The Magnus Archives - MAG Retrospective - Commentary 2

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Jonny and Alex listen to clips from The Magnus Archives, selected by Rusty Quill Patreon supporters, and regale us with stories of production some more true than others. Content WarningsSpoilers for all of The Magnus ArchivesCharacter deathsPhysical violence (inc. self-injury & SFX)Explicit languageDiscussions of: blades, ghosts, human remains, death & murderMentions of: insects, traumaSFX: high pitched sounds, screaming, staticTranscripts:PDF - https://cutt.ly/zb0SfUpDOC - https://cutt.ly/5b0SyMZEdited this week by Nico Vettese and Jeffrey Nils GardnerProduced by Lowri Ann Davies Check out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop and https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill. You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribe Please rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear. Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] The Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. hello listener it's me alexander jay newell and with me today i have johnny johnny's here hooray and we are here to do another commentary episode this one is covering choices made by patrons so these are the bits that patrons really really really want us to give low quality kind of uh riffing around it's great it's going to be insights i'm going to be saying funny stories i promise

promise there'll be a funny story for every one of these clips. I don't know. Even if I have to make them up. Yeah, right. Fictional quips. Here we go. Any last words before we get started? God help us all. No pressure, Johnny, but you do also have to get all of these now encyclopedically correct.

Yeah, that's fair. Why are you still here? Why are you still here? You told me to be here for recording, Alex. I don't have another choice. I just am. Oh, it's ghost. Yeah, I know where we are. It's ghost.

I've typed up a few resignation letters, but I just couldn't bring myself to hand them in. I'm trapped here. Funny story about this is, weirdly, for quite a long section of season two, Alex actually was a ghost. So when we were recording the season one finale... You're not even waiting for the quiet bit.

You're just diving right in. I know this one. It's like, oh, it's funny. You know, misunderstandings. No, I just... Just the way you phrased that did you think i was a ghost no to be fair this is one of the first times in the series that i properly was just like you know what i can do a joke that's gonna be fun you can't cross talk over cross talk johnny you're

mad i'm tripling you're a renegade tripling the cross talk a ghost really shut up the thing i liked about that scene is there hasn't been much chance for true levity earlier because season one has to take itself very seriously it has a slightly tongue-in-cheek start where it's like i'm a bit officious so that you know who i am the archivist is a bit of a joke in a lot of the ways but the actual series the actual horror of it and the interactions have to be quite po-faced but that meant that it was only once you had a big you know stuff's hitting the uh fan finale that you could then have uh just that moment also i love comedy that comes out of characters like engaging with very like high nonsense like genre stuff in very real ways if you're like hang on ghosts are a thing there's a question of like okay well it

does kind of sound like you're saying the stuff that you say when you realize you're a ghost. Yeah. So I really enjoy those moments of like where genre awareness clashes. I'm really struggling with this because I haven't heard this episode in about four years and I can still hear it running just a little bit underneath and part of me is just there going,

why is Lottie in the podcast? Lottie is in the podcast, yes. What? Why is there all this? Oh, someone's... Oh, it's Tim. This is Tim. This is Lottie in the podcast? Lottie is in the podcast, yes. What? Why is there all this? Oh, it's Tim. This is Tim. This is Tim turning up. Oh, Tim without his trousers.

More importantly, happy Tim. I got too used to angry Tim towards the end. Do you remember when we made Mike hold his breath for ages to do this scene and he got really lightheaded? He gets really lightheaded really easily. Yeah. To be clear, we didn't force him to do this scene and he got really lightheaded he gets really lightheaded really easily yeah to be clear we didn't force him to do this we were like you know if you like do the sort of faux hyperventilating it gives you a certain giddy energy and he went a little bit further

i think that we intended that whole scene was that was a very fun one to record because as well you got to remember that at that point we'd never done proper group recordings yeah those are our first group recordings and there's elements of like discovering that mike's not allowed to speak at the same time as other performers mike's deep bass rumble was that the first time we had to just like strap a pillow to his chest yeah for a chunk of that i remember we were in Post Asbestos flat and we were all gathered around my table. And we were sat around the table in what was effectively a purely empty room I'd only really just moved into. And even if I shoved every single piece of furniture I owned in there, it was still basically just a big blank room, which is why it's deliberately built a little bit reverb-y. Oh, that last one that Alex just told, that was the fake anecdote.

