The Magnus Archives - MAG Season 5 Q&A - Part 2

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Jonny & Alex plough on through the Season 5 mailbag in the 2nd of three Q&A episodesFeaturing: Jonathan Sims & Alexander J. NewallContent warnings:Spoilers for all of The Magnus Archives (esp. finale)Discussions of: canon-typical apocalypse, canon-typical trauma, mould & rot, deathMentions of: physical violence, thalassophobia, spiders & insects, foodThank you to all our Patrons for your continued supportIf you'd like to join them, visit www.patreon.com/rustyquill.Edited this week by Lowri Ann Davies & Alexander J. NewallProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop & 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/subscribePlease 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] 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.

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the second in the post-Magnus Q&As. I'm Alexander J Newell, director and contributor, and with me I have... It's me, Johnny, hello, I've had some caffeine, feeling punchy. Very different tone, very different tone from last one. Right, so for this one we have spared elizabeth the uh 50 hour process that these normally take but we're going to be doing a lot more i think a lot more story focused stuff things like that although i think we have a couple of orders of business off the top of this q a which will make life a little bit easier i think yes so first up a lot of the questions here are for

what might be termed extra canonical information. Like really specific, some of it as well. Yeah. And the obvious preface is that a lot of those, like, we're probably not going to answer because we don't have good answers for them. Because by its nature, Magnus is an expansive world that's intended to have a lot of dangling threads a lot of like scope for people to draw their own conclusions their own interpretations so a lot of these we're going to be like we don't really have an answer for that and for some of them we do have an answer but it's it's a joke it's a funny answer

like nothing we say here regarding story stuff has any actual effect on the text the text now exists it's there it's finished it's complete it's done you know and if we say something that goes against your interpretation of the text we're wrong yeah like we can't change the thing that exists that's not how this works. So yeah, a second point of order on this one is there's quite a lot of questions of please lay out Johnny every aspect of your career for the next 10 years that I might follow it and set calendar alerts in my diary. By the same token, there's quite a lot of like, hey, who are Rusty Quill currently in negotiations for? And it's not a thing we can do

so there might be a few questions that are perfectly reasonable and the answer will be sit tight because i can't answer that question so with that little bit of order of business off the top we can now get stuck in so i haven't read most of these these have been prepped prior so that i can give a fresh take but with that in mind i will start with this question from amsel oh and the last order of business as always is you have no idea how many questions there were you have no you have no concept so of how many questions there are as a result no we're not getting through them we're not getting through most we'll get through some on to our first question then this is from amsel in the post change world would you rather rule over a domain or be trapped in one i mean i mean

from a moral point of view be trapped in one but from a personal selfish point of view rule over one like i mean it's i mean you're gonna suffer either way but there's one bonus with ruling over that you get which is at least you can still get the satisfaction of a job well done you're suffering either way at least this way you know i don't know though because like it's efficient and it it works actually no i'm gonna i'm gonna game it and use my knowledge as the author that at some point it ends and say i'm going to be victim in this scenario because then at the end i'm not going to get just torn apart by angry well if we're going to go meta yeah there is an objectively correct answer regardless of morality which is yes one of them you don't immediately get chased down after the fact.

Okay, okay, on to our next question then, which is from basically everyone. What fear domain do you think you would be trapped in? Oh, this is such an obvious question, and I've given it exactly zero thought. See, I've given it some thought, and the issue is I find myself a little bit split. I think I would end up in two very specific ones, which is either a very generic vast one, because I do get certain thalassophobic tendencies in open water and things like that. I'm a very strong swimmer. I can do all that kind of thing, but it still freaks me out. But you're also deeply basic.

Yeah, exactly. The other option, which is way more specific, is it depends how cerebral a hell I get given, because I'm not claustrophobic at all, but certainly the buried where I wake up and there is 2,000 things to do, all of which are dense paperwork, and if I don't do them, people I know are going to suffer.

