Fifteen To One

(Image from Wakelet)

So. The first of four essays about the four semi-finalists in the Magnus Cup. For those not in the know (and if this applies to you, you might want to rethink their life choices), The Magnus Archives is effortlessly the best horror podcast I've come across in the last seven or eight years. So good that I spent about nine months in 2019/2020 writing a Twitter thread about an episode every single day. Some of those threads were not short.

When even that wasn't enough (and I wrote up the fifth season too, week by week, as it came out), I'm in the process of using the SCIENCE of polls to SCIENTIFICALLY SCIENCE the best episode of the whole damn shebang - all two hundred episodes of it. Check it out on Twitter: the hashtag is #MagnusCup (not the one about swimming) and it's been going on for FUCKING AGES.

Explanations out of the way, I'm gonna chat about "The Eye Opens", judged by humans who press buttons to be one of the top four episodes of the show. It's also the Season Four finale, so if you've not come across the show before, or even if you just haven't worked through the first 160 episodes yet (and again, I did one a day and wrote about it, so save your excuses), I'd stay clear of what unspools below.

There's no sense reinventing the wheel. Well, maybe there is, if your first wheel was total dogshit, but I think my 2020 on "The Eye Opens" is broadly accurate. It's fun revisiting my theories about what the Web was up to, with the hindsight of a finished series. I would - entirely objectively - give myself a B- for my thoughts on the matter (disappointed I didn't see the parallel with Magnus' little band, but then that's the best kind of twist, isn't it - the one you know you should have seen coming, but, er, didn't).

Sticking strictly with the episode in the context of what came before, though, nothing has really shifted in my thinking. "The Eye Opens" still reads to me as structured as a series finale. Indeed, with the series fully finished, the degree to which you can see the first four seasons as The Magnus Archives, and the final one as a closely linked spin-off (like, say, Bosch Legacy) is noticeable.

In part, this is because of how many doors at this point have closed, or been burned to cinders. The institute is gone, with five characters with their own voice actors presumed dead (admittedly, the strength of that presumption varies between cases). Martin is apparently free of the Eye, having switched allegiance to the Lonely, only for (the irony!) the companion who tied him to that entity having gone too, [1] . Now, our two protagonists get to spend some time alone in their remote Scottish love nest, making good tea and discussing good cows, while Jon grazes on stale but nourishing statements. As actual endings go, I've seen much, much worse. Not even thirty episodes earlier, Jon was terrified he'd been locked inside a supernatural torture-box that would crush him to coal every twenty minutes for eternity. At the start of this episode, his biggest concern is whether he has sufficient wardrobe space. He might hate The Archers, but you have to figure that after the last three years, ending up there must feel like something of a relief. 

I've never summoned the courage to ask Jonny Sims this directly, but I've always wondered whether there was a point at which this story was intended as being an alternate endpoint. It's not hard to see how to do it - Magnus' plan has relied on gamble after gamble (including one literal bet), and there'd be no small poetic justice in his whole plan collapsing because Martin overheard Jon reading the trigger statement and tearing it from Jon's hands. It wouldn't even been the first time Martin had thrown a stick in the spokes of Magnus' plans by daring to be an actual human being.

This would fall short of a perfect ending, I'm very much aware. Anabel's endgame would be completely ignored, the last and most important door remaining would be bypassed. Even more important, an end state where Jonah Magnus is implicitly reduced to Dick Dastardly, dreaming up ever-more ludicrous schemes to get Jon to accidentally read his ritual words ("Martin, this fortune cookie seems to be papier mache, are you sure it came from Jade House?") 

Still, though. It would work, in the sense that using paper-ties for your dress shirt because you left your cufflinks at home would work. You know there was a better option, but no-one can claim you didn't finish getting dressed.

In the parlance of 90s genre TV, then - my first critical language as surely as English is my mother tongue - "The Eye Opens" reads as something very close to Babylon 5's "Rising Stars". The penultimate episode of that show's fourth season, it designed to lead into a season finale or a series finale, depending on circumstance. A universe in which The Magnus Archives ended forever with "The Panopticon", "The Last", and an iteration of this episode where Magnus didn't get his own way is not one too dreadful to contemplate.