The one about Alex being a ghost is real. Oh, was it? Okay, cool, great. We're coming into our next one then. All right, let's see. We're one for one, at least, on knowing what we're talking about, which is good. I am strapped in. I found this in the folder marked 991060. Oh no, I don't remember the numbers.

Where Gertrude's tape had indicated I would find the statement of Decahemp. Nice vocal waver. There was nothing else in there. But I think it tells me what I need to know. Oh, is this the revelation of the... This is the revelation of the Not Sasha. Not Sasha. Oh! It's tied to the table.

Oh god, yeah, the table. I found the tapes. I thought it was pronounced Calliope. This is the archivist's misjudgment. If I'd been a bit more thorough, if I... It's just a scratch, John. I'll be fine. Can we begin? Was there anything I could have done?

Could I have... Hello? I see you show yourself hello yeah yep here's a genuine fun fact that whole bit of i thought it was pronounced calliope is because we had a big old back and forth. Yeah, we had a big old... I wouldn't have called it an argument. Lottie, myself, Johnny. It's not a Calliope. It's a Calliope.

It's a Calliope. How can it be a Calliope? That's the worst thing ever. It's Calliope. I've always said Calliope. It's Calliope. And then Lottie was adamant it was Calliope. And it's like, it's Calliope.

Here's a fake fun fact. Alex plays the Calliope. Alex has the coordination of a toddler so i sincerely doubt that to be fair you did the sound editing on the calliope track so in a very real way uh no no well sort of so that's the sam sam the music man original oh is it a sam original so as a result i didn't actually generate that i made it sound worse he provided a really good track and i went i'm really sorry sam i'm gonna have to just bastardize this okay so you commissioned a calliope track which in a very real way is that not playing the calliope you know what you're correct the fact that i commissioned the magnus

archives in a lot of ways means it's entirely my achievement and we are all stood upon the shoulders of my giant hood. What we really need to bear in mind here when we think about the writing of the... Shut up, Alex. I can't remember what comes after this, though, to be honest. I should be listening. Oh, I think it's just the archivist being like,

I'm going to get vengeance. And coming up is the bit where he smashes up the table. Oh, yeah. And Michael's like, that was stupid. Oh, here's a question then, because I know people always clock this line. Is it surprisingly easy to buy an axe in central London? Yeah, just go to Robert Dias. It legitimately is, right? It's not just me.

You can get them from hardware shops, and you do get hardware shops in central London. It's just not something that you usually think to pick up, because there's not a lot of things what need chopping. It's one of those weirdnesses of UK law as well, where it's like, you can go into the shop and buy it, but you're kind of expected to teleport it to the destination. Oh yeah, because there are laws about what you can and can't carry around. Oh, God, yeah. I remember the fan reactions to really, really, John,

you think you can just take an axe to a table and solve the problem. I don't know if I'd have jumped to the exact same conclusion, but certainly... Oh, I would have straight away, yeah. It's very much like, OK, well, these things are tied to an artifact so destroying the artifact like because the thing is in your classic ghost story destroying the thing that is tethering a monster does destroy that like tethering a ghost does destroy the ghost i really really like though that it's the first case of it's john acting in a genre savvy way and then

being punished for it yeah and that's why i really really liked that bit that tickled me when we were first going over it because it was just yeah good let's punish people for daring to be genre savvy statement of alice tonner regarding the crimes and death of Calvin Benchley Oh it's Elias giving Daisy's statement to her I like that because it sounds so gentle and I'm the only one left who knows about

the scar on my back it doesn't really look like a Daisy, more like a starburst but it's what the doctor said when I got it so that's how I've always seen it It makes me feel strong to know that the soft nickname everyone calls me comes from a bloody wound This is, I think, Elias' first major life. Twisting the knife. I'm going to kill you someday. couldn't play with them because i was a girl but every day after getting home we'd go to the nearby park and play it was small just a scrap of grass and dirt but if you hop the fence to the south you could get into the cemetery and if you went the other way you got into an old building site

the fence on that side was broken and jagged but it collapsed enough that it was easy to climb over i remember being really happy with how do we do the superpower thing with Elias? Because the connection's quite similar, which is you have a problem in season five, which people never really address, which is... Do you have any idea how difficult it can be to have an omniscient protagonist? Yeah.