And if I stop, it's not going to get done and that forever but that's more of a that's less of a fear response than a a pure misery so i think mine's between those two probably i mean to a certain degree i think oliver bank's domain kind of is of all the ones i wrote is probably the closest to somewhere i might actually be just because like i am a bit of a hypochondriac like that you know a lot of those sort of things i'm like oh that's a slight pain in my arm ah time for the heart attack goodbye everyone so that there is an element of that one or some just really horrible corruption domain because i really hate like mold and rot and all that sort of stuff like it's just it's just nothing wrong with a good mold you can do a lot with a good mold also

the corruption is a power that you can kick so i'm okay i'm okay with the corruption don't bother me what do you mean it's a power you can kick oh no creepy mushroom kick it what you can't kick like if the mold is buried into your flesh kick it if you are rotting you can't just kick your own rot out yeah you can kick it okay the corruption is a power that can be kicked i have i have no time for it disagree okay this next question is from basically everyone it does lure a little bit in towards that like you know text is the text argument but you know i was ready for this to be asked which is fair enough knowing that the end of the show was intended to be ambiguous do either of us have any canon ideas in our head about what really happened to john and martin have we decided that no one including us should know not really i mean i i i don't like

there were various story discussions where they just died or where they like something specific and like detailed happened to them like you know that they were plucked from the world everything is yeah but as soon as we landed on that actually no it is this sort of ambiguous just end this this this kind of open thing it felt certainly to me it felt so right that like my mind was just like yep brilliant brilliant that's that that's it i don't know periodically i've been like oh yeah no they probably died or no you know what i think they ended up somewhere else or you know what i think some other thing happened to them that is weird and metaphysical but i don't actually have a defined interpretation for myself yeah i i'm kind of the same that i don't think there's actually like i

mean they've said they know that it's intended to be deliberate but to go further i think it it's deliberately like there is no canonical answer here but i think it's also worth separating out that question from of course i see potentials there. This isn't teasing anything, to be clear, or anything like that. All I'm getting at is, with an ending like that, I can see multiple avenues that you could extrapolate from there as a point. But just because it has a lot of potential avenues for exploration, people can go off and they can explore those as as they see fit in in you know fan works and headcanons but ultimately the canonical answer is there's not an answer like that's not an accident also for me like i love a tragedy and for me a tragedy always builds

up to that like single like point of catharsis that, in this case, Martin's stabbing John, and there's that massive climax. And then after that, I don't really have a strong... I don't care as much, I guess. I'm like, no, that's what happens after that point. It's not this story. It's not this story. Next question again from Basically Everyone.

Would either of you be willing to explain your thoughts on the ending, which I think we've already sort of been doing a little bit. I think it's worth mentioning as well that I think it needed to be both, to be clear. We did examine like, is it this or is it that? I actually don't think it functions as an ending if it's categorically one or the other at the point that you reach. It has to be both. Yeah. if it's categorically one or the other at the at the point that you reach it has to be both yeah no i i think it's an interesting one because the ending has been both a fixed point and incredibly mutable throughout a lot of the series like it was quite early in season one when we were

discussing the overall shape of the show it came down to this thing of like oh no i want to end the world we want to have this like weirdmageddon and it's like well this is a kind of a cosmic horror tragedy so you've got the problems that like well you can't have a cosmic horror if the good guys canonically win but also if you're going to be following characters for 200 episodes... You can't just casually chuck them under the bus. Yeah, you can't just have it like, you know, with a horror movie, like two hours. Oh, no, that's a really bleak ending for these characters that we've spent two hours with. Fine. But you can't have just like a completely bleak ending for characters you have spent,

what, 80 hours with. And then if you look at real time years you know half a decade you've been chilling out with exactly so the the sort of the fix there is like oh okay so by the end they're not necessarily heroes like they're not necessarily like the good guys in that sort of sense they are changed and i mean they're always very flawed characters because we like to write flawed characters but they have been changed and kind of warped by this world and what they've had to do to survive and push through and so there was the the idea of john making that decision to take over from elias uh from jonah at the end was always there and then

him sort of essentially dying to release the fears into the multiverse was always core to what that ending was but the exact mechanics of that changed quite a lot in our first iteration actually the 197 reveal of the web spreading out was actually going to be an episode 200 revelation yeah it was like the final twist but as we got closer it became more and more apparent that a as a final twist it like it it worked a lot better if it was revealed and establishing the stakes because so much of this of the series was about choice it felt cheap to have the archivist like tricked into doing it or like just revealed that it had all been a manipulation that it had to have like and there could be web manipulation stuff in that final choice but it still had to be

