we tend to associate “fire” with Desolation, and the very present and physical crackling of the fire in the background… was adding a very ominous touch to this.

* I must admit that before Jon confirmed that it was Jonah’s statement, I didn’t know whether it was him or Annabelle? There was something very carnivorous and cruel in the tone Jon used, which reminded me of her rather than Elias. (And, overall: I felt “Jonah” a bit more than in Ben-as-Elias’s words! It’s probably because of the huge amount of posturing, and the… slowness? of Jon’s reading, rather than Elias’s usual chirpy bitey comments.)

I have to appreciate, also, how this season began, continued and ended… with people saying hello to Jon and/or calling him “Jon” when he was physically unable to answer.

(Season 4 trailer) MARTIN: Hi Jon. [PAUSE] H–how are you? [LIGHT CHUCKLE] … Yeah. Yeah, same here. It’s… it’s bad all over, you know?

(MAG121) OLIVER: Hum… Hello, Jon. Do you… m–mind if I call you Jon? I… I mean. You don’t actually know me, it’s just… well. “Archivist”, it’s so… formal, isn’t it? And I do kind of know you…? Haven’t had much choice, really.

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “‘Free will’ is a funny old thing – isn’t it, Jon? Can I call you Jon? I’m going to call you Jon.”

Elias had been spending a loooot of time watching Jon, indeed.

* The struggle in Jon’s throat noises was heart-breaking, we could hear that he was clearly trying to resist… to no avail, and Elia’s little taunt was just the nail on the coffin…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Why does a man seek to destroy the world? It’s a simple enough answer: for immortality, and power […]; to place yourself beyond pain, and death, and fear. It is an awful thing to know about yourself, but the freedom, Jon, the freedom of it all…! I have dedicated my life to handing the world to these Dread Powers, all for my own gain, and I feel… nothing but satisfaction, in that choice. I am to be a king of a ruined world, and I shall never die. I believe there are far more people in this world who’d take that bargain than you would ever guess. And I have beaten all of them.”

* We had learned through Robert Smirke’s letter that Jonah was afraid of dying (MAG138: “I beg you, do not pursue this goal; if only a single lesson may be gleaned from my life of long study, and longer hardship, it is that the fear of Death is natural, and to flee from it will only bring greater misery. Repent of your sins, Jonah. Seek forgiveness. I am certain the Dread Powers cannot take a soul that keeps faith in the Resurrection.”), that absolutely confirms it. Things have changed indeed, and the separations we used to rely on will probably be less relevant, but… still, it’s interesting that this season began with an agent of The End visiting Jon (sent by The Web). Oliver had precisely highlighted that you can’t really escape death (MAG121: “That was it with the old woman too. That was different, though. Way I figure it? She stuck her nose in just about everywhere it wasn’t wanted and stirred up hornets. ‘Till all the precautions in the world couldn’t stop Death from finally catching her.”), I’m curious about whether or not it will be relevant for Jonah too.

* Adding to this: Jon had explained that he had woken up because he was afraid of dying (MAG136: “My memories of the coma are not clear. But I know I made a choice; I made a choice to become… something else. Because I was afraid to die.”), and it was a lingering theme in this season: is it worth it to not die if it relies on harming others? We’ve had various examples of people accepting this deal in their own ways (Helen who chose to “stop feeling guilty” about it, Tova McHugh who justified to herself that she deserved to live more than others…), and others who actively refused it (Daisy who pointed out that it wasn’t worth it, Melanie who had decided to stop any complacency with Beholding even if it would cause her own death, before she found a way out). The beginning of the episode established that Jon was still trying to not use his powers, and the prologue confirmed it once more: after the harm he caused and kept hidden during the first half of season 4, he’s still following the conscious choice to not hurt others at the present. I had felt that MAG138 was implicitly contrasting Jonah and Jon (agreeing to let his friends get consumed for his own gain / wanting to protect the assistants and refusing to lose anyone else); given how Elias was absolutely deadpan about the fact he had embraced the Fears for his own gain, the contrast is definitely cemented.

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Of course, this desire did not manifest overnight. When Smirke first gathered our little band – Lukas, Scott and the rest – to discuss and hypothesise on the nature of the things he had learned from Rayner… I felt what I believe we all felt: curiosity, and fear. But as he compiled his taxonomy and codified his theories on the grand rituals, I began to develop a very specific concern. Smirke was still so obsessed with his ideas on balance, even as our fellows began to experiment and fall to the service of their patrons: I began to worry that if one of them successfully attempted their ritual, then I would be as much a victim as any, trapped in the nightmare landscape of a twisted world. At first, I attempted prevention, but the cause seemed hopeless. The only way to ensure I did not suffer the tribulations of what I believed to be… an inevitable transformation, was to bring it about myself. So what began as an experiment… soon became a race. Beyond that, I was getting older, and mortality began to weigh more heavily on my mind. How much in this world is done because we fear death, the last and greatest terror? I convinced Smirke to work on Millbank, leading him to design it as a temple to all the Fears in equilibrium, such that my own modifications to the design of the Panopticon went… unremarked. It – took – years for the dread of the prisoners that passed through to fully suffuse the place, and I was an old man by the time I made my first attempt at The Watcher’s Crown, sat in the centre of that colossal eye, the great ring of cells encircling me like a coronet. It was… flawed, of course, as all Smirke’s rituals were; and none of the inmates survived, as the power I attempted to harness shook the building almost to pieces, and the murky swamp upon which the prison was build consumed it. But it left me a gift: for sat in that watchtower, I could see… everything I turned my mind to. It was a dizzying power; and one I discovered I maintained even as I found vessels to extend my life. [DISTANT RUMBLE OF THUNDER] Of course, I had to make sure the location was kept under my control while I worked on revising my plans, and so I moved the organisation I had founded to assist in my research down to London. And the Institute, as you know it, was born. I’ll not bore you with details of my bodies and failures through those intervening years. Suffice to say I kept busy, both planning my own next attempt, and doing my best to stymie those others who tried versions of their own. Surely, my interpretation of The Watcher’s Crown had been incomplete; there had been some element of the ritual I had overlooked.”

* ! I had felt like season 4 was… really giving the idea that an “old” generation of avatars or people involved with the Powers had been wiped out? The Lightless Flame was almost entirely eradicated by Gertrude, a few recent failed rituals damaged some factions (The Stranger, The Dark, The Flesh), a lot of recurring figures were revealed dead (such as Adelard) or are “officially” dead (Mikaele Salesa…?), Peter was recently eradicated, etc. Simon Fairchild, Jonah and Trevor Herbert (if he has survived) seem to be the oldest; the only ones left seem to be Jared Hopworth (since 1996), Jude Perry (since 1991), Daisy (in whichever state she currently is…), Oliver Banks (“died” and came back after 2015), Annabelle Cane (turned in 2010), Helen-the-Distortion (took over in 2017), Julia Montauk (embraced The Hunt in summer 2010), Jon (Beholding, gradually groomed into avatarhood from late 2015 to early 2018), potentially Martin (Beholding-touched Lonely, late 2017 and 2018). That’s not many, compared to the old guard. But it did fit with both the idea that the apocalypse would be brought around now, and that Jonah had lived it as a “race” against others?

* We don’t know what happened to George Gilbert Scott as an avatar of The Buried in the Magnusverse? He was described in MAG050, but I wonder if he’s still around, given how Elias took great care of finishing off Rayner by sending the police after him. (Technically, we don’t know how Mordechai Lukas ended either… but the Lukases are still prosperous and financing the Institute, so the family and Elias are still in good terms.)

* It’s an implicit correction to Jon’s conclusions that the Institute had never been founded “in earnest” and that Jonah Magnus had always been “an evil man” after reading Jonathan Fanshawe’s letter from 1831 (MAG127): Jonah really taking it to heart to point out that his opinions had changed a bit over the matter of the Fears, uh? Although it was a quick decision: if we’re following our History, Robert Smirke began working on Millbank around 1816. If Jonah was the one who pushed him in that direction for his own plans, it means that he was already planning to bring in Beholding when Albrech had sent him his letter (MAG023) about The Eye’s tomb in the Black Forest. Was it the case, or is the Magnus timeline diverging a bit from our own history (maybe Smirke began working on Millbank later in the Magnusverse), or did Jonah rewrite history a bit there, retrospectively telling himself that he had convinced Smirke to work on Millbank for his own gains? Jonah, at least, let Barnabas Bennett die in 1824, and the way Elias presented it, it had still been a sad choice albeit one made without any hesitation (MAG092: “And it was not out of malice, or because he lacked affection for Barnabas Bennett: he retrieved those bones sadly enough when the time came. […] No, it was because he was curious. Because he had to know, to watch and see it all.”); according to Jonathan Fanshawe’s letter from 1831, he had grown a bit more ruthless towards Albrecht von Closen by then.

* … How old was Jonah when he pushed Smirke to work on Millbank? “I was getting older, and mortality began to weigh more heavily on my mind” would mean old age… but he was still alive in 1867 (Robert Smirke’s letter). He couldn’t have been more than 40 in 1816, and that’s already stretching a lot! So either Real Life’s and Magnus’s Histories diverge as mentioned above, either he was really a Victorian asshole getting worried over his first wrinkles and white hair, gooooods, Jonah, please…

* It… does explain the “Opperior” in the Institute’s logo, if he wanted for more than half his life that Millbank would be contaminated by the fears…………

* I love how he casually explained that The Watcher’s Crown had already happened, when we were panicking about it, and yet! We should have suspected! Since Smirke’s letter mentioned that Jonah was likely working on a Beholding project:

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “It is telling that of those I have brought into my confidence, it is only you and I who have continued this far without falling to one Power or another, despite all my instruction and work. This is, of course, assuming you have not taken the path of The Eye that I know has called you – called us both – for so long, even since before we began our work on Millbank. […] I am not a fool; I know well enough what this dream is likely to mean, and I warn you again that if you have any remaining ambitions to use our work, to try and wear The Watcher’s Crown, you must abandon them! Not simply for the sake of your own soul, but for that of the world! I have always had the utmost respect for you as a man of dignity, and learning. Do not allow yourself to fall to this madness. […] I am choosing to assume that these manifestations are unintentional, Jonah, and you have not… simply decided to implore a Dark Patron to end the life of an old man. I further find myself supposing that they may emanate from your own intrigues and preparations to culminate those plans which we agreed to abandon so many decades ago! […] The Eye has marked me for something, of this I have no doubt. My… humble hope is that it may be a swift death, an accidental effect of your own researches, which I once again implore you to abandon. It is likely too late for me, but I will not…”

Letter interrupted because He Dead. I’m a bit surprised that Jonah didn’t take credit for his death, so it might have been Beholding just growing more powerful at the time and touching Smirke without even Jonah doing anything purposefully?

* And again!!! It made sense re: the current building of the Institute. We knew that the Institute had been founded in 1818, but Sampson Kempthorne’s letter (MAG050) had mentioned that Jonah was “rattling around an Edinburgh townhouse, surrounded by piles of ghostly accounts and lunatic documentation” in 1841. Breekon, while describing an event that had happened around 1853 (his time serving on the Robert Small), had mentioned that it had been “the first time we saw what would become this place, The Eye’s Pedestal” (MAG128), implying that it wasn’t yet The Eye’s pedestal at the time. That’s because Jonah only moved the Institute to London after his failed Watcher’s Crown attempt, past 1867! And all to protect the Panopticon and his actual body inside of it!

* Just the mention in passing that a huge amount of people died during his attempt, but it’s not really surprising from Elias-Jonah. Though, he was a bit more handson than Peter had credited him for, in the end?

* It’s interesting how the failed rituals impacted avatars differently. Peter almost lost himself; Tom Haan certainly did (as pointed out by Gertrude); Rayner was severely diminished; Simon just kept going after each one (only one attempt amongst many, in the big universe?). Jonah… got a power boost out of it. If the Fears work on a Whatever Feels Right basis, is it because he was so self-centred that he couldn’t even imagine not getting personal gain out of it or something?

