#love how jonny and jon look completely different in your style despite being played by horror man himself

[ncfan-1]

ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives: S1 EP022 (’Colony’), EP023 (’Schwartzwald’), & EP024 (’Strange Music’)

In which a lot of plot material is dropped on us.

No spoilers past Season 1, please!

EP 022: ‘Colony’

- So we’re back from where ‘Freefall’ left off, with Martin retelling his close encounter with Jane Prentiss. What happened with the container full of worms that he presumably brought into the Archives, I don’t know.

- Jonathan’s silence after Martin says he can vouch for his sanity is so awful it winds up being hilarious.

- Martin picked up on the same thing that I picked up on the first time I listened to ‘Arachnophobia’—namely that the description of the worms rings a bell.

- It says something about how sketchy the Archives has become to me even at this point that I didn’t bat an eye that Martin regarded breaking and entering an acceptable part of “due diligence.”

- “I get closer, and I see that it looks more like a worm of some sort, maybe an inch long, with a silver, segmented body that goes black at one end, almost like it’s been burned.” This is a description of the worm. It stood out to me, and I’ll explain why at the end of the section.

- I wonder—did the edges of Martin’s shadow move because worms were moving in it, or does proximity to the Flesh Hive (or a host of the Flesh Hive) by itself have that effect?

- Oh, Martin, Jonathan didn’t once think about it in terms of you having disappeared.

- Because I have a slightly dirty mind, I assume Jane Prentiss was naked under that coat. Obviously, the holes in her body and the general state of decay her body was in would have distracted from that. Those images from Planet Earth of different species of cordyceps growing out of different species of animal corpses is firmly impressed upon my mind.

- I wonder how much of Jane’s mind is even left at this point. Like, by the season finale, I can only assume that she’s dead and the Flesh Hive is running around with her corpse, but was she even properly alive anymore at this point? I honestly don’t know.

- If I’d been trapped in my home by Jane Prentiss and the worms for thirteen days, I would have been screwed. Like Martin, I keep upwards of a week’s worth of food on hand, but a lot of my stuff is frozen. Also, since we live out in the middle of nowhere, if we lose power, we also lose running water, and about the only thing I drink anymore is water.

- I imagine Martin doesn’t want to think about it (and who could blame him?), but I wonder if, while Jane and the worms were stalking Martin’s home, any of his neighbors tried to stop by. Or any of their pets. Does Martin have pets? (Did he have pets?)

- It’s a testament to how seriously Jon takes Jane Prentiss that he isn’t nasty to Martin at all after he’s done making his statement, that he volunteers to ask Elias to hire extra security, and goes so far as to offer Martin the use of a room in the Archives until the danger’s passed.

- Martin’s stunned stammering when Jon says all this is kinda heartbreaking.

- “Keep him. We have had our fun.” Y I K E S.

- Now, I talk about the worms—namely, the description of the worms, and why it stood out to me that these worms, the manifestation of an entity that hates the Magnus Institute, look the way they do.

Let me tell you about the silverfish. The silverfish is a small insect, ranging in size from half an inch to one inch long. It has a silver, segmented body that’s darker at the head, and it looks like this:

It doesn’t look exactly like the worms. It has legs and antennae; it’s not a worm at all. The funny thing about the silverfish, however, is that it’s the bane of many an archive in a humid climate, because among other things, one of its favorite things to eat is paper. I wonder if this was an intentional choice on Jonny Sims’s (the writer’s) part.

EP 023: ‘Schwartzwald’

- This is my favorite of the set I’m doing today, and it’s one of my favorites of Season 1. It’s just so lovely.

- So, was Jonah Magnus of German descent? Von Closen remarks upon his very strong opinions about the German confederation, and I get the impression that it is (or was, or possibly still is) much in use as a Germanic and a Scandinavian given name and surname.

- I listen to von Closen’s description of the Black Forest, and I wonder how it compares to the forests I know. I’d believe that the trees are taller, but the forests here are very dense, and the undergrowth can make them very difficult to navigate.

- I’d say finding a cemetery in the middle of the woods is incredibly creepy, but old, small family burial plots are so common in the South that it’s not out of the question that you’d stumble across one if you started walking across the backwoods in a really rural area. You can see a lot of them in farmland, far from the road at the tree line. My family’s old burial plot is in a cow pasture. One of the raised tombs is broken.