an actual decision that they understood the stakes of to give a really really hot take i firmly believe that every single story the correct ending for a story is a high stakes personal choice you have then like you know you wrap up after that fact but i can't think of any story that that is not objectively just the right answer for i mean it's it's agency is yeah is at the core of it so yeah the the endings are an interesting one because like that image of like john taking over at the heart of the institute this was i think before i think when we first came up with that it was before we'd settled on the panopticon largely because i hadn't done the historical research to discover about millbank prison that's so long ago yeah oh yeah the idea of the archivist taking over was there right from the start and then a lot of

stuff sort of changed and moved around and i'm i'm really i'm really happy actually with with where we ended up i think i think we landed in a pretty good place with it i'd certainly say that the archivist ended up more sympathetic towards the end. I think originally we were talking about a much more gradual descent into an inevitable decision. And actually what it ended up being is a lot more like someone is struggling to make it, struggling to make it along, struggling to make it along, and is driven to the point where they believe this is the right call. But that's not quite the same

so i think that weirdly enough even at the end there's an element of sympathy for the archivist that was not oh absolutely original conception i don't think we were talking initially about it being like kind of a five series slow descent into being the person that would make that decision and the thing that actually changed about that was the relationship with martin yeah which was something that we'd like kind of discussed and maybe had in our mind during some of the early seasons but at the time i don't think we realized how much of an emotional through line an emotional core of the show it was going to be i think the the ending episode itself as well it was a weird one to write because it felt quite quick in a lot of ways.

Yeah. But every time I tried to extend any of the scenes, the momentum of it just disappeared. You know? See, that was the thing is from my perspective, structurally speaking, there's sort of a scene missing. Yeah. Which is everyone else trying to blow up the base like oh no we're struggling oh no ah from your tv beats it needs the oh we're gonna do it we're

gonna do it oh no it's going wrong and then we cut yeah no i i actually wrote a couple of drafts of a scene like that but it didn't work because like there was nothing in that scene that you didn't get from like the epilogue yeah and like there was no revelation that scene that you didn't get from the epilogue. Yeah. There was no revelation for that scene. It wasn't actually as tense as all that. And more importantly, it took this episode that was essentially a single shot. Yeah. The final episode is one long scene. And breaking it up to put in that scene underneath the Institute,

it didn't add anything. And it really like killed the pace and i kept trying to i kept trying to extend the conversation between john and martin and it just never landed like it just felt i get it deflating yeah it's a weird one teleported back in time and told myself that we weren't really doing that scene i like younger me would tell me well you're doing it wrong that's that's incorrect yeah and it just i don't think it would have ever worked like that ever but i'm shocked because that's structurally a bit off yeah it like it felt weird and i think i think in some ways it does feel like a little bit abrupt in terms of in terms of that last episode but i'm happy with it

speaking of the intensity of the relationships there for many people given your feelings about kissing noises what made you change your mind about including one in the finale that's an easy question it's a finale mate yeah you get one you don't get to have one every episode which people would have pushed for and also there's a difference between two characters in an empty void having a snog and what you got. Yeah, like... You get one. You get one. Also, fundamentally, it was one of those things where I wrote it in

and I was like, oh, Alex has said no kissing, might get pushed back on this. And I was like, no, this is the right place for it. Yeah, it's fine. It's like a good swear. If you'd never sworn through the entire series, it'd be a good point for a swear. Yeah, well, it's also one of like a good swear if you'd never sworn through the entire series be a good point for a swear yeah well it's also it's one of those things where i think when people listen to like the old q and a's i think they often take what we say as in context of like the whole thing like

all five seasons as opposed to what our thoughts and feelings were at that point yeah you know there's all sorts of stuff that like i say in earlier q and a's that later no it's not it's not the case and it's like broadly speaking if i say something in earlier q and a i'll try to abide by it but at the same time the world and me have changed since that q and a and you know that's often reflected in the writing i'd say i stand by everything before where it's like you can't have too much in a show because it's it's distracting but that's not what's on the cards there it's fine it's just you can't do it all the time if i gave any ground we'd have ended up with non-stop snogging so uh it had to be this way i am afraid yeah snogs galore title of the magnus archives 2

semicolon snogs galore okay at asher ketchum asks so i know it might be one of those up to listener to interpret things but does the rest of the world remember their time in the nightmare scape world short answer is yes yeah so that's interesting i think we're pretty clear at like simon fairchild's fate is definitely intended to imply that yes uh the exact degree of that is not something that we've dived into largely because it's one of those things it's too interesting a question to go too far into, because I'd end up... Building a new version of the Magnus world? Yeah, you can't just dive into that question a little bit.