* It still makes so much sense that his own way to “not die” was to take hosts: he knew Rayner, and that’s what Rayner was doing, so it worked because he had an example of it working for someone else; it had to work this way for himself, too!

* Really interesting too, that… The Eye was not mentioned in the first part of his statement. We know that The Watcher’s Crown was The Eye’s ritual, but it’s really telling that Jonah didn’t explicitly introduce it as his god: in his mind, he was clearly doing it for himself, for his own interests, for his own survival and gain, and not at all out of devotion or fascination or unwilling service to a patron (though there are clear indications that… he was actually much more Beholding than he was aware).

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “It was not until I met Gertrude Robinson that things began to really come into focus. You see, the role of Archivist has been part of The Beholding for as far back as my research can go. This isn’t uncommon for the Powers: most of the beliefs around them are guesswork and fallible human interpretation, but there are certain… throughlines and consistencies that can be spotted, regardless of the trappings. But Gertrude was unlike any other Archivist. She simply did not care about collecting experiences or compiling the fears of others – she was driven to stop those who served the Powers. More than once, I thought she must secretly be of The Hunt, [RUMBLE OF THUNDER] but there was never that sick joy in her, that thrill of predator and prey. She had simply decided that this was her position in life, and went about it with a practicality that even I found disconcerting at times. I once asked her… what drove her, what had started her down that path. She told me The Desolation had killed her cat…! I don’t know if she was joking and, to be honest, I could never bring myself to look into her mind and find out for sure.”

* So ;; Kinda leaning into the idea that Johann von Württemberg and the creature under Alexandria were indeed Archivists of their times? (And I’m D: all over again about Jonah confirming that he had researched on Beholding, because of what happened to Albrecht von Closen between 1816 and 1831 because of him and the books…)

* Gotta love how he didn’t mention any other Archivist before SHE happened. Gertrude Robinson was That Special, uh. (Well, he had acknowledged that “I suppose we both got a little complacent. Fifty years is a long time!” in MAG158)

* I love how I can absolutely not tell either whether she was messing with him or if it was the truth. She could very well have dedicated a huge amount of her life to fucking over The Lightless Flame in particular because they had murdered her cat, it would have been entirely understandable.

* I love that JONAH was TOO SCARED of Gertrude Robinson to peer into her mind ever. Also:

(MAG159) PETER: Gertrude was the one that scared me. She seemed to have no interest in meeting me whatsoever, something… I appreciated, but there was something in her eyes when she looked at me, as though she was making a calculation and I was an unwanted integer she was deciding whether to remove.

Lonely Eyes, united in their shared fear of the scary old woman.

* That was one of the first moments I remembered that Jon was listening to this with us – and how upsetting it must have been to be reminded of “the Archivist” being a function, when he had been so afraid to have inherited a “mantle” like Michael and others in season 3…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “In any case, Gertrude’s ruthless efficiency in derailing and collapsing rituals threw into stark relief a question that had been bothering me for almost a hundred and fifty years. In the whole span of humanity, why had nobody ever succeeded? Perhaps there were a long line of Gertrude Robinson throughout history, but I found that hard to credit. Could it be then, that there was something in the very concept of the rituals that meant they couldn’t succeed? She was clearly having similar thoughts in that last year, all of which culminated with… the People’s Church. When I saw that she was making no preparations whatsoever to stop it, I realised she was putting into practice a theory – and one she couldn’t afford to be wrong. She was going to wait, and see if the unopposed ritual succeeded, or if it collapsed under its own strain, as mine had all those years ago. Knowing Gertrude, I’m sure she had a backup plan if she had miscalculated; but she had not. The ritual failed. And all at once, I realised what needed to be done. You see… the thing about the Fears is that they can never be truly separated from each other. When does the fear of sudden violence transition into the panic of hunted prey? When does the mask of The Stranger become the deception of The Spiral? 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 could not sever it from the others, and eventually it would be violently pulled back to the place next to reality where they dwell.”

* I Did Not Share That Opinion because… honestly, the rituals seemed quite easy to derail? The only thing that surprised me is that Gertrude took care of them on her own, only thanks to a few (sometimes unwilling) allies: Adelard, Gerry, Michael and Jan Kilbride. Even with past taxonomies, there might have been dozens of different cults worshipping different things (Jonah did acknowledge that Beholding&Archivist was an old constant); we got a glimpse of old conflicts in MAG053 (Those Who Sing The Night fighting against the site of an Archive) and MAG117 (The Stranger’s last ritual attempt getting interrupted by what Gertrude interpreted as Slaughter avatars). It sounded logical to me that a lot of these rituals had failed in the past because others had opposed it: they weren’t planning their ritual in a vacuum, but with a dozen of cults opposing yours.

* BUT THE EXPLANATION WAS A “OH SHIT” MOMENT BECAUSE!!! It… made sense, and we had glimpses and hints and we should have guessed that it was the case!!

(MAG080) ARCHIVIST: So the creatures are, what, priests? These books their holy texts? LEITNER: I told you it was an unhelpful analogy. Let’s try another one. Um… 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? ARCHIVIST: So the books, the monsters, they’re part of these beings? Just extensions of them? Fingers being pushed into our world?

(MAG111) GERRY: And when our fears change, so do these things. But it’s not quick. Gertrude reckons they’ve basically been the same since the Industrial Revolution. She and my mum both liked to follow Smirke’s list of fourteen. ARCHIVIST: [DISBELIEVINGLY] Th– I mean, there are a lot more than fourteen things to be afraid of in the world. Where do you draw the line? GERRY: Hmmm. 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. […] 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. O–Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like– ARCHIVIST: An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once. GERRY: Now you’re getting it. ARCHIVIST: Like colours, but if colours hated me.

(MAG137, Wallis Turner) “The crew, hungry for death in their stolen uniforms, at first cried out in joy with each new murder; then, they cried out with expectation; and at last, with what sounded like concern, casting their eyes up into the empty sky as though waiting for something. As fewer and fewer of us remained, I could feel something like panic begin to spread through them. […] The crew… did not… stop me. They simply watched me with expressions of despair, and the deepest disappointment I’ve ever seen.” […] GERTRUDE: Still the anti-climax is fascinating: I can only assume they were supposed to be… bombed at the height of the ritual. Maybe by Japanese aircraft, maybe Allied, maybe… both. I wondered what stopped it: a Japanese radar filled with… spiderwebs; a US destroyer, finding itself suddenly alone in the open ocean? [HUFF] We’ll probably never know.

(MAG143) MANUELA: I… don’t know exactly when it all started to come undone. I think Maxwell first felt the ripples four days before the eclipse was due. [SIGH] It was strange… Like a pause in the hysterical whimpering and fruitless prayers of the sacrifices. And a ripple that was felt through the waters, and the stagnant blood that bound us. A disruption. We would later learn that this was the collapse of the ritual at Hither Green – but it was only the first. […] And as we unveiled our new and absent sun, the sacrifices who remained screamed, and fell in holy agonies, and the world of endless night we had been promised began to pour in, shining out and all around us. It touched and caressed our souls with the soothing fears of night, and I heard Maxwell weeping with joy at what we had done. And then… it stopped. It just… stopped. All at once, that loving embrace was stripped from us, and it began to retreat, to recede back into the place that it had come from. We were so close…! … We were so close…

(MAG151) SIMON: Do you know when the last ritual I attempted was? MARTIN: I… I don’t know, that space station? SIMON: Oh goodness no, that’s the future my boy! But no; it was 1853! The height of the aquarium mania! All over the Empire, people were starting to understand the depths of the terrible unknown below the ocean. And I thought that was a rich vein to be tapped. Even bothered old Halley into helping me design a special diving bell for the ritual. I called it “The Awful Deep” – and between you and me, I was rather proud of myself. MARTIN: … So why didn’t it work? SIMON: Because it… wasn’t a very good idea…? The Fear wasn’t out there, not like I hoped it was. It all sort of… fizzled. Also, a Hunter broke in and destroyed the mechanism, sent me and all my sacrifices plummeting to the bottom of the ocean.

Gertrude had recorded MAG137’s statement in October 2014: a few months before The Dark’s attempt… so it’s probably thanks to this one that she suspected that The Dark would fail on its own…

* And we did, thematically, have many clues during season 4! MAG122 was a very polarising episode when it came to which Fear(s) it was about; MAG126-MAG136 made us wonder if it was the same Spiral avatar “Gabriel” who had been collaborating with Web(?) Neil Lagorio; we (and Gertrude and Martin) felt like Extinction-statements were reminiscent of other Fears; Robert Smirke’s letter in MAG138 had him refuse to admit that his taxonomy wasn’t perfect and didn’t really work; MAG145 had Arthur Nolan complaining about Diego Molina calling their god “Asag” when that aspect encompassed Corruption traits; Jon admitted after reading MAG153’s statement that it was “The Corruption at work, if I had to guess, though with unsettling echoes of a… ‘Fleshliness’”… We had so many moments in which the divisions weren’t really clear, and implicit reminders that Robert Smirke’s taxonomy was one amongst others and certainly far from perfect…

* I wonder if Gertrude felt something, upon learning that… she had sacrificed Jan and Michael (and probably many others) for nothing, and that she could have “just” derailed punctual actions without making many victims… (Though: the bombing in Alexandria was implied to be her doing, and the old Archive wasn’t a current threat. It’s possible that she did that in case Elias-Jonah was planning to use it for Beholding, or to just to try to diminish Beholding… but still, she caused collateral victims quite casually.)

* How ironic, that Gertrude and Elias both understood what was happening thanks to The Dark failing, when Beholding was presented as an opposite power… (And even more ironic for Jonah&Rayner, since it’s through Rayner that Smirke (and therefore Jonah) learned so much about the Powers, and that Rayner was probably Jonah’s direct inspiration when it came to snatching bodies to extend his life…)

* Gertrude took A BIG RISK with the idea that The Dark’s ritual would fail on its own, and I’m really curious about Jonah’s comment that “Knowing Gertrude, I’m sure she had a backup plan if she had miscalculated; but she had not.” => did she really have a backup plan? A way to undo The Dark peering through? I… don’t think that the whole apocalypse at the end of MAG160 can be undone, but that small comment could leave a bit of hope in that regard…? (Unless Gertrude thought she could undo such things, and it’s revealed to not work in season 5.)

* I’m “glad” (ha) that Tim… really didn’t care about stopping The Unknowing in itself, and that his goal was clear:

(MAG117) TIM: … I’m gonna hurt them, though. I’m gonna hurt the things that stole my brother and wrecked my life. I’m the distraction! If it looks like any of the… “circus folk mannequins”, whatever, are gonna see the others, I’m to make the biggest mess I can, draw them away, keep them busy. [SCOFF] I know what it means! They gave it to me because they think I’ll get angry and do something stupid anyway. And they’re probably right. So maybe it’s for the best.

… He did achieve what he wanted in that regard. ;; (I mean, it was heartbreaking, and I’m Constantly Sad About Tim. But at least… he got what he wanted, which was to hurt the Circus and avenge his brother. The ritual would have failed anyway, but there would have still have been mannequins running wild, maybe even Nikola. So. He took them down with him.)

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “The solution, then, is simple: a new ritual must be devised, that will bring through… all the Powers, at once. All Fourteen, as I had hoped I could complete it before any new Powers such as Extinction were able to fully emerge. All under The Eye’s auspices, of course – we mustn’t forget our roots.”

* AHAH for Jonah still going for a “fourteen” categorisation + isolating The Extinction. He was still fairly influenced by Smirke’s taxonomy, and this reflected in his incantation (on the one hand, the neat categorisations don’t work… but he’s using them anyway) (… which is what I’m doing too, but pssh.)

* OH SHIT for the announcement that he was planning THAT. We could have had a bit of hope given that The Watcher’s Crown had failed already, and was doomed to fail anyway… but nop.

* AHAH about the “we mustn’t forget our roots” because Elias-Jonah reaaaally doesn’t sound super-devoted to his patron.