(There would even be the option of letting Jonah get his way, and end on the collapse of reality. I'm on record as fucking hating last-minute bullshit sadtwists, but Sims' meticulous planning would have blunted that particular razorblade. The biggest issue with that approach would be the show ending on the realisation that the world would have survived if Jon had chosen to abandon Martin to the Lonely two episodes earlier. That's too sour a taste for me to recommend this particular change of dessert [2].)

Since I brought up the 90s, though, and keeping one eye firmly on my thread from 2020, the episode "The Eye Opens" seems closest to in ideaspace isn't B5's "Rising Stars", but The X Files' "The Truth". While Chris Carter wrote the latter in the certain knowledge his show wasn't coming back [3], there's an obvious parallel in how both episodes grapple with spinning drama from exposition that takes up the majority of the run time.

And it sucked. Just a total mutant liver-pecking turkey in every conceivable direction. To this day, it remains the worst finale of any show I've seen. Our two heroes, characters we'd watched fight impossible odds and impossible entities both, fictional people who both individually and as a partnership we just had to see succeed, just listened impotently while the web and secrets and lies spun before and around them over the show's history was revealed. This was what nine years of alien abductions and shape-shifting mercenaries and quisling alien collaborators and sentient, parasitic oil had led us to?  A proto-Powerpoint-presentation entitled "What Was Actually Going On, Actually"? FUCK.

I wasn't alone in feeling cheated. The finale was so poorly received that when Chris Carter (somehow, ridiculously) managed to persuade enough people that his show deserved a second movie outing, the entirety of what was revealed during "The End" was ignored. Next, when Carter (somehow, even more ridiculously) managed to persuade enough people that his show deserved a second television outing, the entirety of what was revealed during "The End" was explicitly dismissed as an obvious lie.

 
In short, an exposition dump finale is a risky enough approach, even without a specific example we can point to of it failing disastrously in practice. And yet while "The End" is generally regarded as one of the lowest points of a show that basically only had low points left, this post only exists because "The Eye Opens" has made its way into the semi-final of The Magnus Cup. Ninety-eight percent of the show's episodes have fallen out of contention while this one keeps on tickig, and for all I know, it's going to eventually win out as this particular field's GOAT. So why is that? After all, Sims has basically taken the same approach Carter did - replacing our heroes investigations, chases and occasional near-death encounters with a lecture on which particular truth turns out to have been the one that out there.

Well, there's a clue in how I structured the question. The Magnus Archives only occasionally moves into the model in which Jon or Martin (or anyone else) gets down to the runnings and the shootings and the general doing of derring. This show has been building in confidence and complexity since the end of its first season, but the swirling, adrenaline-drenched chaos of "The Panopticon"  is still a noticeable deviation from the standard model. "The Last" is (ironically) a little closer to home, with its extra-dimensional hostage rescue at least broadly similar to something like "Entombed", but we're still clearly some distance from the model the show used in its first two years.

"The Eye Opens", in contrast, represents a return to the baseline- Jon reading out a statement alone. There's a sense of things coming full circle - another good trick to pull if you're wrapping things up. Especially, of course, if you contrast it with the total collapse of essentially everything your show has been built on since the beginning. I've noted a few times before that, so long as you accept "Stranger And Stranger" as a season finale, and "Eye Contact" a kind of coda, each season finale of The Magnus Archives represents a narrative collapse, in which the threat is not just to the characters, but to the very ability of the show to continue functioning. In season one, this came in the sudden switch from anthology storytelling to flown-blown audio drama. In season two it was the show moving outside the Institute. Season three saw The Unknowing saw the breakdown the conventions of audio drama itself, and saw the infectious madness of the Stranger's ritual spread out into the show's opening theme. And each time, the show never truly restores itself to the status quo ante.