If you go too deep, you're like, oh no, this is fascinating. Like, what does this world actually look like? So whether it's like they have vague memories, but it's like it was a nightmare, or whether they have like deep and intricate exact memories of everything that happened what the actual time frame is like has the world like the physical world returned exactly as it was or is there a lot of reason you couldn't have stuff like collective memory effects the list goes on so those sorts of details i have no particular specific thoughts on but broadly speaking yes the world remembers and is aware of what has happened that was certainly the intent behind the fairchild nod at the end

and like a lot of that is just because i feel like the standard move would be to have everyone forget and to have like the world continue never knowing what had happened but it's so much more interesting to me to be like no what's what what is what is a world that has suffered through six months of like incredible supernatural trauma like what is that world and it's not often that you get a sort of post post apocalypse or like a a genesis story whatever you want to call it where everything's still there you know it isn't like oh and now we live in the ruins of the old world the old world's basically fine it's just that we all remember it not being that's a different it's just consideration it's one of those ones where like

weirdly i think post magnus archives is a much more compelling world than the magnus archives no right okay i'm really glad this question's got asked by apparently loads of people which is really pleasing me hey johnny what's up was the original plan to actually have annabelle do the whole web martin and filling martin with spies and stuff as described in 196 so So yeah, like I said earlier, we went through a huge number of variants of the ending and different sort of states of play. Years ago, mind.

And yeah, one of them was like having Martin basically filled with spiders and turned into a spider avatar. And like it would be basically i john and spider martin like facing off in the final episode and that would be like the tragic confrontation well there was a there was a version where and again this is this was abandoned long long time ago there was a version we were looking at where maybe the archivist betrayal was a little bit more focused around like believing martin had done something awful that he had yeah like that after martin having stood by him by the whole time

and things like that but essentially it's it was fascinating looking at the the fandom and like the web martin believers uh because what they were doing was correctly picking up on hints dropped in the early seasons that were later like not exactly abandoned but it was much more like well no he does have like aspects of the web to him but he is more over the lonely and that came about very very organically really because because throughout season three and going into season four we had had this conversation. We were like, no, actually, he's like... It can't be. It cannot be.

It must be the boy around. And a lot of it also is one of the interesting things about writing something live, effectively, is that where you do and don't have to listen to how something is being received. have to listen to how something is being received because it became very apparent that martin as web if we went that direction wouldn't land like we wanted it to you know it would give the wrong message we could say as much as we wonder well actually martin is quite like kind of petty a bit manipulative but the the fact is that his character is not, broadly speaking, received in that way. If we went a Web Martin route, it would not come across as a natural culmination of his character. It would come across as like, oh no, he's been lying the whole time, or he's actually evil.

And once we realised that that was what the takeaway would be if we went that route, it became apparent that we had to re-evaluate and be like well okay so what actually is like who actually is Martin within this series at this point and we took a long look and we were like actually he's he's incredibly lonely like this is this is where so much of it is coming from is a place of is a place of isolation and loneliness rather than like manipulation so yeah it's an interesting one so yeah it was i really enjoyed writing it because it was able to like look at one of the like dozens of ending drafts and be like actually you know what that one was quite fun what made me laugh so much was i didn't know you'd done that before i saw that script yeah so i read that

script and went you as you just wrote out what it could have been like one of the potential avenues we explored just explicitly it works and it's great but i was absolutely blind i quite enjoy like it's one of those things that, like, it gives me a certain metatextual joy, you know? Yeah, right? Like the fact that my mum and dad play Gertrude and Leitner, which has a metatextual, like, just a fun metatextual element, given those characters' relationship to the archivist. In the similar way similar way annabelle having like an abandoned plan that was

one of the old scripting plans it it it delighted me it feels right yeah that actually leads on to a follow-on that i'm going to slightly rephrase because we've covered quite a lot of it but it's from again basically everyone you've said the original concept for the finale changed. Could you talk about original versus finished? But the key takeaway here is you once spoke of a chocolate tort of tragedy versus a grim souffle. What's the difference between these two?