* I wonder if The Extinction will get relevant in season 5 as an “outside of the box” Power, since Elias was adamant about not including it and trying to do his thing before it would become a concern:

(MAG138) MARTIN: Yeah, but… if he’s right about… The Extinction, what it is… then why didn’t you say anything before? Why am I only hearing about this now, and why doesn’t Jon know?! ELIAS: In my case, while Peter has talked of it before, it is only very recently that I’ve been forced to admit The Extinction is real.

Was he fearing that it would complicate things too much? Is that an aspect of Fear he didn’t understand? (One bit in the Q&A pointed out that There Could Be More Fears unaccounted for, so I wonder if they’ll get purposefully developed in season 5 as a counter, or if not at all…)

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “And there was only one being that could possibly serve as a lynchpin for this new ritual: the Archivist. A position that had so recently become vacant, thanks to Gertrude’s… ill-timed retirement plans. Because the thing about the Archivist is that… well: it’s a bit of a misnomer. It might, perhaps, be better named “the Archive”. Because you do not administer and preserve the records of fear, Jon – you are a record of fear. Both in mind, as you walk the shuddering dread of each statement; and in body, as the Powers each leave their mark upon you. You are a living chronicle of terror. [CREAKING] Perhaps, then, if I could find an Archivist and have each Power mark them, have them confront each one, and each in turn instil in them a powerful and acute fear for their life, they could be turned into a conduit for the coming of this… nightmare kingdom. … Do you see where I’m going, Jon? It does tickle me, that in this world of… would-be occult dynasties and ageless monsters, the “Chosen One” is… simply that: someone I chose! It’s not in your blood, or your soul, or your… destiny. It’s just in your own, rotten luck.” [THUNDER CLAPPING]

* “Gertrude’s ill-timed retirement plans” is that the name of your own gun, Elias.

* If we’re going with “audio recording by The Archive” at the start of season 5, I’m going to scream.

* Elias’s sense of drama with the background sounds…

* The dehumanisation was THROUGH THE ROOF, and made for a very AOUCH parallel to Peter’s snarky comment to Martin (MAG126: “I’m just saying, that we’d all be better off if your Archivist actually knew how to archive.”). It was just… horrifying already, that he casually admitted that he had been setting up Jon getting hurt and marked? It was the most common hypothesis, we had been screaming with the last ones getting ticked off during season 4, we knew what was to happen when MAG159’s title had been revealed to be “The Last” (the last assistant, the last Fear to mark Jon), we had no doubt that Elias had been pulling strings in that direction… but still, there was something so unsettling about Jonah casually objectifying Jon and mentioning that he needed Jon to be hurt and afraid for his own goals…

* Oh GODS, the fact that Elias casually answered Jon’s questions about being “chosen”…

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: Why were we chosen? Agnes was created – crafted with a specific purpose so finely tuned that even a grain of uncertainty threatened the entirety of her being. [CHORTLING] But I’m so full of doubt it feels like there’s no room for anything else, and… I’m sure Martin is the same…! Is there “destiny” here? B–bloodlines and… prophecies, or did we just… stumble into this? Maybe we’re the opposite of Agnes; maybe our doubts are exactly what we need. I–if that’s the case, I’m a… an amazing chosen one. … [LONG EXHALE] Don’t know how that would work, though.

Tim had mentioned that the Fears attacking you was just “bad luck” (MAG117)… and it’s one side of the coin. The flip side, in Jonah’s case, is that no, someone picked you and chose to hurt you. That’s coherent with Elias’s ~paternalistic~ comments about “choices” in MAG092, but really, I do hate (it’s well-done!) how far he goes when it comes to casual victim-blaming, gods.

* How is your hubris today, Jonah. Reminder that characters characterised by their hubris (Leitner, Smirke, Mary…) fell and crashed pretty harshly in TMA, Jonah.

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “I’ll admit my options were somewhat limited, but – my God! When you came to me already marked by The Web, I knew it had to be you. I even held out some small hope you had been sent by the Spider as a sort of… implicit blessing on my whole project, and… do you know what? I think it was…!”

* Still refisdhnjerfdujbrefduhejkzfsd over the fact that Jonah went basically “oh, The Web probably approved?” when… from what we can guess of The Web, NO, IT PRECISELY SENT JON TO USE YOU, YOU DUMB VICTORIAN!!

* “What does the Spider want?” is still the eternal question – why did it want/allow this apocalypse to happen? If it wanted to prevent it, it would have had many occasions to prevent Jon from coming into contacts with other Fears, so… What does the Mother want out of it?

* Jon had mentioned that The Web had “touched” him first:

(MAG081) ARCHIVIST: I do not know how many of them there are, or precisely how they separate, but I do know that the Eye – Beholding – was not the first that I encountered in my life. The first was the Spider. The Web. And I have no idea what that might mean. […] The first of the dark powers to touch me, perhaps, but it did not claim me.

… And it just added up to Jonah’s terribleness: just reminding Jon that he had been picked because of the Web-story that had terrorised his youth…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Of course, I had to bide my time, get a measure of you before I began to push; learn how you worked. So I decided I would wait until something came for you, and see how you reacted. Attacks upon the Archives were not uncommon during Gertrude’s tenure, and while she was always prepared… I made sure you would not be. I reasoned if you couldn’t survive a single encounter, you were unlikely to make it through all Fourteen. So when Jane Prentiss attacked, I watched eagerly, one hand on the gas release from the start. You acquitted yourself well enough, so I decided to see how much further you would get – though I waited until the worms were in you to pull the lever. I needed to make sure you felt that fear all the way to your bones.”

* … It explained why he Elias was occasionally almost praising Jon’s survival skills:

(MAG080) LEITNER: And what’s he going to think when he gets back? ELIAS: Well, he was always going to need to fly the nest at some point. Go out and see the world for himself. LEITNER: He might die. ELIAS: It’s always a danger. Almost always.

(MAG092) ARCHIVIST: What do you want? ELIAS: Honestly? To offer some congratulations. You’re doing a lot better than I expected. ARCHIVIST: Feels like all I’ve managed to do is… not die. ELIAS: And believe me, that is a remarkably rare skill.

* Re: the dehumanisation, it was incredible how it sounded like Jonah was talking about a small animal that he had to tame (and… even that, taming it in a bad way). It put such a bittersweet light on their exchanges in season 1? Because back then, it was still obvious that Jon had some respect for him…

* When I had listened to MAG040 for the first time, I had pictured Elias having a coffee, a smoke, another coffee, waiting for it to cool down, before pulling the lever; I mean, how much time would it take for him to reach it in a small Institute? I was already spoiled that he was Bad, back then, but… the fact that Jonah casually admitted that HE had been the one who got to decide whether or not Jon had the “right” to live at the end of MAG039 is another kind of terribleness………

* He was casually insensitive towards Jon’s wounds in MAG040 (comparing them to Swiss Cheese), and I’m not sure if that was a conscious effort to mess with Jon, or just his very natural lack of empathy showing through.

* The only “help” they had gotten against the worms had been provided by Michael, through Sasha, with the tip regarding the fire extinguishers… How much did Jon have to insist for Elias to provide them with some…?

* Not even a mention of Tim, who had gone through hell at the same time as Jon – and it was very telling… that for Jonah, Tim had only been collateral damage, not really mattering.

* There was something incredibly cruel in that “all the way to your bones”, and Jonah was absolutely just reopening old wounds and reactivating Jon’s trauma and terrors, uh…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “The discovery that one of The Stranger’s minions had infiltrated the Institute in the aftermath was certainly a pleasant bonus. Even if that sliver of paranoia, that “vague wrongness” you couldn’t quite place wouldn’t count as a mark… it was only a matter of time before it confronted you in a far more direct, and affecting, manner. Admittedly, given the advent of The Unknowing, I needn’t have bothered – but what’s the old saying about hindsight? More important to me was Sasha’s encounter with The Distortion. If “it” had taken an interest, then I very much wanted it to cross your path. So I found one of its current victims and convinced her to make a statement. … Poor Helen. I actually had to put her in a taxi myself, she was getting so lost on those… narrow London side streets. It worked, though. Between the stabbing, and at least two desperate flights into its door… you’re marked very deep by The Spiral.”

* Again: Fork U, re: “hindsight” joke.

* Not!Sasha had mentioned as soon as MAG040 that Elias had stared at her “funnily”, which was a good indicator that he knew… but I’m surprised that Elias admitted that he had not noticed the moment The Stranger had infiltrated the Institute, before it was too late? He should have known the risk associated with the table, right? The Not!Them had been bound to it for fifteen years at this point!

* Get a double slice of Stranger in your face, Jon.

* ;; Tim wasn’t mentioned at all in Jonah’s statement, and that’s the only mention of Sasha… just as someone who had allowed The Distortion to come closer…

* I DIDN’T EXPECT AT ALL THE BIT ABOUT HELEN!!! FUCK!!! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO GO “Poor Helen” AT HER, YOU HORRIBLE NASTY MAN!! That was one of the cruellest new things in his statement, the fact that he had sent her to give a statement and shoved her into a taxi, only to nudge Michael towards Jon??? I wonder whether Helen-the-Distortion remembers it: it might get relevant in season 5…? We never saw Elias interact with The Distortion, after all, and he had a very poor opinion of Michael in MAG092.

* Yeah, “marked very deep by The Spiral”, uh. Uh. (Stabbing from MAG047 when Jon tried to save Helen, first flight into the corridors at the end of MAG078, second journey through the corridors at the end of MAG101, small adventure in the corridors in MAG131, another journey through the corridors at the end of MAG143. No wonder Jonah has a hard time keeping track of the amount of times.)

* ;; No mention at all that both Tim and Martin had experienced the Not!Them’s deceptions and that they also went through Michael’s corridors… once again, collaterals who didn’t matter much to him, uh…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Jurgen Leitner was a surprise, of course, and I was forced to… improvise. I had no idea how much Gertrude would have told him, and he could very easily have derailed everything if you learned too much too fast. I… justified it to myself, saying I was going to have to send you out into the world anyway if you were to encounter more of the Powers, but I can’t honestly pretend it wasn’t a… rather rash move.”

* So: it wasn’t necessarily that Elias didn’t want Leitner to tell Jon about the Institute being a temple to Beholding and Elias being bad (which Leitner did tell Jon), but about Gertrude’s own conclusions regarding Elias being in fact “Jonah Magnus”, and the rituals not working. So once again… Gertrude withholding information and not sharing it all actually worked in the world’s disfavour – Leitner was still concerned about The Unknowing, when the priority should have lain elsewhere…

* Confirmation, once again, that Elias had indeed no idea about Leitner living in the tunnels back then. We still don’t know if he truly has trouble seeing down there, or if it was solely A Disappearance protecting Leitner from his sight…

* Funny thing is that Elias has been pretty consistent about the fact that Leitner was a bit of a mistake:

(MAG092) ELIAS: So. For the avoidance of any doubt. I killed Gertrude Robinson because she intended to destroy the Archives. And I killed Jurgen Leitner because he was… an unnecessary complication. Likely to tell Jon too much, too early.

(MAG102) ELIAS: I have been trying to give you the information you need. ARCHIVIST: Sure, when you’re not bashing its head in with a pipe. ELIAS: Leitner was… I will admit I possibly… overreacted to his sudden re-emergence.

(MAG108) PETER: Oh. That doesn’t sound like the Elias I know. He killed people himself? MARTIN: I mean, I wasn’t, I wasn’t there, but that’s what he said…? And I did see the body. Er, bodies. PETER: Elias Bouchard, getting his hands dirty. Well-well. Must be the End Times.

* Obligatory “oh my GODS, ELIAS…” re: “I justified [Leitner’s murder] to myself” because… talk about something that feels like a Web-thing. It was repeated many times that the violent impulsive bit was surprising from Elias, and Jon had precisely left the room to smoke a cigarette (recurrent theme of the Web, Jon in possession of a Web lighter etc.), leaving Leitner alone. That. Sounds awfully like Elias being a tool of The Web, rather than making that decision by himself………

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Still. I’d requested Detective Tonner be assigned to the case when they found Gertrude’s body, in the hope that having a Hunter in the mix would eventually lead to a confrontation, and setting you up as a killer certainly hastened that.”

