#and daisy is so keenly aware of that so much more self-aware than she's given credit for

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘A Guest for Mr Spider’ (S03E01) Analysis

After hyperventilating for a while, because IT’S HEEEERE, I got down to listening to the first episode of season 3, and … well, it wasn’t what I had expected, but it was an absolutely fascinating contextualization of a character we’ve known for a while, and also sets the scene for what we might expect going forward in season 3.  Come on in to hear what I thought about …

 The statement of Jonathan Sims, former Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, regarding a childhood encounter with a book once possessed by Jurgen Leitner.

Hooooo … this is going to be a pretty long post, because we have A LOT to get through.  This episode was exposition-rich without feeling like an info dump, which is a credit to Jonny Sims’ writing.  We got really surprising amounts of information about Sims as a character and about what brought him to the Institute.  But we also got some discussion of recent events as well, from a Sims who seems perhaps a week out from the events of the finale.  

First, we got confirmation for something I had suspected throughout season 2: a lot of Sims’ paranoia was induced by the Not-Them.  But then again, while Sims insists that it was all the Not-Them, I think it was more complicated than that.  I have a feeling that, given the very specific reactions that Sims was having compared to Tim or Martin, it was likely a combination of the Not-Them, the Beholding pricking at him and warning him that there was danger nearby, and his own natural paranoia being hugely exaggerated.  Because Sims has always been a little paranoid.  

He is, however, a lot more self-aware in this episode than he has been in quite some time.  He knows that, for the majority of the last season, he really wasn’t playing with a full deck.  I doubt he’s as recovered from the events of season 2 as he thinks.  While he does sound saner, he still frays and starts sounding a lot more broken again when he discusses the fact that his former colleagues now likely think him a psychopathic killer.  A lot is hitting Sims all at once at this point: the loss of his job, being on the run despite the lack of wide-scale manhunt (my guess is that the investigation into Leitner’s death is going to be a very secret thing, likely undertaken by Daisy alone), and having lost people he might not have even recognized as friends before he did indeed lose them.  Sasha is dead, and Martin and Tim both suspect him of murder.  As dismissive as he was of his assistants, I think he’s feeling their loss a lot more keenly than he thought he would.

But most of that remains subtext or only hinted at, because Sims might think he’s no longer the Archivist, but something is still driving him.  Something has made him find a new tape recorder, new tapes, and to start recording again in the exact same manner he did at the Institute.  One could say it was habit, but I think that the Beholding is still claiming him.  He is still the Archivist, and as such the compulsion to behold and to record is overwhelming to him.  The only way he can start to make sense of everything that happened to him and because of him in season 2 is to finally recount the story that started him down this path, that committed him to the study of the paranormal, and that even seems rooted in some of the stupider decisions he’s made in this podcast’s run.

One thing I noticed, even early on, was that Sims was ready to dismiss almost any statement—no matter how compelling—as insubstantiated nonsense.  And yet whenever Jurgen Leitner’s library came up, he took that statement, even flimsy and without any proof, as 100% fact.  Sims was a believer in Leitner’s library and its horrors, if nothing else at the beginning of this series.  And in this statement, we learn why.  Sims himself had an encounter with one of those books, and it changed him in a fundamental way, setting him on the path to become the Archivist.  For Sims, Leitner was the definition of all that was horrific, supernatural, and evil.  Sims readily admits that he was functioning in a very (understandably) self-centered manner at the beginning of his tenure as the Archivist.  He had experienced the horror of a Leitner book, and so that was real. His fear and his suffering were real, but everyone else was likely lying or hallucinating or drugged.  Sims is a deeply self-centered individual, not because he’s a narcissist, but because he has defined himself as something independent of … well, just about everything and everyone else for basically all of his life.

In addition to being a nicely creepy story, we finally get a lot more insight into what formed Jonathan Sims into the man he is today, and even in his childhood he seemed to be defined by two characteristics that seem to have spilled over into his adulthood: isolation, and a belief in his own intelligence that very frequently veers into arrogance.  We also know that Sims was “a child of the 90s”, so is likely in his early to mid-thirties (I think of children of the nineties as those who remember that period as their childhood, so were likely … five or six in 1990?  Making him 32 or 33ish?).  We also know he looks considerably older than his actual age, even to the point of already having graying hair.  We know that both of his parents are dead.  His father died when he was two of an accidental fall, and his mother died a few years later due to complications of a routine surgery.  As such, the only caretaker Sims really knew was a grandmother grieving her dead son, and who resented having to care for a rather difficult grandchild.  Sims’ sense of isolation clearly started early, as while he doesn’t seem to have any outright hostility toward his grandmother, there is a definite distance in the way he discusses her.  She tried her best, but they were clearly never particularly close, and Sims in turn never really developed any deep bonds in his childhood.  The entire statement is devoid of mentions of friends or profound connections.  Even the person who eventually saved him from the book wasn’t a friend, but instead a bully who used to torment Sims, and whose name Sims can’t remember.