The chocolate tort of tragedy, specifically, was an idea I had that was completely abandoned about the archivist. This was in a version where it seemed like martin had died a few episodes previous and was going to come back as uh i think this was one of the spider avatar versions i forget i think it was one of the it was late spider avatar version because it was a way we were exploring to see if we could cheat the archivist when we realized it couldn't be a gradual descent it needed to be a bit more of a switch it was a version where the archivist

was very much like alone like he had taken on the power like he had killed jonah elias at the end of i think penultimate episode and so the the final episode is is like it is the sort of the lonely the lonely king before martin comes up and i had an idea of like him having like a knowledge power which would allow him basically it's basically ghosts it's basically ghosts of all the other characters from the throughout the seasons like kind of berating him because he now has the knowledge powers to know what they would say were they able to see him now it was conceptually it was conceptually quite nice i don't think it would have actually worked i think it would have come across as cheesy in the end yeah i agree i thought i i thought like because we we pulled away from it because we were like it's conceptually nice but it feels like it's like ghosts yelling at you it feels a

bit tv it feels a bit trite to be to be fair actually i think we actually pulled away from it near the end of season three when we kind of did that already with gertrude and lightner yeah yeah we just like took that idea and stole it and used it elsewhere so there was although i don't know if that actually matches up time-wise with the chocolate torta tragic tweet but i forget but yeah that was the idea of like the layers of like oh he's alone but he's still being berated by like his his friends and he's lost them and then we definitely co-opted a chunk of it for start of season five as well don't forget yeah oh yeah with the we we realized that we could cheat have all of the nice fluffy stuff at the start and then use it as a massive guilt stick to hit the archivist with extra hard to launch us

into the start of the season so we definitely co-opted chunks of it but anyway that was that was specifically what i was talking about when i was referring to layers it was again one of the variant endings and it's it's like i say they all have the same core to them but yeah the exact manifestation of them changed and you know altered and all this sort of stuff i suppose the real follow-on question though there johnny is that if it's a grim souffle is it a souffle that came out and held up or is it one that kind of just exploded alex the souffle exploded and covered you with gristle gristle oh excellent grisly souffle god you're welcome everyone on to the next question then so this next question catches me a little bit by surprise from apparently a bunch of people in the season four q a johnny said the relationship between john and martin would not be explicit but that's not the case in season five what did you change your mind about to make that become a

relationship okay so i've seen this about a bit i i think i probably communicated myself quite poorly in the season four q a okay because what i said was that if you interpreted martin and john's dynamic at the end of season four as platonic that that was like that was valid that was fine which oh like it's a it's a it's a valid reading it's a hypothetically coherent reading and the thing is this is not a canonical or intentional like this is me stating almost a philosophical position because my my attitude is that there is the text i've made text, but then the text is out there. It is dead. It is extant. Then there is the reader or the listener, the audience, and the story is kind of what happens when the two meet. And if a listener's interaction with the text leads them to a specific reading,

I do not have the power or the authority or the right to say, no, that's wrong. You know, it's the sort of death of the author thing. And it's not exactly that I'm pushing off my own responsibility. In fact, in many ways, I'm saying that, like, well, no, if it is possible for this to be a common reading, and I didn't want that to be a common reading, I've failed, I've made a mistake, I've clearly put something in the text that I didn't really want to be there, or I haven't put something that I did want to be there, but that's on me, I can't then go turn around and say, these people are wrong. And so, like, if there were that many, and there were quite a lot of people who did read the season four finale as a platonic thing, I don't have the right to say, no, you're wrong.