* Elias revealed that he had used his ways to get her assigned on the case… while their first interaction in MAG082 consisted in Elias blackmailing her right away. Typical.

* So, in a way, people that Elias feels he “chose” so far: Jon… and Daisy.

* … So that was why he just threw out that random bit about Jon Being Very Dangerous:

(MAG082) ELIAS: I leave the matter of Jonathan Sims up to you, though I will not tell you where he is. I suggest you close the case and move on, but if you find yourself unable to do so, my advice is to kill him quickly. There’s no telling what he might be capable of.

He didn’t really need to, though, given how Daisy had her own grudge against Jon (the fact that he had unwittingly forced her to give him her statement against her will). But I do appreciate how Elias tried to frame him, and Basira just waltzed in, told Daisy “For god’s sake look at him!” (MAG091) when she was threatening him… and yup, indeed. Does not look like a murderer. (Although nowadays, Peter would like to differ.)

* Obligatory I’M SAD ABOUT DAISY, because, back then, she wouldn’t have minded much… but if she were to regain her sense in season 5 somehow (ha), how upset would she be to learn that the time she had hurt Jon (strangled or sliced his throat a bit) had worked as his Hunt mark, crossing another one off…? (Though, later, Julia&Trevor also did the work: Jon was hunted by Julia, and hurt by them both when they threatened him in season 4.)

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Then it was just a matter of feeding you statements to lead you to a… few avatars I thought were likely to harm you, but probably would stop short of actually killing you. Jude served her purpose exactly as I had hoped, as did our dearly departed Mr Crew – marking you for The Desolation, and The Vast.”

* I call bullshit on Jude, since trying to track her down… wasn’t the only conclusion you could make of Gertrude’s recording in MAG087: Gertrude mentioned she was back in London, sure, but it was a Stranger-related statement about the imminence of The Unknowing, and there were many leads to take from that one (investigating the forest? The skin aspect? The mannequins?), especially since Jon knew he had to try to stop the ritual. So, on that one, pretty sure it was Jonah making sense “retroactively”, but that he really had no idea where Jon would go with it.

* Though I can believe that he had made sure that “rumours” saying that he had been the one to kill Gertrude would reach the Lightless Flame, as Jude as heard (not fundamentally to make sure she wouldn’t harm Jon… but to make sure that they wouldn’t attack the Institute after Gertrude’s death).

* Same, Jude directing Jon towards Mike really was a fluke, thanks to Jon&Jude’s conversation!

* Jonny trying to hammer that Mike Crew Is Absolutely Dead And Done, once again.

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Honestly, I had… nothing to do with Melanie and her Slaughter adventure, but when I saw the situation, I made sure to trap her here; so whenever her rage bubbled over, you were right there, a ready target. I didn’t foresee the mark coming from… surgery gone wrong, but it was a very pleasant surprise.”

* Alllriiight, so that’s what he was checking in MAG084, when we heard static when he was talking with Melanie! He discovered the bullet in that moment.

* ;; Slaughtered!Melanie was blaming Jon for being responsible of the fact she was trapped here… and she was wrong, but a bit of truth was in there – Elias had trapped her because she would be useful for his plans regarding Jon.

* List of people Jonah “chose”: Jon, Daisy, Melanie.

* OH GODS, AND THAT WAS WHY HE WAS SO CHIRPY IN MAG102…………

(MAG102) ARCHIVIST: I get, I get that you hate being here, Melanie, but do you really want to trade it for prison? MELANIE: No! But the way I see it, the police seem really keen not to investigate crimes committed here. ELIAS: That’s actually fair. ARCHIVIST: Shut up…! Melanie, please. […] We, We will… We will find a way to deal with… with him. Not today. A–and not like this. ELIAS: I am still here, you know. ARCHIVIST: And if you weren’t, I assume you would be watching this conversation, so... Melanie, we can’t do this. Not yet.

I had assumed, back then, that he was just very dumb, but… no. He was probably throwing oil on the fire on purpose, to try to get Jon stabbed by her right then, right there.

* ;; Same, I wonder if Melanie will learn that her stabbing him was actually a Slaughter mark, engineered/hoped by Jonah…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “The Unknowing was a distraction, but not an unwelcome one. For this to work, you needed more than just the marks; you needed power. And that was something The Unknowing served to test, though it posed no… actual danger in the grand scheme of things.”

* And that explained Elias’s comments about what he considered Jon’s necessary progresses, successes and failures!

(MAG116) ELIAS: I have been doing my best to prepare you, Jon, to See. You should hopefully have it a bit easier than the others. ARCHIVIST: Another of my… powers? ELIAS: More… an aspect of your becoming.

(MAG120) ELIAS: You’re doing well, Jon. I only hope you can continue your growth without my guidance.

(MAG135) ELIAS: Fine. Consider it a test – things are… coming, things that will need Jon to be far stronger and more willing to use his connection to our patron. His performance during The Unknowing was… disappointing. I needed a way to force him to harness his ability more acutely than he had before. The coffin was a useful tool; Daisy an adequate bait. BASIRA: Then you messed up. Way he tells it, he doesn’t know how he got out of there. ELIAS: But he did. And his powers were no small part of it. Even if he required some assistance, they were what saved him. And he’s still achieved what no one – mortal, monster, or anything in-between – has ever been able to. He climbed out of The Buried.

Elias praised him for his dreams, because they were proof of his records of fears; he lamented what he did during The Unknowing, since Jon was barely able to survive in it (ultimately resorting to compulsion, giving Tim the tools to press on the detonator)…

* And that was also why he was pushing for Jon to go in person despite the plan not relying on him:

(MAG117) ARCHIVIST: Tim isn’t going to sit home and wait, and Elias seems pretty insistent I go along. Part of me thinks it’s just so that we can see if whatever this… preparation he’s been trying to do on me works. And you know what? That same… petty little part of me… rather hopes it doesn’t; that all this time, all his… cryptic nudges and “learn to fly by falling” attitude ends up being a complete waste of time. Just to show him. Even so, I–I– it wouldn’t… feel right to not go.

… because ultimately, he was testing Jon in a controlled environment.

* (Still no mention of Tim who died there, and it was just adding to Jonah’s overall cruelty? The fact that Sasha and Tim died… and that it didn’t matter at all in his plans…)

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “And it did serve another purpose, of course. It inadvertently pushed you to confront Death – a mark I had been very worried about trying to orchestrate. If I tried too early, you’d just die; too late, and you might be powerful enough to see the attempt coming, and maybe even understand why. As it was, it was just right; and once again you came through with flying colours.”

* No wonder that Jonah was the most worried about The End’s mark, given his own personal relationship to the fear of dying, uh.

* And :) The Web :) Sent :) An avatar of The End to wake up Jon and make him “choose”. Which Jonah didn’t mention at all, and it seems like a huge oversight – Jon didn’t “come through with flying colours” on his own, he was given the keys to decide what would happen of him, and it’s not Jonah who provided them, but Oliver, sent by The Mother.

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “By this point, your abilities were coming on in leaps and bounds, and I was concerned that meeting face-to-face might end up with you… knowing something you shouldn’t. I had initially planned to go into hiding, but when your colleagues surprised me with the police, well. It was simple enough to cut a deal. All that remained, then, were The Dark, The Flesh, The Buried and The Lonely.”

* Confirmation (once again after MAG120) that Martin HAD surprised him with his plan, and that Elias wasn’t really preparing Peter as an Interim Director because he thought the assistants would get him arrested, but because he had something else in mind.

* Was he planning to go hide in Scotland, or in a Lukas estate.

* So confirmation that indeed, he was trying to hide his main reason for preventing Jon from seeing him:

(MAG127) ELIAS: He can listen all he wants, but he’s at a very delicate stage right now, and I… fear my presence would be a, hum… [LIGHT JANGLING OF HANDCUFFS] a distraction.

(MAG148) ARCHIVIST: You should have let me come with. BASIRA: No. Besides, he wouldn’t have seen me if I had.

He had explained this right after Jon had described to Basira his inner “door” of knowledge, and how he tended to Know things when close to people or concepts… So it was indeed Elias trying to avoid Jon from compelling him or forcing a statement out of him or knowing about his plans.

* And yeah, this is how we had begun season 4. Only four remaining. orz

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “I was a little put out when that idiot Jared Hopworth misinterpreted my letters and attacked the Institute too soon, before you were even out of the hospital, but then… Oh! You should have seen my face, when you voluntarily went to him. I couldn’t see what happened in there, of course, but given how you came out, I’m very sure it counts as a mark.”

* Alright so: Elias confirmed that he was behind Jared’s letters:

(MAG131) JARED: The letters started comin’ in about two years ago. Good white paper, large print. Nice and simple. Dunno who sent them; they were never signed, and I dunno how they kept finding me. There was never much in them; normally just a name, and a place, or a time. I ignored the first couple, but they kept coming, and eventually I got curious. So, I followed the instructions in one of ‘em. […] I didn’t doubt the letters again. They came pretty regular after that. And they always led to summat good. Quality bones, a new mate, or some unlucky fool who wouldn’t look at me for the fear. It got so I trusted them. The letters, I mean. So I didn’t question them. There’s a lotta stuff in this world I’ve never understood, and these were no different. Then I got one about your lot, your Archives. Told me to go there and kill you. They even sent a picture. So I did. Well, I tried. Didn’t know about those tunnels, or wherever this place is, but the pipes… they were wide enough for me and a few mates to squeeze through, bit by bit, one bone at a time.

… Back when the episode had aired, I had multiple suspects: Annabelle, obviously (since there was the matter of the big font in MAG123), potentially Adelard (because what was he doing?? … we didn’t know at the time that he was already dead.), potentially Peter (to push Martin towards him), and also Elias… because of the “bones” + the irony of the “pipes”. I can’t believe it was Elias, I hate everything.

* We had speculated a lot about the intentions of the person who had sent Jared after the Archives: was it to “punish” the assistants? To make sure they would fragment and avoid for them to plan together again like they had at the end of season 3? Was it to push Martin towards Peter? To enhance Melanie’s Slaughter effects? Was it someone targeting Jon himself, and just not knowing that he was currently in a not!coma? … And nop: it was indeed targeting Jon, and the letters had been sent by someone who knew that Jon was currently away from the Archives.

* I mean. Elias. Elias, my dude, my Victorian bro. What did you expect, by making Jared used to attack people on sight as soon as he would receive letters with his next target, when you sent him a letter with his next target? WHO was really the idiot there.

* “I couldn’t see what happened in there” is an unfortunate confession: so Jonah… can’t see in Helen’s corridors. That could come in handy during season 5…

* This is an implicit confirmation: Elias is not the one listening through the tapes, since Jon’s encounter with Jared was recorded, but Elias only drew his conclusions when he came out.

* HEY ELIAS. HOW FUNNY THAT THE WEB HAD SENT A FLESH-RELATED STATEMENT TO JON, DRAWING HIM TO THE CONCLUSION THAT HIS OWN BODY COULD BE USED AS AN ANCHOR, AND THUS CONTRIBUTING TO HIM GOING DOWN TO SEE JARED AND ASKED HIM TO REMOVE A RIB, THUS MARKING HIM FOR THE FLESH. HOW FUNNY HOW THE WEB BASICALLY SAVED YOUR PLANS’ BUTTS WHEN YOU HAD DRAMATICALLY FAILED.

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “I suspected the coffin might turn up again, and once it did, it was simply a matter of getting any, uh… restraining factors you might have had flying off on a wild goose chase, and waiting. Honestly, Detective Tonner has proven invaluable through this whole process. [CHUCKLE] I was racking my brains for month about what I could use to lure you in.”

* Breekon wasn’t sure why he was going to the Institute, and that’s another “potentially the Web” thing.