No one has gone, what's it difficult to have an omniscient protagonist? You haven't... It's so hard! Real difficult. Even then, we still had to rely on the crutch of like a couple of blind spots the time we spent working out the exact shape and limits of these blind spots because we had to have them because otherwise like you can't have any reveals it was the same for elias where we were doing it right back when going we have a problem which is if we

have a truly omniscient antagonist here it's impossible to win we had to yeah create those blind spots and so on and the distraction elements and blah blah blah but this one tied to that as well is we really wanted to have basically the evil superpower thing of that was more interesting than just i can read your thoughts because again if you have omniscience and can do complete mind reading what's the point and I really like the idea of weaponising memories against people, it's horrible

but I did like it, it came together well I'm very proud of how Elias ended up as a practical feature of the plot if that makes sense and a lot of it always came down to this thing of he can see realistically almost anything because there are pictures of eyes basically everywhere but he's still one

person who is at any given point going to be looking in one place in a direction and often out of his own eyes how retro yeah like classic i was gonna say out of his own eyes technically yes always they are his own eyes i was very careful when i said that it is odd once you look at the series as a whole to think of like the elements that are there where it's like his body is just still down there chilling yeah through all of this just just having a grand old time waiting it's odd yeah keeping his body down there was something like kind of new that's something that actually came quite late i think i'd originally just conceived of it as like a body hopping thing but then i was like no there needs

to be something in the panopticon that like is a vulnerability thank goodness we had the mechanism that the tunnel steered people away otherwise martin's first four years i went down the tunnels what do you find the end of the series mate it was just laid out yeah i found jürgen leitner gertrude robinson's body the panopticon you know the list goes on like i've basically solved it in a single journey it is three different series finales which revolve around the revelation of something in and that's not including the fact that he found gertrude robinson's like arch first failed thing yeah there's a version where martin just goes in the tunnel solves everything and leaves well i mean i guess like it does make sense in the fact

that like so much of it is about the institute and what is lurking in the institute's past which metaphorically is represented by the tunnels it It's like that bit in the Marvel films where they're like, oh look, all of the stones are in one place at one time. A lot of our plot was just chilling in the tunnels until it was needed. Hello? Miss Robinson,

I found Mr Vargas' statement that you asked for. Another little bit of Luke, but his time being lovely. I already had the original, but I didn't think you'd want it in Spanish. That laugh. Just that subtle... Unless you speak Spanish. I do not.

Thank you, Michael. Sure. Well, was there anything else that you needed? No, no, not at the moment. Thank you. Right. Well, if you need me, they're installing that climate control storage, that thing, over the weekend. So, you know, I'm just getting all that together. Yes, yes. I remember.

Right. Well, call me if you need anything Thank you Michael And I will What a nice scene between two Conscientious workers It's just a hard cold turn of And now I'm back into full blown mode Michael

Is played by Luke Boyes and I think I remember at the time because obviously we had michael the monster prior to michael the assistant so as a result we were working backwards from monster it was as i recall a lot harder to get luke to zone in on the not creepy when we explained the character to him, when he turned up to just stab the archivist, it was just like, boom, yep, okay, I can do this weird monster.

Then we had to take water and be like, no, this is... He thinks that this is a harmless old lady that he's working for and he's just being very gentle. There's a trick with Luke that he really keys into, which is providing a parallel example. I don't think I've ever mentioned this on audio before. The example that he was given to play towards was, I think it's called The Man with Thistle Down Hair from Strange and Norell.