I can say, well, no, I intended it to be romantic, but I can't actually say you have to read it that way. And a lot of people have said, oh, well, clearly, massively was like, no, screw all of you in season five. It's like, no, that's how season five was always going to be. You know, like, it potentially is a valid reading as of the end of season four. If you can have that reading sustained through season five, I mean, good luck to you. But it was always going to be a pretty explicitly romantic relationship throughout season five yeah it's interesting i think the question kind of implies a pivot that doesn't exist yeah i think i didn't quite expect how prominent the relationship was going to be in

a lot of season five largely because i mean largely because there wasn't a pandemic at that point uh which meant that there was a lot of other voices yeah like initially as we've mentioned before season five was going to have a lot more like enduring ensemble elements it was still going to be that central odyssey but as soon as production was like well no like 70 80% of these scenes are going to have to be specifically Johnny and Alex John and Martin it was like well this relationship which was always going to be the emotional through line

the emotional core of this season now has to be kind of the actual forefront of it as well next one's a much broader question again from a bunch of people and again makes sense do you have an overall favourite episode from the series not really changes i have some favorites but i've never had a favorite i've never said before i've always had a soft spot for lost john's cave because

because it's the first time that scope creep happened in the entire series where there was a there was a version of the episode and then i went you know what johnny nod to some original footage that you found and you're like but you've explicitly said that that can't happen because it'll be too difficult i was like yeah but it'll be good i'll figure it out it'd be fine it is the first case where i went you know screw common sense i'll figure it out it's kind of the only one as well that wasn't that wasn't an effect we used again no no no no and it was just it was just a screw it let's have a little bit just one of those season one things where we're still like finding our feet like experimenting with the form yeah and not you know like well

this is a fundamental transformation that we're going to do later or this is a big finale and so we're going to massively switch everything up just being like you know what let's try this see how it works yeah i've already had stuff like that always liked piper just because of the writing i mean i so we're going to massively switch everything up, just being like, you know what? Let's try this. See how it works. Yeah, I've already had stuff like that. Always liked Piper just because of the writing. I mean, I always liked... Like, the Piper was one that's, like, been in my head for, like, years and years before Magnus.

Piper is the point I thought we had something special. And I don't mean that in a cruel way. It's just that Piper was the time I heard it and went, oh, it is quite good, isn't it? Because I put extra work into the... At the time, I was still learning all was the time i heard it and went oh it's quite good in it because i put i put extra to work into the at the time i was still learning all of the like music and stuff just to help it pop because i really liked that then moving through it's the ones honestly a lot of them are the ones you'd expect mr spider i quite liked the like plague village season five i think i have a soft i I think most of my favourites are driven more though by the monologues

than by the scenic stuff which might surprise people I really really liked the execution of the monologue of 200 I think Elizabeth's sort of primordial soup through to through all of the different soundscapes I really really liked that

I think the monologue on its own is it does its job but it needed that extra stuff on top in a way that some of the others some of the other models just stand on their own you could just read it as a text and it just goes off in your head anyway whereas 200 i think is one of the best ones where those two elements mesh i'm really happy with 200 sort of tag on to that with what were your favorite parts about writing or performing in the show oh i like to do a scream i hate doing screams i hate hate the only thing if alex had his way we would just do a pinter play of magnus where no one does anything and everyone just talks at one another i hate combat and screaming god also you know what i really liked recording with like some of my friends you know

breacon and hope that's always been fun to perform with because it never has been anything other than chaos because you johnny specifically the second that you are paired with that bunch it is just a concoction for pure ludicrous bombastic nonsense and the content was always good at the other end but it was the fact it'd be two hours of you're right breaking i'm all right hope you like polos i bloody love polos and then you'd get in there as them as well so i've got all of you with bad cockney accents going the thing about a polo is i really like the holes in the middle oh you see interestingly because i disagree because i think that that means there's not enough polo so yeah i think that's probably my favorite bit in

retrospect at the time drove me a little bit up the wall but looking back those are certainly some of my fondest memories i also really enjoyed writing comedy into magnus yeah like i loved it whenever anyone was like saying that oh magnus is a comedy or like oh this is this is funny in a way that was like and i don't think they realize because it's like i loved the ghost line in season one that was probably the best instance of that because it was done a little bit on the fly because we were we were kind of editing in real time a little bit to really get it to pop and i that was a joy that was really fun to just triple down on just the stupidest take possible this next one i'm not surprised he's being asked this one's from ace i've seen a lot of people pointing out parallels between the magnus archives and lord of the rings were any of those parallels intentional