* ;; Sad because “wild goose chase” has been the recurring way of referring to Basira getting misled and manipulated… (MAG134: “Then, your detective friend went on one of Elias’s wild goose chases, then Jon wilfully hurled himself into the coffin.” / MAG148: “So, what now? Another wild goose chase?”) There was something gratuitously mean about calling her “restraining factors” instead of her name…

* I’m SAD about DAISY, okay orz The fact that he presented her as a tool for his goals…

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “And of course, I knew the Dark Sun was just sitting there waiting; so when it came time, I whipped up another apocalypse, and sent you on your merry way.”

* It was a very strange thing that he would just begin to talk about the Dark Sun right after Jon had learned about it through a statement, indeed, so… I guess that he got inspired by Jon, rather than having that one under his sleeve all along?

* Also: he made sure that the police would get rid of Rayner and a few cultists during season 2. If he hadn’t done that, there would have still been a few powerful but diminished Dark avatars roaming around, who could have been used to mark Jon. So really: lots of posturing but actually lots of improvising, though Jonah isn’t really admitting that – but it’s interesting to focus on what he doesn’t talk about to clear that up a bit…

* Still laughing in retrospect that he… didn’t really try to Sell the Dark ritual much. It was mostly a “you can’t afford to be wrong about it being nothing” to Basira, and she had ample preexisting reasons to think that The Dark could be a threat (since she had lost a colleague against them, and that it had put into motion the chain of events leading her to quit the police).

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Then all that remained… was The Lonely. Poor Peter. He really should have left well enough alone. [CHUCKLE] Or just done what I’d asked in the first place. Ah, well. He knew what I was attempting, and was very unwilling to cooperate until I made him… a little wager about Martin. Of course, he had no way of knowing that, in addition to setting you up for the final mark, he was giving you all the tools you needed to escape from it.”

* Fork you and your puns, Jonah.

* ;; Peter did explain to Jon that he was weak to a wager, in MAG159…

* I’m a bit sad that we never saw Elias&Peter interact a bit more… cordially, since they had been acquaintances for at least 20 years – we didn’t really see why they were putting up with the other, and Jonah didn’t sound heartbroken (at all) over Peter’s annihilation? On the other hand, the bitter exes dynamic was hilarious but… you know. I’ll miss Peter, he was so awful and fun.

* Confirmation that Martin was Jon’s anchor… and Elias knew it full well.

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “How is Martin, by the way? He looks well. You will keep an eye on him when all this is over, won’t you? [RUMBLE OF THUNDER] He’s earned that.”

* Big “OH NO” moment on first listen, because I got seized up by the dread that something was currently happening to Martin (who was outside, alone), and that would be how Jonah would be striking… I really didn’t expect the final incantation.

* Fork you and your puns 2.0, Jonah.

* I HATE that “he’s earned that”, implying that Martin made efforts and sacrifices just to be taken care of and/or that he ~served Jonah’s plans so well~ that he’s earned to get his love story during the apocalypse.

* …………….. But also….. Listen………………. Elias->Martin is one of my favourite ships, okay……. And it was just candy……. that Elias would randomly remember him……

* Or: not so randomly, since the point of his whole statement seemed to have been to make Jon’s old fears and pain bubble over the surface all over again. What could be more efficient than suddenly bringing up Martin, when Jon knew that Martin was alone outside?

* I have a Lot Of Feelings over the fact that the last person to (unwillingly) serve Elias’s plans… was Martin. For his plan to work, Jonah needed to be sure that Jon would go after Martin (we heard a lot of pining through season 4, and so did Elias, uh.), and that Martin would be the key for Jon to come back (which is something he likely deduced from The Buried?). It’s still the thing that scares me much about Jonah: you would want him to underestimate and overlook affection, friendship and love between people… but no. He’s fully able to take those things into account — and to turn them against you.

(Though: I’m really not sure that he knew that Jon had feelings for Martin, or was likely to develop some, back when he sent Peter to Martin in MAG108, nor that Martin would fork Peter over (since he hadn’t taken Elias down yet)… He could have been relying on the fact that Martin had a crush, back then, to make sure that Martin would stick to Jon’s side and not lose himself to The Lonely? And Jon was already adamant about protecting his remaining assistants: he would have gone to save Basira, Daisy or Melanie in The Lonely, too, just like he rescued Daisy. I’m not sure the idea of an anchor to find his way back had crossed Jonah’s mind before The Buried… Jonah presents a lot of things organically and logically through his statements, but he’s probably rearranging details in his advantage: he got very lucky, quite often. … Or, well. The appropriateness of the term “Lucky” depends on how much The Web will be revealed to have contributed.)

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “And there, I think we are brought just about up to date. I have enjoyed our little trip down memory lane, but… past here lies only impatience. You are prepared. You are ready. You are marked. The power of The Ceaseless Watcher flows through you, and the time of our victory is here. Don’t worry, Jon. You’ll get used to it here – in the world that we have made.”

* At this point, I still didn’t know how he would strike, and still not expecting an incantation.

* I hatehatehate Jonah’s use of first-person plural. It’s nothing new:

(MAG092) ELIAS: [SIGH] What are you? ARCHIVIST: I… The Archivist. ELIAS: Precisely. It is your job to chronicle these things, to experience them, whether first-hand or through the eyes of others. To simply be told, well… ARCHIVIST: It doesn’t please your master? ELIAS: Our master, Jon. […] We thrive on ceaseless watching, on knowing too much. What we face is the hidden, the uncanny, and the unknown. If you are to stop them, you need to get better at seeing.

(MAG135) ELIAS: Fine. Consider it a test – things are… coming, things that will need Jon to be far stronger and more willing to use his connection to our patron.

… but here? Absolutely making complicit, almost like an associate, when he was forcing Jon to read, when he had pointed out as soon as his first lines that Jon would try to resist reading? Awful.

On the incantation in itself:

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “You who watch and know and understand none; You who listen and hear and will not comprehend; You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right; Come to us in your wholeness! Come to us in your perfection! Bring all that is fear, and all that is terror, and all that is the awful dread that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and hunts and rips and bleeds and dies! Come to us! I – OPEN – THE DOOR!”

* It’s still interesting that, when it comes to aspects of the Amorphous Blob Of Terrors, Jonah still went for the good old fourteen regarding Jon’s marks and the incantation (Beholding + Corruption, Buried, Dark, Vast, Spiral, Lonely, Stranger, Web, Desolation, Hunt, Slaughter, Flesh, End). Indeed, he was planning on doing things before the Extinction would fully emerge, but I wonder if other potential aspects, that have been left out, will get relevant in season 5…

* Aaaaaaaaaaaand… there was a general expectation/fear in the fandom, since Jon had mentioned his inner door of knowledge, that it would be opened at some point:

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] It’s… hard. It’s like there’s a–a–a door, in my mind. And behind it, is… i–is the entire ocean. Before, I didn’t notice it, but now, I–I know it’s there, and I can’t forget it, and I can feel the pressure of the water on it. I–I–I, I can keep it closed… but sometimes, when I’m around p–people, or–or places, or… ideas… a drop or two will push through the cracks, at the edges of the door. And I’ll… know something. BASIRA: … What happens, if you open the door? [PAUSE] ARCHIVIST: I drown.

On that one, I think that Jonah might have used the imagery of the “door” specifically because it was a really strong symbolic element for Jon: Mr Spider’s door, that he hadn’t knocked on; Helen’s door in his dreams, that he refuses to open (MAG120: “There is a door in front of him. A yellow door. He knows the dream it used to lead to; he knows it well. But that’s not where it leads anymore. He does not know what is behind it anymore, and he is deathly afraid of finding out. The Archivist turns away.”) as well as his refusal to knock on her door through season 4 until MAG146; there is also the fact that people who knew Jon rarely tended to knock on his door in season 1 and 2 (they just barged in), as if they knew knocking was something he didn’t appreciate.

Independently, Martin got kind of a warning (?) with The Extinction (MAG134: “It talked of Garland Hillier’s “new revelation”, about the absolute change of the world in terms that seemed at first elegiac, but later seemed… almost panicked, with the final entry simply repeating the words [STATIC:] “La porte est la porte.” “The door is the door.””), although it was another sort of movement: leaving your comfortable world to go into another, and coming back to yours safely. Not sure it will be that simple in season 5.

* New all-Fears ritual doesn’t have a name but would be tentatively called “The Magnus Archive” according to Jonny-on-discord, which. Sob.

- What I find interesting in what Jonah didn’t mention at all:

* It was revealing that he didn’t mention the assistants (or barely): didn’t mention Tim or Sasha’s deaths, Melanie’s escape, Daisy turning into a beast again, Basira being still trapped there. He had presented the assistants as disposable in MAG092, he really wanted to hammer in that it was the case here, uh… (Although he might have appreciated Basira a tiny bit this season?)

* I’m still curious about why he didn’t want Tim to go to The Unknowing. Was it because he was fearing that Tim would go rogue and definitely kill Jon there? … Or was it because he was fearing that Tim would die there while he had other projects for him? (… Next host…?)

* Nothing about Jon’s relationship to the tape recorders, which, mmmmmmmmmmmm.

* Nothing about Jon’s Web lighter sticking to him.

* A surprisingly short mention of The Web and that was it, despite how obviously it appeared that The Web had been a bit more involved than this in Jon’s adventures.

* … It’s still extremely suspicious to me that a Web-touched “Jonathan” began working at the Institute, while Jonah used to be friends with a “Jonathan Fanshawe” (“my namesake” according to Jon) who ultimately told him to fork off. That doesn’t really feel like narrative irony, but something pushed on purpose to get Jonah’s attention?

* It was Elias’s big moment of claiming his actions, and a few mysteries remain since he didn’t claim credit for Martin’s “intuition” of putting tape recorders around the Coffin to get Jon back, nor for putting Adelard’s last statement (originally an email!) on Jon’s desk, nor for the tape of Gertrude’s murder in Jon’s drawer. So… Web actions?

- I can’t believe that:

(MAG160) [CLICK–] [CONSTANT FUZZY STATIC] MARTIN: Wake up, wake up…! Wake, Jon–Jon–JON, wake up! [SLAP] ARCHIVIST: [YELP] Uh, wha– … Martin…?

Alex&Jonny are promising there will be no onscreen kiss… but we did get a slap.

- That was ONE HELL OF AN ENDING:

(MAG160) MARTIN: I, I don’t know if it’s just here, or if it– ARCHIVIST: No. … No, it’s everywhere… They’re all here, now. I can feel… all of it. MARTIN: J– … Jon, I’m scared. ARCHIVIST: [HINT OF A COLD SMILE] The whole world is afraid, Martin. Because of me. And The Watcher… drinks it all in. MARTIN: … Jon? ARCHIVIST: Look at the sky, Martin! Look at the sky. It’s looking back! [BROKEN LAUGHTER] [CLICK.]

I love how it was impossible to tell if Jon was genuinely laughing or breaking down sobbing, and it was probably a mix of both.

- The situation, as it ends, leaves potential for everyone to feel guilty:

* Jon already highlighted it (“The whole world is afraid, Martin. Because of me.”) – although he was manipulated, pushed in that direction, and ultimately controlled into doing it without being able to fight back. In Jon’s case, one source of heartbreak is that he had tried to cling, although bittersweetly, to the idea that sacrifices had to be made to save the world:

(MAG093) GEORGIE: Jonathan Sims, are you trying to save the world? ARCHIVIST: I… Yeah. I… I guess I am.

(MAG150) ARCHIVIST: What about The Unknowing? We, we saved the world! MELANIE: Did we? I… I mean, I–I think it was the right thing to do, but how many people were killed to do it? We, we weren’t even a neutral party; we did it as agents of The Eye, because Elias told us to. […] You ever think that maybe this whole… ritual business is just an excuse, an–and that we’re all part of some… huge miserable Fear-machine? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] I’ve… considered the possibility.