This all fits so well with everything we’ve already learned about Sims.  Sims really doesn’t get the idea of family.  think Martin’s story didn’t resonate with him nearly so much as it might with others partially because of the Not-Them’s paranoia, but also partially because the idea of completely upending his life and lying about something fundamental like who and what he was for someone he loved was something that Sims didn’t quite comprehend.  Sims has always functioned for himself first and foremost.  Putting others before his own self-interest is something he is clearly working to be better at.  Indeed, he does have moments of great selflessness, like when he tried to protect his assistants by sending them home in ‘The Librarian’.  But while Martin is naturally caring, and puts others before himself even to a fault, such actions are not natural to Sims.  

Instead of friends, Sims has always preferred books.  But even in that, Sims was difficult to please.  He apparently disliked reading anything that seemed familiar, meaning he would only ever read any given author once, and any given subject once.  His grandmother took to buying every second-hand book she could find that was 50p or less, and just presenting him with piles of books to sort through and choose ones he actually found interesting.  

And second-hand books, of course, lead us straight to the library of Jurgen Leitner.

The description of ‘A Guest for Mr Spider’ is somehow even more chilling than most of the other Leitner books, because it’s a picture book.  The implication there seems to be that it specifically targets children. The strange, horrid, twitchy illustrations depict a series of flies in various costumes coming to visit Mr Spider, only to vanish as more and more of Mr Spider’s home is covered in brown ink and Mr Spider becomes more bloated.  The final consumption of Mr Horse and his son sets clear the context that the book wants children.  It will take older people, and indeed it does end up taking the 19-year-old bully who snatched the book from Sims before he could finish it, but this was a book meant to be found and read by a child.  A child who, like Sims, recognized the book instantly as something wrong and horrific, and yet who was powerless to stop reading.  Who would be drawn through the streets to a house that wouldn’t be found later.  A house full of darkness and webs, and long spider legs.  It puts one in mind of Raymond Fielding.  I wonder if, when reading the statements regarding the house on Hill Top Road, Sims saw reflected in those experiences that house from his own childhood.  Did he read Ronald Sinclair’s statement about Fielding, about the children bound in webs in his basement, and think of himself and that nameless bully?  Or did he ever think to tie those spiders together with Mr Spider?

I wonder if he might not have done.  Rather than focusing on the house and the spiders, Sims seems to have focused all his fear and his anger at Jurgen Leitner.  He would dismiss the statements about spiders readily enough at the beginning, but never a statement about Leitner.  In Sims’ mind, the supernatural was rare, with the majority of the statements he read—even those on tape—made up of hoaxes.  But Leitner was evil personified, and had tapped into some primal power that he wielded to harm 8-year-old Jonathan Sims and reshape his entire perception of how the world worked.

It shines a whole different light on how profound actually meeting Leitner must have been for Sims. Leitner wasn’t some great villain or all-powerful master of the things in his books.  He was a stupid, arrogant man who thought he could control and define things without control or definition.  He was, as Sims says in this episode, a spoiled child.  He looked at the nightmares in this world and thought he had the ability to confront them and contain them purely because he was interested and had a big enough ego to think he could.  He decided to create a way to hold the supernatural to his own whims, much as Robert Smirke had done with his architecture.  But whatever power Smirke wielded that made him so lastingly effective, Leitner lacked.  He contained the books only for a brief time, and then they all found their way back into the wild, potentially more readily available than they had been before. Even his and Gertrude’s scheme to destroy the Institute could well have been similarly short-sighted, and just another effort to exert control from a man who was ultimately just as powerless as anyone else.

This man, who Sims had so feared and hated, is remarkably similar to Sims.  They both believe that if they confront the horrors of this world, they will somehow have the ability to resist and defeat them.  They are both isolated, both believe themselves more intelligent than they actually are, and are both supremely arrogant.  Leitner isn’t a monster.  He’s a cautionary tale.

And now Sims lacks that driving fear of Leitner.  He lacks a job, and he’s realizing that everything he set out to do in season 1 and even his desire from childhood to protect people from the darkness has roundly and repeatedly failed.  He wanted to organize the archive and failed.  He wanted to disprove the majority of the supernatural statements that weren’t directly related to his own trauma, and he failed.  He wanted to keep his assistants as far from harm as possible, and he failed.  And now he’s on the run.  He’s out in the wild without direction or any real idea of what he needs to do.  