johnny uh don't think so i mean like i like lord of the rings oh they were from me oh were they yeah season five is just it's just the lord of the rings all over i'll be honest uh as a pretentious knob i was thinking of season five a lot more as like the classical odyssey well in fairness structurally we did actually examine a few things because we were like is because i remember having an actual sit-down discussion going is this more like an odyssey is this more like an inferno you know what's what's the kind of story model for i vaguely have a memory of this and you were like is this like an odyssey and i was like yes and then you're like is this like an inferno and i was like yes and you're like is

this like lord of the rings and i was like yes yeah it wasn't a helpful discussion to be clear because i was asking from a structural standpoint you went it's all of them but the best bits personally genuinely at my end i just latched lord of the rings style and it's not literally meant to be a rip-off it's just there were so many parallels going in the whole two characters the second that we knew that helen was going to be popping around as a unhelpful third wheel to just so a little bit of chaos but also be vaguely kind of sympathetic they're not like a lot of parallels happened on their own but i did see them i think the archivist is a much more active figure than frodo i 100 agree on that because certainly i mean i think

i think it's slightly different in the books but certainly in the films which is what i've engaged with most recently i did read the books about a long time ago now like frodo's very like active and full of agency in the first in the first one but in the second and third, he's much more this sort of slow missile heading towards Mount Doom, while Sam is there, like, looking after him and guiding him and, like, trying to talk him through. Yeah. Whereas in season five, John is much more, like, he's much more active, you know? I think part of it as well is, for Lord of the rings uh frodo's denied any kind of meaningful agency at the most important point the whole point is like bear with me because the like certainly

the way it's written and so on is that this is entire thing about something eating away at his self-agency to the point at the end that is not him choosing anything. That is him being conquered by the ring. So as a result, that's not actually a choice. It's not. It might feel a little bit like a choice, but it's not. Yeah, it's a defeat rather than a choice. Exactly. And it's still potent, still hurts to watch and to read,

but it's not a choice. And that is very different. And once you start factoring in the other stuff of like you know tolkien's meant to be it's kind of dealing with these these like post-war considerations and like what it feels like to be swept up in events and so on i think that aesthetically and certain structural elements are yeah very very reminiscent and that's not something that i was trying to fight against when like editing and helping you out but I think they're quite different beasts on the actual like bones I don't think that they are particularly compatible they're dealing with very different themes yeah Lord of the Rings to me is very much about how

you stand against and like an overwhelming tide of darkness essentially whereas Magnus Archives is much more about well what are your moral responsibilities when... When you're in control of an unstoppable tide of darkness. You find that you are part of this darkness, and it's not a tide of darkness sweeping over the world. It is a calcified darkness that is part of the world. One that we sort of touched on a little bit, so we might have to skim past quite quickly which is which characters or events from earlier seasons do you wish you could have brought back for later episodes or explored their stories further oh it's a tricky one there's i think the two that always linger in my mind as not exactly regrets but things if i was reworking magnus from

the start like i might have gone a different way with adelaide decker and agnes montague yeah i agree on both adelaide decker i think i only realized how fascinating a character he was basically when we were retrospectively killing him off like we like he's uniquely grounded he's uniquely grounded he is easily the closest thing that the world has to an actual hero yeah as in someone who is legitimately just trying to do the right thing not from like some weird utilitarian like i must save the world or narcissistic angle yeah but from this point of view of like what you generally would consider like a hero to do and i think that is something that i would have been very interested to dive more into if i'd clocked that angle earlier in his writing it had been

fascinating to see what what the archivist and martin became meeting a decker who had sort of survived and was still fighting the good fight that would have been an interesting conversation yeah and like i regret like i think i legitimately do regret that we didn't fight harder to get him voiced because like it was one of those things where it turned out it probably wasn't going to be possible so like we shifted our focus elsewhere and i'm like i think there's other stuff that would have been worth sacrificing to get like a properly voiced decor i think you'd have ended up losing salator to gain deco or something similar and then the trade-off starts to be a

real problem and agnes is agnes is a tricky one because i was fascinated with this idea of this chosen one messianic figure that you never hear from directly that is entirely created through the effects and through the perceptions of others everyone who surrounds her you get all these sort of kind of conflicting ideas like from jude or the coffee shop guy or gertrude or arthur nolan and all these like all these figures to whom she was so important and you never get an actual definite like this is who she was and that was an idea that that fascinated me this this figure that's only built up through the perceptions of others i think what i underestimated and like and i kind of stand by that conceptually i think i underestimated how much not actually hearing from her would leave that feeling a little bit incomplete a bit unsatisfying sidelined or something. And I think that's why a lot of fans right to the end