(MAG155) ARCHIVIST: I’ve… [DRY CHUCKLE] I’ve saved the world…! The whole world! Does that… give me the right to… [SIGH] take what I need to survive…? I’ve been reading nothing but these old, [FLAPPING PAPER] dry statements for so long, I… [PAPER RUSTLING] I feel weak. Like I’m… fading away. Do I restrain myself, keep my appetite in check, even at the cost of my life? Or do I try to rationalise what I am, like… Ms. McHugh?

And the end of the season was a double-slap: he hadn’t even saved the world in the first place… and he was instrumentalised to cause the apocalypse in the end.

* Martin hadn’t checked the statements, had decided to go for a walk, and had previously been used for Jon’s last mark with The Lonely (and their situation is kind of echoing what Jon had told Peter, when he wasn’t managing to get Martin back at first: “… It was for me, though. I’m the reason he…! … I did this to him as much as you.”) – although, of course, none of it was his fault.

* Basira had been the one to send the statements, and it’s unclear yet if Jonah’s was already snuck inside the pile she sent, whether he added it during the transit (… or if he had made her put it in with the others? I doubt it, but how would Basira react, if he were to promise her that he could lead her to Daisy…?) – although she had done it in good faith, to make sure that Jon would keep himself in check.

* Daisy marked Jon for The Hunt, and then was used as bait for The Buried…

* Melanie gave Jon his Slaughter scar, Melanie&Georgie refused to help Jon at the end of MAG157 because they didn’t want to be associated with the fears (and it was their full right).

I like how bittersweet it is, to see how “easily” things could have been avoided? While, of course, they didn’t want the apocalypse to happen, and they were fighting against someone who had a few centuries of planning behind him, without knowing where he would strike. They’re not responsible for any of it, objectively, but I’m curious about their perceptions of the matter…

- Still so impressed at the build-up for this season, because we had so many hints that are easy to see in retrospect, or things that were easily discernible thematically, though it was harder to see where it was supposed to go…

* The scar/marks theory had been a popular one for a long while, even acknowledged by Jon:

(MAG093) ARCHIVIST: Elias has been sending me statements, apparently to prepare me, whatever that means, but some of the people I’ve been talking to have been… very dangerous. I’m starting to feel like a bit of a punching bag, to be honest. Would be nice to meet a monster, and not have a scar to show for it.

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: Oh. It–it’s fine; scalpel wounds… [CHUCKLE] they heal quickly. BASIRA: Hm. ARCHIVIST: … Too quickly, really. [CHUCKLE] BASIRA: Already? [CHAIR SCRAPES] ARCHIVIST: Just another scar for the collection!

And we were right about it ;; The question was mostly why it was necessary, the assumption was that it was to prepare him for The Watcher’s Crown… and it was even worse than that.

* A big chunk of season 4 was about investigating rituals: in season 3, we knew that The Spiral, The Buried and The Unknowing were not current threats anymore. This season, we were told that The Flesh, The Vast and The Slaughter were past concerns, that The Dark had already had its turn recently, why exactly The Buried had failed, what had neutralised The Desolation, that The Hunt’s whole concept dictates that it couldn’t really have a culmination point, that Gertrude had savagely taken care of The Lonely’s, that The Corruption might have had its try with the attack on the Institute, that The End and The Web aren’t really in the game (or are they.)… and ultimately that The Watcher’s Crown had already been attempted 150 years ago. The surprise laid with the fact that Jonah was planning bigger.

* We already had a few hints that something was off in season 1 and 2 (Elias being a filing clerk in the 70s, but joining the Institute in 1991 and… changing… a lot… to the point he had become the new Head in 1996), but it only increased afterwards: starting season 3, Jonah’s letters were systematically episodes in which Elias was appearing (MAG092, MAG098, MAG127, MAG138); Elias’s detailed knowledge of Jonah’s actions and emotions in MAG092; Manuela presenting the Head of the Institute as an old friend of Maxwell Rayner (MAG135) and not naming him; Eric Delano’s surprise about Elias changing so much (MAG154)… + Elias tending to appear in episodes with “remains” in the title (MAG040, MAG092, MAG127), which. ha.

* A whole thematic arc was, also, about Jon’s identity (as a person or a monster), leading to Martin’s “I see you” and ending with acceptance.

* So. Many. Doors. This seasons. And it led to Elias opening That One.

Overall thoughts looking back over season 4, re: big questions I had towards the end of season 3 / beginning of season 4:

- I’m still laughing really hard that “Wow, Jon, sounds like pining” at the beginning of the season turned out to have been actual pining. I was cautious about it from experience (it could be something else, feelings don’t have to be romantic in nature to be important, you can long for someone without being romantically interested, qpp is a thing, etc.) and then! Surprise, children! The Archivist had it bad.

- Adelard Dekker wasn’t showing up… because he was dead already (died even before Gertrude). I was growing suspicious of it but ;; Ouft, the way he gave his farewells…

- No Lukas!Martin (well, one could still run with that without contradicting canon, but it would also clash with the recurring theme that bloodlines do not actually matter in the end); in the end, Peter’s interest in Martin specifically was because of 1°) abandonment/longing issues, 2°) one-sided crush (which ended up reciprocated), 3°) Elias needing Peter to choose Martin and sending Peter after him specifically because he thought that Martin would ultimately reject Peter’s plan, thus ensuring Elias’s win. At the time of their encounter (MAG108), Martin hadn’t even proved to Elias that he was more cunning that Elias accounted for! Picked Martin for gayness (at the time, Elias probably thought that Martin would cling to Jon’s side and/or that Jon would try to get him back since he was overall concerned for his assistants, thus getting scarred by The Lonely in the process?), ended up winning because of Martin being more cleverer than assumed and Elias had faith that Martin would be allowed to play Peter like the cheap whistle he is. (Look, I’m not saying that Elias->Martin is the superior ship, but–)

(Something funny: Elias sent Peter to Martin in MAG108, and that was shortly after MAG106, in which Melanie and Basira’s office gossip made it clear that Martin’s concern over Jon was not Martin’s usual behaviour, and that other characters were suspecting that there were romantic feelings behind it. Given Elias’s tendency to improvise, I still think it’s absolutely possible that… Elias hadn’t even noticed the crush before Melanie&Basira talked about it.)

- I was so cautious about the assumption that Rayner was body-hopping, I was expecting that to be a red herring or something more complicated, but nop! Occam’s Razor, he absolutely was.

Same for Jonah Magnus and also dead wrong in that regard (but it does make sense that the two operated similarly, since Jonah knew him and in this world the supernatural tends to work… the way you think it should work) =D

- … So, confirmed in the Q&A that Gertrude was meant to have been shot multiple times on tape, and that there was no foul play in the fact that we only heard one gunshot in MAG158 vs. the three holes in her body Martin had reported in MAG040. So I was off the mark about that too, and she truly was meant to have died in March 2015 during The Dark’s ritual attempt!

(Though there is still the problem of MAG087 not making any sense when it comes to the dates… so there could still be Something, but no gunshot involved?)

- I loved how one of the focuses this season was the ritual, and the conclusion it reached! Basira had introduced the concern over the rituals (and specifically Beholding’s) in MAG123, we spent the whole season cataloguing which ones had failed recently, sometimes being told how they had been interrupted, sometimes not but with some wild-mass guessing; it was a major concern all through the season, and the pay-off was grandiose and making so much sense given what we already knew!

- I’m still laughing very hard about the anticipation of the Ny-Ålesund trip, in which I was expecting butchery and Bad Things Happening To Basira (we knew, back then, that a blind character was likely coming), and maybe Rayner wasn’t truly dead?? What about The Dark’s creature?? What about the cultists and Manuela’s branch??? What about the incoming eclipse in August 2018???

… and nop, it was a bust, Elias had been a misleading arsehole, Rayner and Dark creature and most cultists dead, ritual utterly failed in 2015, Manuela alone and unable to do anything. Big “eLIAS” moment.

- Fav period was the speculation regarding Jon��s anchor, because it was wild and delightful, and I still sometimes randomly snicker remembering Lottie&Jonny’s exchange about it.

- I desperately wanted to “hear Daisy’s voice”, metaphorically (… and also, like. concretely. Fay Roberts’s voice, okay.): it was funny in MAG117 to have her skip her testament and just load a gun but, also, it wasn’t really shaping her as a 3D character? And gods, was I pleased with this season and what she had to say about what she had experienced, committed, and the feelings she had about it. I think she was my fav character this season ;_;

- We still don’t know what The Web’s deal is, but given how Jon&co were kicked out of Hill Top Road (Not Levelled Up Enough / Not The Right Time, Inspect This Area For Plot Later), it’s definitely coming in season 5.

Things I overall liked less:

(Obligatory disclaimer: personal taste and opinions, things that resonated less or more uncomfortably with me. This is not a statement that these fictional things shouldn’t exist + the show is not over, there is One Last Season, so a few reveals or development could happen that would make me like these things better overall~)

- A bit sad about the “Elias was actually Jonah Magnus all along” reveal! I do admit it’s been well-done and well-played, I did pick up on the hints here and there (Elias mentioning something that had happened in the 1970s, Jon noticing that Elias Bouchard’s reported behaviour in the past was very different from the man he knows, Elias knowing way too much about Barnabas Bennett’s disappearance, Sarah/the Anglerfish’s “It’s Elias now, then?” and Nikola’s “Elias, can I call you Elias?” (The Stranger had reasons to have a kick with his identity-stealing methods!), Manuela conveying Rayner’s hello, the fact that Robert Smirke had pointed out that Jonah feared death most of all); the reveal was incredible and breath-taking… but! I do agree that it would have been a completely different story (this one is the story of someone refusing to die, and who has been sacrificing anything and anyone over two centuries to gain “power and immortality”), but I would have loved it if the local and consistent big bad had been a lazy privileged but opportunistic student who had found his calling in scheduling and paperwork twenty years ago ^^

- A bit sad, too, that it means we’ve never met an avatar of Beholding (or someone affiliated with Beholding) who wholly worships it? Clearly, Jonah is a lot more Beholding than he admitted (and there was reverence in how he described it in MAG120), but he also wants to think that he mostly used it for his own gain. No (twisted) love like Jane and the Hive, or Jude&Eugene towards The Desolation, or Manuela towards The Dark, or Hezekiah towards The Buried, or Simon towards The Vast, etc.

I wonder if we’ll meet a true and unabashed servant of Beholding in season 5?

- I loved Peter&Elias’s “divorced multiple times” energy, but I’m a bit sad that it felt so unbalanced in Peter’s disfavour in the end: it clearly felt like Elias-Jonah had toyed with him a lot, while Peter was too young and lacking experience and knowledge to be able to see when he was being manipulated?

- A bit surprised about the lack of Tim! His death was heart-breaking, and as much as circumstances weren’t great for some mourning and pondering about him (Jon woke up six months after his death, when other characters had lived through it), it… didn’t really feel like Tim had existed and died in the series, compared to Sasha (at the end of season 2 and during season 3, while they precisely didn’t remember her as a person)…? At times, it felt like maybe a Tim had once worked here, but he had quit on his own, not that… he had died. Maybe I’m a bit blinded by the fact that I experienced season 4 on a weekly basis, whereas I had just listened to season 2 and 3 in one go, but even now, even after compiling, I still feel like something was missing… (For example: Martin refusing to talk about him twice, Jon listing him amongst the dead with Sasha… versus Tim asking Melanie to describe the real Sasha to him and going to lie down, audibly upset and collapsing on himself. I feel like I was missing a bit of emotion in season 4 regarding Tim…? ;_;)

- I’m more neutral than anything about it because it’s conflicting one thing I love and something I don’t like much: Georgie & Melanie! I’m super glad that Georgie was revealed to be bi, and that she got a girlfriend! I’m super glad for a F/F couple! I’m super glad that “Georgie and Melanie as a Thing” is now canon! But I’m personally not too fond of storylines where a romantic involvement happens during or at the beginning of a process of recovery (in such circumstances I’m more invested when it’s a caring but careful friendship), so that one did miss the mark a bit for me. At the same time, I would have been a bit sad if Georgie&Melanie had become a duo without anything romantic ever, so.