I never actually read Doctor Strange and Mr Norell. Doctor Strange and Mr Norell, there was a BBC, I think it is, adaptation as well, and it had a very good portrayal of basically a fae trickster, effectively. And I honestly, I think at some point, said, have you seen this? Can you channel that energy? At which point Luke goes, oh, yeah. Okay, yeah, I got you covered. Great. Here you go. And then just clicked in.

And I remember for this one, when he was playing Michael, the assistant, he had at that point been aware of some of the stuff I'd done as Martin, and I went, could you just do Martin please? Could you just be Martin? Okay what have we got next? Right this way Open it. Everyone loves Michael

Open it and all this will be over It's Michael's demise. Oh, yeah! It's locked. Oh, yeah, it's locked. That was lovely. I loved that so much. Why is it locked?

It can't be. Well, you try it. Oh, here it comes. That's not... Oh. Oh, here it comes. That's not... Oh. Oh, no. Ah! Ah!

Ah! Oh, that's so loud. Yep. And here... is Helen! Hey, Imogen. Helen? Helen Richardson, but...

Michael... Michael isn't me. Oh, of course, and I forgot that right when Helen's first introduced, Helen's very cold and flat. Yeah. And yeah, that was the whole thing, wasn't it, where Helen slowly gets more and more affable and joyously trickstery but at the start she's so patted down yeah it's all so new and like unvarnished in a lot of ways yeah i agonized it was a good joke by the way there alex in case

you missed it no i appreciated it it was certainly certainly a portal to humour. And I understand. You're the worst. I'm just remembering how many times you got me to do the line, well, you try it, because I wasn't being sufficiently petulant. Oh, yeah, because that's the thing. There was a golden period with the Archivist where it was like, more petulant. More, more petulant. More, more. It needs to be ridiculous i genuinely spent i hesitate to think how many hours on just that scream and door combo alone oh yeah i can imagine like hours and

hours because again it's early enough that i didn't have certain procedures down pat and there was still wasn't huge amounts of help and things like that you know when you get a b in your bonnet and you know exactly how it needs to sound speaking of actually is it too late to redo it? just because I was listening to it right there no I am confident I am confident that I have spent enough time

that that's as good as it gets that is as good as it gets there are very few moments in this series where I am confident in what has been achieved that is one of them and i know because i lost that's such a sad thing i lost a lot of sleep on it francois de champe has refused our request for a follow-up interview it's beetle he did

forward us one item however this beetle man i can't read the french on this one but it appears to be a crudely printed wedding invitation Benoit Masson is the only name legible on it as most of the details are obscured by a wide variety of dried stains

what no this is straight romance Alex my problem is the I do the connection. Beetle to Metamorphosis, the Kafka story. So as a result, I always connected it in my head. The information I found from her laptop doesn't give a complete picture of her travels, but now I know when to look. And it appears that when she left Toulouse, she did not return to London.

Instead, it looks like she took several connecting flights eventually ending up in wellington international airport in new zealand i like this one it was so weird in the best way possible i really liked this one this is in the same arc as monster pig there's a point in season three where i really am enjoying trying to like see how far I can push weird in a way that like straddles the line between funny and horrifying and hopefully keeps it mostly into horrifying but still also definitely like quite funny because it is like can I take the idea of this man is in love with a beetle and make it kind of horrifying especially like in terms of how the corruption works about

checking what's the scene that comes after oh this is just after the archivist has returned from his fun skincare vacation his spa month you know martin missed the archivist the archivist missed martin i guess maybe this is like a point that sort of is starting starting to cement stuff that relationship and like properly establish it but moreover a man is in love with a beetle i mean was that an intentional parallel that you had i am in love with a beetle and and then Martin turns up. I did just think, actually, I was like, a man is in love with a beetle and his name is Martin. No, that was not an intentional parallel. This is one of those periods where the exact statement,

I think the statements actually got shuffled around a little bit between episodes, because it was one where there was a lot of plot going specific places there were certain statements that needed to be at certain points but yeah there were certainly i don't think they were initially written as the same episode but i could be wrong you went through that period where you started to divorce the statements a little bit in certain chunks from what was happening so that you could do that, I remember. Yeah, and there were some that needed to be in certain locations or matching certain plot beats, but there were others that were a bit more free-floating.

