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| (Image from Wakelet) |
"Do Not Open" is a fun episode to take apart, because none of my usual routes actually work. There's no way to do much in the way of character study here; the common observation is that Josh is surprisingly smart is correct, but that's a plot beat rather than a character note. Semiotically, the statement is unusually (and ironically) lacking in depth. This in itself isn't a complaint. Not everything needs subtext, and a twenty-minute horror story can certainly do enough other things for it to not need powerful thematic undertows. I guess you could try and link Joshua's experiences in Amsterdam with his time struggling not to open the box, twisting the whole into some commentary on alcohol/drug recovery. Importantly, though, that would be tasteless. Even more importanly, it would be shit.
No. Let's just take this one at face value. It's certainly pretty enough. Essentially, and this delights me, "Do Not Open" is a locked-box mystery where the goal is figuring out how not to unlock the box. As I've said, Magnus Arvhives fans talk a lot about how smart Joshua's solution is, but that's just one peak among many. Joshua calmly works his way through figuring out the basics of something entirely inexplicable, and keeps himself alive as a result.
This also means the box's contents aren't revealed to us. Yes, we return to it next season, but this early into the show, where there's no firm evidence there even is an ongoing plot, never mind where it might lead, there's no reason to think we'll ever learn what lies inside the box. This is probably, for me, even smarter of Sims than the solution he cooks up for Joshua to delpoy. The need to open the unopenable box for the audience is Horror 101. No, it's more general than that. It's woven into the most basic levels of storytelling, from poor Pandora onwards. If you set up a box whose contents cannot be released, someone's going to do just that. It's just too obviously a source of entertainment, however bleakly defined. We might call it Chekov's Fun.
But no. While it seems very likely that John opens the box at the end of the statment, he does so leaving Joshua - and hence the audience - with no clear idea of the consequences. the mystery is deliberately prioritised over the satisfying reveal. This is true more generally here, too. Why does the box scratch when he puts orange juice on its lid? Is there something specific about it being liquid, linking it to the mellifluous moaning when it rains? Why does the weather affect the coffin, anyway? What lay within the dreams Joshua no longer remembers? And over all of this, just why did John pick a Brit in Amsterdam to look after a coffin?
I've heard Sims talk about the difficulty in providing enough answers to play fair with the audience, while avoiding giving them so much the mystery is lost. It's a problem every serialised story which trades in mystery has to grapple with eventually, and Sims stakes out his position quite early here. Even with the entire storyline resolved, much of what I've pointed to above still has no answers. Sure, we know now that torrential rain and the flooding it can cause lies within the remit of The Buried, and that the scratching Joshua heard was probably some poor soul desperately trying to escape. There are still far more questions than answers, though.
For instance: just what actually was going on with John? I've not listened to every Q&A Sims has done, so it's possible he's explicitly ruled this theory out, but I'd always assumed the original plan was for John to be an avatar of the Buried, rather than the Stranger. The way he's described as very short, with a strange aura of density, and the way he refers to himself as being "inside" a foreign land, all point that way. So too does the fact the first victims of the Buried we learn of are both called John. My theory circa Season Three was that both lost Johns eventually became avatars, with one getting killed by his own God for not feeding the coffin, and the other one going on to... well, there's a question. Here's another one: isn't it odd that we never actually meet a contemporary avatar of the Buried, literally the only of the fourteen fears that this is true of?
Maybe this is just an example of early installment weirdness, or external events forcing a change of plans (such as the intended fates of Tim and Sasha). Or maybe it's neither of those things, and I'm just playing around in one of the corners of his world that was always meant to remain dark. My point here, once again, is how well Sims manages to make it difficult to tell what's been shifted around. The Magnus Archives, on top of everything else it is, is one of the most coherent serialised stories I've ever seen, even among single-artist works. Part of that is no doubt careful planning, but it's also about the savviness of keeping so much in shadow, you can rearrange things when people aren't looking.
As a horror story, this episode doesn't hit quite as hard as its predecessor (though that says more about how strong the show was, straight out of the gate). Follow ups are always hard, of course (is that why Joshua references The Lost World, Michael Crichton's first sequel, at least under his own name?). And really, in almost every other way, this is a clear step forward. "Angler Fish" immediately showed that Sims could write an effective horror story. "Do Not Open" proved that he knew why what he was writing was effective.
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