- Nnnot too fond of the “terror attack” at the beginning of MAG158, mostly the fact that we heard the guns&the screams and knew it was happening. Overall, I’m not too fond of “random people get terrorised and butchered just because they’re in the way of people targeting the protags”, plus there, the whole concept that it was a cleansing felt… a bit too rough for me. So, really glad that Alex said they toned it down to avoid getting too close to real-life, as opposed to for instance having someone injured stepping in into the Archives to reveal what was happening, because yips, would have been way too far for me indeed ^^”

- Instead of “Oh! That was interesting and very sad and an amazing exploration”, I’m still mostly uncomfortable and disgusted towards the whole storyline of Jon having attacked people.

Disclaimer: I’m not very fond of stories where a twist is that your male protagonist was, in fact, an unreliable narrator doing some very cruel and horrible things while the information we had until then was designed to stir empathy for him. I also felt like MAG141-142 were very disjointed from the first half of season 4 – there had been no hint of Jon having attacked people before, while it was a festival of Jon making references to his “victims” right after it was revealed to us? And, more specifically, I find MAG142 extremely well-executed, the voice acting was fantastic on its own, but it also cemented that the most accurate comparison to what Jon was doing, to me, wasn’t “addiction” or “hunger”: it was sexual assault. It wasn’t that, I’m aware, but it did provoke in me the same visceral discomfort of… following a sexual assaulter’s woes about his own actions, and sobbing that he’s becoming a monster and did something bad when, yeah, dude, you did something bad? Especially with Jess: a woman in the middle of a romantic encounter is preyed upon, is cornered when alone; our male protagonist subjects her to something she didn’t want, hurts her deeply, thanks her for the experience, leaves, leaving her a mess… and her Narrative Purpose was to come ring the alarm about it to his male love interest. We learn that there were three victims, plus Jess and Floyd (whom we witnessed first-hand). The conclusion is that, although influenced, it was all Jon’s actions. It’s made clear that Jon knew that it was happening (although he wanted to cling to the hope that he was manipulated into doing it), that he hid it from the others while claiming that they needed to trust him, and that it only stopped “because he was caught”. And we end the season with cheering for Jon&Martin, with Jon going to save Martin in the Lonely and taking him back, and then spending a few weeks together in Scotland and being romantically involved, after having suffered from manipulation, isolation and circumstances for so long. Jess, Floyd, the three other victims? Don’t matter narratively past the fact that they’ve been hurt and messed up by the protagonist. Are they okay…? Well, it’s not their stories so we don’t know and, as much as we know, the characters don’t care much: Jon spent his time lamenting about what it meant about his (lack of) Humanity, and whether or not it would be rational or earned to do more harm, whether it was fair that he was suffering in trying to stop, whether his own suffering would stop… rather than expressing concern over his victims’ well-being, apologise, I don’t know, doing anything at all to prove that he wasn’t a plain villain. And we didn’t hear their voices anymore. Their purpose was to get hurt by the protag, and… so far, that’s it. And the circumstances have changed, so their suffering probably won’t matter, since everything is now awful for everyone.

There were a few narrative biases (the tape are not “neutral” and chose to not record Jon’s first four victims; Elias-Jonah didn’t even bother mentioning that it had happened in his big monologue, because… it was irrelevant for them – they are not people/entities we’re rooting for), but I feel that story-wise, it was a bit… showed that these victims weren’t supposed to matter much. Overall, they were basically treated as dead meat when it was discovered what Jon had done, as long as he stopped, and it felt extremely violent to me, especially in Jess Tyrell’s case given the circumstances in which Jon had encountered her and how she recalled the story; and it just felt (and keeps feeling) upsetting without any aesthetical pleasure…? I’m really not saying that Protags Should Always Be Pure (Jon… already wasn’t, anyway), and I do get that it was necessary to show what Jon’s choice truly meant, that Beholding was terrifying as a Fear-concept and not a lesser evil compared to the others. It’s something I’m finding interesting in fics, too! But canon-wise, I feel like it could have plainly worked if Floyd had been the only one, and if the exploration had been around what Jon had done to him…? Instead, Jon is a recidivist who knew from the start that he was one, and hid it from everyone until he was caught and stopped. That’s one of the points where I find it a bit hard to ignore that Jon is a male protag, and it’s a bit too reminiscent of IRL injustices (“it’s alright as long as he stops, right)”) – especially given that there’s no judiciary system to handle his actions. Of course, characters do what they can with what they have, amongst many bad options; they don’t have any way to do things perfectly or painlessly, it’s not that kind of story. But still, the “recidivist and hiding it from others” bit made everything discomforting and upsetting to me, rather than something that I was able to find compelling and interesting. That’s… a very human kind of monstrosity, and I just stopped caring much about him or his suffering for the rest of the season…? So a lot of the emotional beat of Jon getting Martin back and them being together just went over my head, because no, Jon is not only “a victim”, he’s also done terrible things to characters who weren’t lucky enough to be protagonists?

As I said, it’s down to personal experiences, squicks, triggers and narrative dislikes; I’m not saying the series or the handling was Problematic or anything like this! And it’s possible that we could hear from Jon’s victims in season 5!

(- A bit related: I do hope that season 5 is not a string of random people getting butchered or suffering while Jon&Martin are strolling through, or Jon Narrating Their Fate As Statements and moaning about how hard it is for him while said people are dying and suffering, because the emotional beat won’t work much for me if it’s the case ;; On the one hand, I usually don’t like apocalyptic stories much; on the other hand, I’m curious about what Jonny can do with the style; but on the third hand, the whole “Jon had secretly hurt people and hid from the others” subplot wasn’t really my brand in the way it was executed, so… I’ll See how it goes.)

- I felt like on its own, it… wasn’t technically a great season for female characters.

I loved Daisy and Melanie’s stories, and Basira’s was heart-breaking in retrospect (though she didn’t get any form of closure or temporary “end” as of now)! For me, they made the most striking storylines in season 4!

But when it comes to the main plot, what would dictate the overall circumstances all characters would suffer from… the main actors were all men. It was a bit “Mm” to me to end up in the situation, in the Panopticon, with four male characters as main players and nobody else – Annabelle wasn’t (explicitly) one, and Helen was apparently there to Watch&Giggle without intervening, Georgie&Melanie didn’t want to get involved, Basira&Daisy mostly made sure that Jon would be able to go rescue Martin, Gertrude has been dead for a while.

Now, it’s a remnant of season 1, which was mostly made of which members and friends of RQ were available to work with in this story (Jon, Martin, Elias are the only main characters who have survived since then, although Melanie had been introduced); if it had been a female character in the place of Peter or Martin… it would have felt iffy too (played and killed off, manipulated/used and needing to be rescued). Furthermore, it makes a lot of sense that, given that this is all Elias-Jonah’s chessboard, he would favour men in general (Victorian asshole who was mostly acquainted with men, if his correspondence is any hint).

At the same time it’s a bit obvious that Annabelle has been more active than she took credit for so far, and has her own plans (why did she so actively help Jonah bring the apocalypse, and why was it necessary for Jon to stay away from Hill Top Road?); plus, Helen is still around, Jonah indirectly pointed out that he can’t see in her corridors; Georgie can’t feel fear, and Melanie might get some immunity (at least from Beholding), so all of them have reasons to get exceedingly relevant in season 5 (if one power gets to “win” in season 5, it’s easy to bank on the Mother of Puppets). So. I didn’t feel like season 4 was super-satisfying in that regard, but also, there is a season 5, and there are enough open doors to think that, when the series will get concluded, it won’t be a gentlemen’s club moving the main plot forwards. So, I’m curious about how season 5 will unfold in that regard.

Fav episodes this season were:

- MAG127, “Remains To Be Seen”: I loved the “voice” of Jonathan Fanshawe, and how delightful it was to hear someone tell Jonah Magnus to fork off? Plus, we got the continuation of Albrecht’s story and his demise a few years after his letter from MAG023; the whole atmosphere was… very eerie and dusty?; I feel like Jon’s description of his “door” (and the “I drown.”) was one of the most striking pictures this season; and it also marked the return of Elias. Jinglebells!Elias, letting us to know that he spends his time gesturing when he talks.

- MAG129, “Submerged”: “When would you start to worry about the rain?” gODS. Very good atmosphere in that one, too, and Jon&Martin’s exchange at the beginning of the episode made us scream so loudly (“iS MARTIN OKAY, LISTEN, HIS VOICE WAS SO OFF, WHAT IS HAPPENING–” “Actually, Alex had the flu” “oh”)

- MAG132, “Entombed”: Resolution of the Saving Daisy mini-arc, and the pay-off was delightful!! Big “OH” moment when it was revealed why Daisy had asked about Jon’s shirt in season 3! Daisy not being a wild monster inside of the Coffin, as we feared, but able to be… herself and expose her doubts and what she didn’t want to be anymore… (Plus, I really felt that indeed, Jon&Daisy had shared something in the Coffin? I loved that small fragile bond that was created out of almost nothing, it felt very genuine and beautiful ;_;)

- MAG145, “Infectious Doubts”: Arthur Nolan’s VA was fantastic, and the exemplification of how Gertrude interacted with avatars was… something, alright. Indeed, one could understand how she managed to live as long as she did. And their discussion about Agnes and the fact that neither of them really knew her keeps breaking my heard for Agnes ;_; (Still crossing fingers that we’re able to hear her in some form in season 5? Given the whole, constant thing about how we only “know” her through male characters and/or people romantically or sexually interested in her…)

- MAG151, “Big Picture”: Simon Fairchild, okay. And Martin having had Enough. Plus, obviously, the… not exactly “answers”, indeed, but the way Simon tried to explain how to look at things and concepts without freezing them into concrete like Robert Smirke had done (given that Martin was the one to be given that talk, I’m really curious about whether he will put this to use in season 5); the shade-throwing about Peter; the reveal that Jon had listened to Martin’s tapes, which was also a “!!” moment.

- MAG157, “Rotten Core”: Tfw you’re The Corruption in season 4 and you don’t get a dedicated statement until near the end of it, but when you do, there is another one shortly afterwards, and it’s. This. About Adelard’s end. It was a very gruesome one, but also so… just plain sad? When it comes to Adelard, still managing to shape him as a character with a mind of steel, with his ultimate resolve and last words. I really came out of it wondering what Gertrude had felt when receiving it, because it… indeed felt like the end of an era/a long-distance partnership. (Also, THE RETURN OF THE ADMIRAL!!! Kitty cuddles and purring!!)

- MAG158, “Panopticon”: Still so impressed that so much had been crammed into this episode, with so many different tones, and with the sense of urgency going crescendo. Plus, you know, big reveals about Gertrude’s death, Elias’s identity, what was Peter and Elias’s deal, and finally, what was hidden in the tunnels.

Things to *squint* about in season 5, or overall questions/pondering:

- … The name of the show still works as of now, though it’s almost “Magnus’s Archive(s)” as things are right now. I suppose that characters will go back to the Institute at some point (if only to reach the Panopticon for some reason), I wonder how long it will take?

- How will the “one episode = one statement” thing fare in season 5…? I kind of hope it’s not a succession of Jon narrating/describing people’s gruesome demises, or live-statements which would make things (SOMEHOW) even worse for them. Technically, Jon had received statements and tapes, so we could explore those first… if he’s in any state to. (Obligatory: will we begin the season with “Recording by The Archive”? Or by Martin, searching for Jon, to reverse the end of season 4?)

- Who is listening through the tapes and why are they manifesting. (I was banking on Web at the end of season 3, nowadays I’m not so sure given how it’s been using them physically, a bit too blatantly.)

- What are the tapes Jon received in MAG160 about…? And were they sent by The Web? Is there another Gertrude tape amongst them? (A message about her “retirement plan”? The “little chat” Gertrude had mentioned in MAG158, which happened after Jonah had taken Elias as a new host and when she realised what was happening? An Adelard-Gertrude conversation if they manage to find The Perfect VA for Adelard? … A Jon-Gertrude conversation for when he began to work at the Institute? Jon had recalled that he had talked with her once or twice – what if it had been recorded because Jon was already relevant for whatever-is-listening-through-the-tapes…?)