- Okay, I’ve read enough ghost stories to know that when a creepy old man tells you it’s dangerous to do the thing, that’s your signal to turn right back around and forget about doing the thing. From a more practical standpoint, even discounting supernatural elements, you shouldn’t do exploration of the kind von Closen is doing by yourself, because of the risk of being injured so far from civilization is a very real one, and it’s worse if you’re by yourself.

- And we have an intermission with Martin! And it turns out that Jonathan has been coming to the Archive well before seven in the morning for a while. Yeah, that’s not unhealthy at all.

- I would not be surprised if the books von Closen found in the mausoleum are of the same class of book as Jurgen Leitner’s stuff. Most of them were damaged past the capacity to read them, and the world is a better place for it. The fact that the one book he took away from the mausoleum is unaccounted for is… worrisome.

- A wall seemingly made of (probably evil) books molded together is a nice, evocative image.

- More eye imagery.

- The fact that the book von Closen found was probably in Arabic is kinda funny to me, because in Lovecraftian lore, the author of the Necronomicon was Arabic, and I think that’s the original language of the text.

- The text on the coin von Closen found, “Für de stille,” made the recording go staticky. It’s German for ‘For the silence’, if Google Translate can be trusted, and yeah, I know that’s a tall order.

- The date on the coin, 1279, is the year Ulrich II, Count of Württemberg, died. He was twenty-five.

- And now we get a story behind the creepy mausoleum. ‘Johann’s steps’ seems to carry on a long tradition of egregiously risky childhood games. And, indeed, what was it they were seen by?

- I can’t tell if Johann von Württemberg is supposed to be a historical figure or not.

- I love the detail about the old man being able to see despite having no eyes, and his head jerking up like a hunting dog’s responding to a signal. It so effectively signals that the only human thing about him is his appearance.

- The stinger is great—apparently this friend of Jonah Magnus’s nephew is the ancestor of another collector of the arcane, Mary Keay, and her son, Gerard Keay. Mary’s birth date struck me, though, the fact that she was born in 1924. Gerard was described as being in his late teens, so somewhere between seventeen and nineteen, in 2002 (‘Old Passages’)—I’d assume the reason Dominic Swain assumed him to be in his late thirties ten years later in ‘Page Turner’ was down to rough living. That means that Mary would have had to have been in her late fifties or even her early sixties when Gerard was born. It’s not impossible for a woman to have a child (and apparently her first) at that age, it’s just extremely rare.

EP 024: ‘Strange Music’

- I’m like Leanne; I’m not scared of clowns, but I don’t think they’re all that funny, either. Dolls can occasionally be creepy, but for the most part, they’re not—at least, not by themselves.

- Budel is a town in the Netherlands, it turns out.

- A loft is an… interesting place to keep something like a calliope organ. The fact that the organ and the steamer trunk full of mutilated dolls are the only things in the loft makes me think that Nikolai was hiding them there, like he couldn’t get rid of them but wanted to forget they were there.

- One does wonder how exactly the broken calliope organ played.

- The clown doll sounds like a Pierrot-style doll. I think the clown doll from Poltergeist was like that as well.

- The only way I have ever heard Calliope pronounced is “Cuh-LIE-oh-pee.” I’ve never heard it pronounced “Call-ee-OH-pee,” and I’ve certainly never heard it pronounced “Call-ee-ohp.” Who exactly pronounces it “Call-ee-ohp?”

- “Faster, faster” sounds vaguely demonic in origin. Just something about how frantically fast it is and how completely carried away Leanne gets while playing it, how lost in the music she gets. That and the fact that playing it immediately gets the clown doll’s attention.

- Wonder what Josh did that proved him to be “just another asshole.” From the context, it sounds like he cheated on Leanne or stole from her or something like that.

- I also wonder what it was that made the entity of the episode decide to target Josh and not Leanne. I really doubt it respects the fact that she’s the granddaughter of the person who owned the calliope organ.

- And some sinister delivery men (gee, I wonder who it could be, she says sarcastically) broke into Leanne’s house just to get at the organ and the trunk.

- And it turns out Leanne’s grandfather Nikolai Dennikin was an organist for a creepy circus called the Circus of the Other. Given that name, ‘Circus of the Other’, I expect that to come up again.

- And the stinger of this episode is that the sinister calliope organ has somehow ended up in the Archives’ artifact storage room. Which is a good stinger, I’ll admit.