 

"The Eye Opens" continues this tradition, and then some, threatening to upend the board so completely it was hard at the time to guess how another round might even be played. There's a constant background pressure working on your mind as episode unfolds - the growing question of "What the hell is going to happen next?", as opposed to "The End" prompting viewers to ask "How can this possibly be it?". This is heightened by the awareness that "The Eye Opens" has an emergency lever it can pull by having Martin burst in. As I've mentioned, the dramatic implications of tugging that particular rip-cord are not encouraging - though there would be a certain delicious irony in Magnus' plan being reliant on Martin as a lure, and unravelled by Martin as a human. As we spiral ever-closer to planet-wide catastrophe, though, the urge for any solution to be presented can't help but build.

Taken together, this is the story of a boulder gaining speed as it tumbles down the mountainside towards an unsuspecting town, with the only possible source of salvation showing no sign they need to act as time grows ever shorter. And, of course, this isn't the kind of show where salvation can simply be assumed. As I've said, the narrative collapses that end each year of the show are never fully averted. The fear of how far matters will go, and how conceivable it is that they can ever be wound back, generates a sense of propulsion pleasingly at odds with what, in theory, is simply an extended supervillain's gloating plan-reveal.

Well, maybe not "simply". There's also the author themselves chucking aside their metaphorical DM screen, to proudly show everyone look at the notes they've been working from for the last few years [4]. What strikes me here is how enjoyable that process is. That's largely thanks to how successful Sims was in putting together four seasons that work as a cohesive whole. I know the journey wasn't precisely as planned (who got the Not! is one example, and I'm also convinced there was originally a rather different plan for Lost John's Cave), but whatever cracks there were have been so well papered over, they're indistinguishable from the stumbles his characters make simply because they are (or were) human. The sense of cohesion is honestly impressive, and that combined with the chance to finally get inside Elias/Jonah's mind does a lot to sweeten the fact that fundamentally, we're watching fourteen minor variations of the same magician's trick.

Or perhaps that's the wrong metaphor. Maybe this is more like watching an evil wizard finally finishing a cursed jigsaw, one which we've only just learned the rough shape of, and still can't quite see the picture on the box. Not until the final moments, anyway,  making this episode a literal eye-opener (Sims never gets enough credit for the strength of his pun game). 

All of which is to say "The Eye Opens" works much, much better than anyone could have realistically expected it to. Certainly, it's orders of magntiude (Magnustude?) beyond "The End", which felt less like seeing a master sculptor rip the sheet from a masterwork, and more like watching a man stuffing money into his pockets as read out fanwank theories for his own show direct to camera. Even so, though, a remarkable success with a (self-imposed) nightmare brief doesn't in itself imply a top-tier episode. Indeed, I'm actually surprised this episode has made it to the semi finals of The Magnus Cup. The analysis above amounts to an explanation as to how Sims made the info-dump model of season finale work as well as it possibly can. In that context, it's an absolute triumph - far more high-profile and more experienced writers have done far, far worse with this cursed approach. But the approach still is cursed, and for good reason. Two years ago I described "The Eye Opens" as doing it's thing "competently and efficiently". That remains true, but crucially, "competent" and "efficient" aren't the adjectives you most want applied to your fiction. Obviously, they're better than their antonyms, but when you praise the structure of a cake, people start wondering whether that means it isn't as delicious as you were hoping.

"The Eye Opens", It needed to be done, and it was definitely done as well as it possibly could be. It's certainly a great example of Sims' abilities as a writer. I just struggle to see an argument for it as a great example of The Magnus Archives.

[1] I'm kidding; the reason Martin has escaped The Lonely is obviously Jon. I do wonder though how the Lukas' god feels about the fact you can only escape The Eye by blinding yourself, while freeing yourself from The Lonely involves running away to Scotland with a hot piece of ass. 

[2] It's true that, no matter what happened in Season 5 (and I'm deliberately trying to be as oblique as possible on that front, for anyone reading this without having devoured the show's final year), it remains true that Jon's love doomed the world. It's also true that, of all the powers Magnus had to inflict on Jon, his trap was probably the neatest with regard to the Lonely. After all, had Jon refused to follow Martin, would he have not ended up alone?

[3] Though that decision did get reversed, temporarily, which brings "The Truth" and "The Eye Opens" even closer together.

[4] Not quite all the notes, admittedly - the specific actions and motivations of The Web are left mostly unknown, to serve as the basis of season five's mystery.