- WHAT DOES THE WEB WANT / WHAT DID IT WANT AND GET

- Hey Jon, how is your lighter today (and how many cigarettes have you smoked recently)?

- Hill Top Road trip 2.0, and what the “scar in reality” means (and why Annabelle didn’t want Jon to get involved there… as of season 4, at any rate)

- I remembered about Anya Villette’s statement recently, and namely that bit:

(MAG114, Anya Villette) “I don’t know this place. They said I should come and talk to you. A few people did. People I thought I knew, but they were different. I should know this place, I think. I used to go to the Tate a lot when I lived in London, and I, I passed the building, but… I don’t know you people. Nothing makes sense anymore.”

For me, her statement was clearly Spiral, but the implication of the Institute not being there did grab my interest, because see: Robert Smirke died earlier in the Magnusverse than in our real world – Martin pointed out that he had died the day he had written MAG138’s letter, on February 13th 1867, while the historical Robert Smirke died on April 18th 1867. The difference being that, in the Magnusverse, it was implied that Jonah’s experiments and preparations of The Watcher’s Crown had directly caused Smirke’s death; the Watcher’s Crown attempt which resulted in the sinking of Millbank, and the establishment of the Institute to hide the Panopticon. The main difference between a world “without the Magnus Institute in London” and a world with it was… Jonah’s ritual attempt. It wonder if this is where two realities may have shifted and diverged, in the Magnusverse? We still don’t know much about this “scar in reality” lying at Hill Top Road, and why it’s hidden, or what it could cause…

- Given how Peter wasn’t sure why The Web had never tried to push for its own ritual, was it because the Mother knew that it would fail anyway? Was is something well-known amongst Web agents that it was All or Nothing, or was Jonah a pioneer in that area, and Annabelle (?) decided to lend him her support?

- … Or maybe not at all: I’m curious about other avatars’ stance on/in the new world, if there will be divergences, if most will embrace it, it if it will cause dissatisfaction because they’re not needed as vessels to feed their patrons anymore? Having the time of their lives, or dissatisfied/now useless when it comes to feeding the Fears?

- Elias hinted that Gertrude might have had a backup plan to stop The Dark, if it had turned out that their ritual could succeed – could that help with the whole apocalypse? I’m… not really convinced that the apocalypse can be undone or tuned down, and it’s likely that season 5 ends even more badly than season 4, but we shall see… Reminder that:

(MAG126) ARCHIVIST: … I remembered Gertrude’s notebook; we found it alongside the plastic explosives, but it rather got lost amongst the business of… [SIGH] saving the world at the cost of two lives… It… it’s borderline incomprehensible, not because of any code, or cypher – there’s every chance I could read those; just simply because… most of it is… numbers or fragments of sentences that would no doubt mean something to her, but… well, not to me. I have been staring at it for hours, in the hope something from it would just… come to me.

Jon hadn’t managed to decipher her notebook as of season 4, I wonder if it could get relevant again.

- How many episodes before we hear Elias again.

- I’m not sure how Elias is supposed to get “on top” of this, since Jon had been the one to “open the door” to the Fears? Why is Elias so confident that he will never die? Given how he had mentioned “an eternity of terror and suffering” for all at the beginning, I wonder if people might not become “immortal” in the new landscape – in the sense of not being able to die at all, of The End being a fear but also out of reach, putting people in a state worse than death? Still, curious about why Elias was so sure that he would get an edge and not share the same fate as everyone else, since I doubt the Fears could feel anything, to say nothing of gratefulness? So, what protection does he have?

- How will Elias die/be neutralised, and by whom or what? (I kind of randomly hope that Georgie will do something? I always found it a bit interesting that she was introduced as a talking character right after Elias had been revealed to be the villain… while Georgie is connected with The End and knows the words that killed her friend.)

- Will we learn a bit more about “Emma”, Gertrude’s third assistant named by Eric?

- Are we absolutely done with Agnes’s story, and/or is there a tiny chance that we could hear her voice in some way…?

- What happened with Salesa, and what was the broken lens he retrieved supposed to do?

- Was Eduardo Acosta’s statement relevant, for Tim to interrupt Martin in MAG104.

- Will Jon’s two missing ribs become relevant again? Did Jon leave his rib at the Institute, or did he take it with him in Scotland? (Jon, putting it on the fireplace lintel as soon as he unpacked–)

- There is still the matter of Extinction and whether it was a partial bust (that is now irrelevant) or if it will come into play after all; perhaps we’ll meet or witness the creation of one of its first avatars or something. (Honestly, I was beginning to wonder if Gertrude hadn’t been one for the Fears, given how she had pointed out that she was Desolation To The Desolation…)

- Martin spent a lot of time studying the Fears in season 4, to the point that he received Simon’s guidance about how to perceive them… so I wonder if that will be relevant, too, since he wasn’t able to use that knowledge at all in the season finale. It really felt like he was growing as a main character, until he was cast into The Lonely and took a backseat so… I’m expecting for it to come into fruition? Jon had the rigid knowledge of the Fears, and the knowledge given by Beholding, but Martin was taught to get the feeling of them, and it might be more efficient now that they’re here?

- How will the connection between Martin and The Lonely manifest? Martin had to suffer Peter’s influence for almost a year, has been shown to be able to use powers in front of Georgie, and still wanted to isolate himself a bit in MAG160, so I doubt that The Lonely will let him go this easily.

- Will Martin’s studies over the entities help in some way? Will The Extinction (and other aspects of the Big Blob Of Terror that weren’t contained in Jonah’s invocation) be relevant?

- Was MAG158 the “true end” of Daisy, and will it lead to her being absolutely unhinged and lost in season 5…? It felt like it when it happened, but the way Jon&Martin mentioned her in MAG160, it didn’t really feel like she was lost-lost – but that card has already been played with the Coffin…

- I found the season incredibly harsh on Basira overall: she tried to handle the situation while Martin was jumping ship and Melanie was getting more erratic; she got manipulated by Elias multiple times; she wasn’t even the one to rescue Daisy from the Coffin; she hadn’t noticed that Jon had been attacking people behind her back; she “lost” Daisy emotionally a bit further by initially refusing to respect her wish of not going back to The Hunt; she ultimately lost Daisy a second time… Except for punching Elias, she didn’t really get any “win”? I mean, everyone’s lives suck, but it feels that comparatively, Basira got the worst of it (Jon managed to save people, to elope with Martin; Melanie managed to flee from the Institute and has Georgie with her; Martin was finally found and cared for… but Basira?). I wonder how it will come out in season 5, and if she will manage to get… something. Anything. There were a few red threads (ha) thrown around with the fact that she was trying to track Annabelle, we’ll see if it leads somewhere… (If anyone was desperate for control, it was Basira in season 4…)

- On that note: is Basira still vitally “tied” to the Institute, even in this new world paradigm?

- I’m really curious about how Melanie will be handling things in season 5 and how she will fare in the new world, given how she cut herself off from Beholding, which is still supposed to be reigning a bit over the other Fears in this apocalypse. And she mentioned being “not scared anymore”, so…

- Same thing with Fear-less Georgie.

- I’m curious about Jon’s state at the beginning of season 5: absolutely collapsed on himself? Barely responsive? Already centred back while also still depressed? Already with a plan? Stuck for a while before Martin&him begin to move for one reason or another (trying to find Basira, Georgie, Melanie, or getting a clue regarding what to do?).

Bits about the trailer/teaser for season 5:

- I like how it was casually introduced that life in Scotland hadn’t been that idyllic, since they had run out of tea even before the apocalypse. Englishmen in Scotland, raiding the tiny village shop until it was out of tea. Amazing.

- … Martin still not getting Jon’s sense of humour with the “knock-knock” joke.

- And it meant A LOT that JON was WILLING to make a knock-knock joke, given his relationship to doors and especially Mr Spider’s!! ;w;

(- This is how Web!Martin can still win, given the parallel.)

- … Aouch for Martin suggesting coffee instead. Jon doesn’t drink much of it, according to season 2.

- Not!Tea is canonically ~something that isn’t tea~, and I’m… mostly D: about the fact that Martin was convinced that it was tea. He was thinking that he had brewed and prepared this thing – did he really? – and sounded absolutely certain that it was plain ordinary tea he was holding… so the world is really messing with people’s heads and perceptions, uh…

- And it makes me worried because anyone else wouldn’t have had Jon’s “advantage” of seeing through deceptions and fears, and warning someone about it. Quite honestly, I’m not really worried about Jon&Martin (bad stuff will happen to them, but we will hear their thoughts about it); my worry is mostly about regular people, because again, I don’t like random innocents being canon fodder around protagonists for the sake of their own progress or because of their actions. (And yes, I’m aware that s5 will probably be a lot of this, especially given the short comment about the village orz)

(- It’s possible that the village would be the theme of the first “statement” if Jon begins to narrate people’s fates, I guess…)

- Though at the same time. Jon didn’t sound afraid at the prospect of the not!tea potentially attacking Martin, which should have been a concern?

- Things are “unchanged” according to Jon, who isn’t sure that things can change again… and it’s aouch given his laments over things changing during all of season 4 (+ Martin “not big on change” according to Tim). Jon isn’t sure things can change again, I’m really not sure either, so… either they can’t, either they do, either people keep changing too…?

- Things have changed, and Elias was apparently kind of right that Jon… was made to live in/feed from this world.

- … The way Jon described the rolling wave of knowledge was directly echoing how he had portrayed his inner door in MAG127 so: now, the door has opened and the entire ocean is indeed out there, uh…

- But Jon is not “drowning”? We’re still following the same logic as at the end of season 4: that something feeling right doesn’t mean that it is right. It is actually a bit reassuring, since… Jon kept his morals? Is trying not to know, not to use his powers? Saying that he wished it didn’t feel right means a lot: that it does, but that he still would prefer otherwise. Jon is not a creature of pure instinct but someone able to decide what is right and wrong, still fighting against urges and new influences. That’s weirdly optimistic, in this situation?

- Jon was going for bitterness and “despair”, but it was also contradicted by what he was doing: if he had truly fallen into despair, he wouldn’t be this cautious about his powers and the knowledge, he might “stop feeling guilty” like Helen. He isn’t. He’s still holding on, which means that, indeed, there is still some hope or something to salvage – or at least, the idea of not making things worse.

- Same with his comment about the fact that “comfort” doesn’t exist anymore: he… immediately proved that, no, yes, it does, with the hug (?) he shared with Martin.

- Jon&Martin still together as of now (which, honestly, I wasn’t expecting! I was bracing myself for them to already be separated somehow), still in Scotland given their comments. Will they stay in the safehouse for a while, or will they quickly get on the move?

- Martin’s “You know I’m here for you” sounds to me like we’ll end up with a situation in which it isn’t the case anymore – because Martin would have to let Jon down, would be dead, or because Jon is not even there anymore.

- Tape recorders still around, we don’t know what they are, but they’re still listening in. Despite Jon’s claim that “it’s over”, it’s not and there are still Tales To Be Told, even after the end (?) of the world.

Anyway, expectations are overall “they’re going to die (or not even be granted that, and they’ll be condemned to an eternity of worse)”, but ;___; It feels weird to think that I’m already going to say goodbye to that bunch of idiots in 40 episodes ;_;

MAG161’s title is surprisingly a bit obtuse for me, and I wonder if it will still be possible to try to “guess” an entity through announced titles this season (now that all the Fears are there and acknowledged as part of a whole) – Buried stuff??? As a season opener, I would say, either Annabelle stuff, either Jon&Martin; Aaangst is a given; but after that…

#the magnus archives #tma season 4 #mag160 #long post/#... like v long even for my usual reviews >>#tma liveblog #tma spoilers #also contains a few bits about season 5's trailer teaser

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