So he falls back on compulsion.  He records his own statement, lacking anyone else’s.  He hides and he looks at the shattered remains of his life.  Something is going to happen, I’m certain, to roust him from this hiding space, and to plunge him into the wider world of the supernatural.  Having him out of the Institute may well be exactly the boost to his skill and his understanding that Elias thinks it will be.  He will see the powers of his world in a much more direct fashion.  He may well be able to get statements from faction members who would never set foot inside the Institute.  And he will likely be in terrible danger from all of them. We still don’t know what it means to be the Archivist, but we know that whatever it is, members of other factions want the Archivist.  They want to use him, or tell him things, or get information from him, or kill him. But Sims’ position makes him marked, not only by the Beholding, but every supernatural entity out there.  And this season, I think we’ll learn a lot more about what that really means.

This was quite the episode for big reveals regarding the backstory of Jonathan Sims, and what makes him the man he is today.  So much of it jives perfectly with the man we’ve gotten to know.  He’s protective of others, but in an abstract way that speaks more to a belief that this is the way he ought to be than a sense of genuine connection with others.  And yet he believes enough in this abstract sense of right and wrong that he is willing to put himself in danger to protect innocents.  It was why he tried to deck Michael when he realized a woman had been snatched right under his nose.  Looking back, that experience must have been even more traumatic for him than it had seemed at the time, given how closely it resembled what happened when he was a child. There was someone else walking through a door, never to be seen again, while Jonathan Sims stood by helpless to stop it.  So many of the previous statements have new resonance now that we know how closely Sims’ own experience mirrored them.

His early isolation, as well as seeing someone snatched up by Mr Spider, goes a long way to explaining why he wouldn’t reach out to Martin or Tim throughout season 2, even when he knew he should.  It explains why he’s been so hesitant to foster anything but the most professional relationships with them, despite Martin’s best efforts.  He’s never learned how to connect with anyone on a deep and meaningful level, and he’s only now realizing how detrimental that can be.

More than that, there is a guilt in Sims, unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious, that this bully he can barely even remember died and thereby saved him.  Imagine the guilt that rears up when Leitner revealed that Gertrude had three assistants, and they all died.  Imagine his guilt when he realizes that Sasha is dead and he never even noticed because of the Not-Them.  Imagine his guilt when he realizes that Tim and Martin are unable to quit, and are therefore meant to die for him as well.  These people he could almost call his friends, and some great and unknown power will kill them just because that’s what the assistants of an Archivist do.  There may well be some unconscious belief that if he just pushes them away, if he keeps them as far from him as possible, and if he stays away from the Institute, he can save them.  I doubt that’s the way it works.  I think that something will draw Sims and Martin and Tim back together, but I think that Sims is always going to be operating with that low-level terror that more people, people he cares about this time, people with names and faces he will remember, are going to end up dying because of him again.  Sims has massive amounts of survivor’s guilt, I think, and he doesn’t even realize it.

Conclusions

Starting the season out with a deep-dive character study wasn’t what I expected, but I really liked it. We now have a good idea of what’s going on with Sims right now, and have a better understanding of his head-space. He’s staying with Georgie, the hostess of the ‘What the Ghost’ podcast, and someone Melanie once mentioned actually spoke pretty well of Sims.  It’s still not clear if Sims and Georgie were once romantically involved, but he’s now staying in her guest room and cat-sitting for her.  Their conversations are awkward, like two people who haven’t interacted in years and are suddenly together and realizing how little they have in common.  

I’m interested what they’ll do with Georgie.  I’m honestly hoping she’s not another outsider character, as we already have that in Basira Hussain.  It would be more interesting if she was already an insider, perhaps a member of the Open Eye or working with Trevor the Vampire Slayer or something.  She’s said she’ll believe anything.  What if that’s because she’s already seen so much and has way more contacts in that world than Sims?  What if she’s not just a random character, but the gate through which he’ll be thrown head-first into the wider world of the supernatural in TMA?  That would be a fun twist.

I’m also hoping that, now that we’ve established Sims, we get to see what’s happening at the Institute. What is Elias doing to clean up after season 2?  Was that Daisy on the teaser trailer?  Is she hunting Sims?  If she is, does she intend to deal with him the same way she deals with other supernatural threats?  Is Martin the Interim Head Archivist?  Is Tim still there?  What is their relationship like now?  There are so many questions.  We’ve gotten a surprising number of answers about Sims, so I’m hopeful we’ll start to get a few about our other favorite characters as well starting next week.