"And Bark, And Grunt, And Roar, And Burn"

(Image from Wakelet)

(Spoilers for up to Episode 100 of The Magnus Archives below).

On paper, this is a superb act of trolling. You’ve reached the halfway point of not just your season, but the entire show, and you’re doing it with your 100th episode. You know your audience is expecting a blowout, especially given your show is heading into hiatus.

So you lean in. You ramp things up at the end of Episode 99, by slinging your main character into the most dangerous situation he’s faced since the show began. Kidnapped by the Stranger in its ascendancy, without the (admittedly questionable) defences of the Institute to call on? How can our protagonist possibly get out of this one?

There couldn't be doubt in anyone's mind that Episode 100 was going to be AMAZING.

So does Sims deliver on what serial fiction demands and what his own set-up promised? He DOES NOT. Instead, Episode 100 is the first (and ultimately only) one to not feature the Archivist at all, with his sudden disappearance prompting nothing more dramatic than a loss of workplace efficiency.

Like I say, obvious trolling, Only… surely the only immutable rule of trolling is that it’s aimed at piss people off. The fact this episode made it into the semi-finals of The Magnus Cup suggests this isn't the case. Possibly this is at least in part due to the episode being re-evaluated once the rest of the season/show was available, but my recollection is that fan response was pretty positive at the time.

This is less the writing of a troll, then, and more that of a puckish fairy (a comparison I suspect Sims himself would find quite pleasing). It's also, though, and this shouldn't be undervalued, the writing of someone possessing a solid steel spine. A bait-and-switch of such audacity demanded what the audience stumbled into was every bit as rewarding as the tale of mortal peril and incomprehensible terror they were expecting. 

And again, the very fact this is one of the four essays I'm writing at this stage in the competition is proof that confidence paid off. "I Guess You Had To Be There" is both technically impressive, and hugely fun. Each of the four encounters here are amusing in their own way, with each visitor differing in their challenges, and each precisely paired off with the character whose buttons will get their particular buttons most thoroughly jabbed. Martin has to deal with acute social embarrassment, Melanie has to sit through a pathetic meltdown from someone who thinks the Institute is awesome, Basira finds someone essentially immune to interview techniques that came from police training rather than a fear god, and Tim - well, Tim would have been a shitty little prick no matter what, really. Screw Tim.

It wasn't actually a secret that Sims could write comedy, of course (though here it's fairer to say he wrote comedic situations, with much of the dialogue being improvised by the performers). The show has been funny before; it's just that until now, humour has been deployed as seasoning, rather than as a base ingredient. This is a good time then to consider just how difficult an ingredient comedy is to bake into horror - at least if you want it to actually remain horrific. Jokes don't have to be bad to cause problems. Horror relies on building tension, and humour functions as tension release. Turn the wheel a little too far, and everything you've been building up will dissipate, leaving you with nothing.

To some extent Sims threads the needle here by mostly not trying to make the statements scary - indeed that's very much part of the joke (as well as finally giving an in-universe explanation as to why every previous statement reads like it was crafted by a professional writer). That's not true across the episode, though. There's a reason Brian's is the last statement to begin and to end. His spiralling panic starts off funny, but it becomes increasingly unsettling as both his anguish and the unpleasantness behind it become more obvious. It's like the old analogy of the frog in slowly heating water, except the frog is freaking out the whole time, meaning initially they just sound ridiculous, until you start to hear the water bubbling.

Via Brian's statement, then [1], the episode shifts us, almost without us noticing, to the conditions necessary to throw in Peter Lukas for the first time. A dash of true Archives-style horror as the episode draws to a close, as a reminder of where we are. It's an effective intro to Lukas, too, given he only has eight lines. Not just in terms of his combination of upbeat geniality and sinister intent, but his colossal arrogance (discussed in my "Panopticon" article), evidenced by him snatching someone at random in another Fear's territory simply because he can. Not just a reminder, then, but a promise of what's to come (a promise made all the stronger for casting so well-known (and well-respected) a name in horror podcasting as Alasdair Stuart). One more plate set spinning as we wait to see which one will crash to the floor first.

Given all this fulsome praise, then, why did "I Guess..." barely scrape into the top half of my ENTIRELY SCIENTIFIC ranking of every episode of the show's first four seasons (I never did get around to adding in Season 5)? I think it's because it's the kind of episode I appreciate rather than love. Talking about the ways it's smart and tight and brave is easy. It certainly makes more sense that this be Episode 100 than "Another Twist", despite the latter being a story I prefer. But you can't demonstrate how far you can stretch your concept without moving away from your conceptual core. This isn't a bad thing, and indeed a show that doesn't do it isn't liable to last for long. I prefer it when the Archives extend downward, though, rather than along.

But hey. Even by my standards, that's just personal taste masquerading as critical analysis. The humans of Twitter have spoken. "I Guess You Had To Be There" is two victories away from being the greatest episode of the whole damn show, despite it featuring a minimum of the creator's writing, and precisely none of his voice acting.

I guess this puckish thing can work both ways.

[1] Quick shout out here to how well the editing team does its job here. One way in which the 100th episode does play things fairly straight is in how well it showcases the progress the show has made over its first two and a half seasons.