Sorry, it's just odd listening to you and me talk and then talking over you and me talking. Yeah, it is a bit disconcerting. It's pretty much a summary of my life at this point. I mean, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, not so much now. Not so much now. Oh!

Nice lighter. You're a spider freak, then. Oh, no, I never really thought of it. I'm John. I'm with the Magnus Institute. I'm the archivist. When did she die? About a year after you did.

Was it peaceful? No. Good. I don't think she would have wanted that. God, I can't imagine her dying in bed. So you're the new guy, then? Following in her footsteps? I mean, some of them.

They don't exactly lead where I thought they would. Yeah, she was like that. I'm trying to stop the unknowing. Good old John Gracie. She didn't manage it, then? Not before she... I need your help. Do you now?

She thought she'd found a way to stop it, I think. If anyone knows what that was... That was so much fun to record. I don't even know if I'd call it fun. It was just like, sometimes you'll get a recording and it just flows. Yeah, it was so easy. I recall just doing three takes. Boom, boom, boom. It was lovely. You both just walked in do this all right okay we'll do it two more times why in case it might break okay yeah

how have you been like it was it was just lovely straightforward really really nice recording john absolutely nailed the part i feel you know those things where it's like oh yeah no we got the casting really good on that and like you feel like kind of a payoff of that in the studio because you're like yes really thought that this person would absolutely nail the part and they did i love the weariness but not it's not true sadness it's not woe is me he's not cynical is jerry is the thing. Yeah. He still kind of believes in the possibility of goodness, even though he himself has seen pretty much only dreadful stuff for most of his life. Yeah, this is someone who's read about goodness and is... I'm sure it's out there somewhere.

Yeah. There's a sequence as well I loved. You were encountering Jerry out in a north american shack it was not the person anyone expected you to be meeting on your foreign sojourn it's a lovely episode for me retrospectively because it's one that i feel very like vindicated is not quite the right word but like i feel that exposition heavy law dumps are ridiculously difficult to not make super boring yeah and in retrospect one one one we nailed it i also really like the sort of the almost attempt at like ransom that j does, if you remember. Yeah. Where Jerry's like, maybe I won't tell you.

He's like, well, what have you got to lose? What do I have to gain? Ugh, just give me some lore. Yeah. It's taking the lore dump and wrapping it in a really actually interesting and fun new character dynamic. Yeah, I really liked that dynamic. It's one of the ones where, to be clear, there was just no version of the Magnus Archives liked that dynamic it's one of the ones where to be clear there was just no versions of magnus archives where that dynamic could be you know explored extensively

and still really work but it's one of the dynamics where if there could have been i really would have liked there to have been i mean it is the thing That dynamic only works so well because of the stuff that means that it could only ever happen in a single scene. I mean, could you imagine it? The archivist and Jerry, it's got such a Randall and Hopkirk deceased vibe. Yeah. Going around, solving crimes, one of you is a ghost. One of the reasons it works so well is because of Jerry's role within the wider world and the wider narrative. But that also very much puts a limit, I guess, on how much he can actually be there. Good scene, I think. Well, on that then, I hope this has been an enlightening experience for everyone.

Yes. Mostly that it's better to listen to it without a pair of people just nattering through the hallway so you can't hear what's going on. I think that the thing we did in this episode was good. I disagree. Discuss. I really enjoyed working with all of the actors, except for my mother. Right.

Okay, I am going to wrap this episode up here if you listen to this mother i did enjoy working with you right okay in that case then thanks everyone i think we'll be back next week with some different content but until then thanks everyone and uh look after this episode is distributed by rusty quill and licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike 4.0 international license for more information visit rustyquill.com tweet us at the rusty quill visit us on facebook or email us at mail at rustyquill.com thanks for listening. and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks, so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a classic whodunit, and sometimes you want to get wrapped

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