were kind of expecting Agnes to come back in a more significant way because that storyline didn't necessarily have that emotional closure. Yeah. So I don't know what else I would do with Agnes were I to revisit it, but while I stand by what we were doing with Agnes, I think there is more that we could have gone into. I think I have one minor regret on the event side, which is there's a trope that I love,

which we never did in Magnus, I don't think, which is formally re-examining something that we have already seen and already dealt with from the perspective of a different person, thereby recontextualising that entire event. Oh yeah, we never did that, did we? No, we didn't. I don't think we did. Because it's like, this wouldn't be the best case of it,

but like the unknowing from the perspective of someone else where it turns out it wasn't nearly what you thought went on. There's lots of extra layers. Yeah, we do. We sort of do that a little bit with Rosie, but there's no proper recontextualisation there. That's the extra little source that I think is missing it's giving that it's giving that like view from the gallery like alternate perspective on something but that perspective is naturally transformative

of the event again the opportunity never came up and you don't want to force it because if you do it's very very trite yeah i would always secretly hope that we will get the chance but at no point in the entire series do i really feel like it presented itself as an option so you just kind of got to surf the wave that you're on rather than wish you had something else but again given the choice between an ending that lands and getting that i know what i'd pick so it's all good pushing back on that 160 but is that not what 160 is see here's the thing the thing. Here's the thing. For 160 and basically anything that ties to the Hilltop Road stuff, I think it touches on it but doesn't truly recontextualise it.

It isn't an inversion in the formal sense. It is an elaboration. Okay, fair. Because 160 takes a lot of stuff that seems like it is accidental or seems like it is the action of one party and reveals it to actually have been jonah magnus actually have been elias it's not quite because what i'm interested in is like that retelling trope where you are literally re-experiencing the event from a different perspective and it is a different event by virtue of that relensing

doesn't quite come off i think 160 is as close as you get in the series i don't think it's necessarily worse off for it that's a personal want it's just something you would have liked to do yeah yeah yeah so good name uh almost hopeful cheesecake asks if you yourself worked in the archives do you think you would have made it to season five uh yeah probably i'd end up full-blown avatar i'm pretty good at keeping my head down in a job i hate nah nah i'm not i'd burn very bright and very fast and i would go out and immediately become the thing that we were fighting against it is really easy to push my buttons in specific ways yeah nah i'd love to say i would this isn't even like a oh in a survival situation in this specific situation someone would immediately turn up and start whispering in my ear all the right things to just go i have become evil and i yeah not a chance i

mean i spent nine years in the exact same position at a rubbish office job, keeping my head down because I was busy doing like writing and other stuff. And I think I could probably do the same. On the other hand, yeah, the proof's in the pudding. Whereas I, on the other hand, went very wrong very quickly and it didn't do well for me. So, yeah, I think we've already kind of tried this. And I support you in saying you. Oh, yeah, because we actually've already kind of tried this. And I support you in saying you'd... Oh yeah, because we actually, we started from the exact same,

we both started working the same night shift at the same place. And we did it in very different ways. I made a lot of noise when I was there as well. Yeah, it's fine. I support you in saying you'd survive to season five though. I actually genuinely do think you would. Because you just managed to not be around when stuff hit the fan every time and that's the thing the key to getting through a job you hate is learning when to pull a sickie bang on absolutely yes and you know what i think i'm skilled enough at pulling tactical cities

to make it through to season five i agree i 100 agree that that is yeah i bang on okay okay i'm gonna move on to the next one because i think you got a definitive answer there from a bunch of people who's the character that you had the most fun writing oh i don't know though a lot of them like i love any characters that get to snipe at each other because you know like characters being a bit mean to each other it's nice it's fun it's more fun to write than characters being nice i think for me legitimately martin because he has enough arcs to sort of keep me interested where there's a few versions of that character as the series progresses so he always felt fresh to me but if it was characters that are a giggle to write which isn't quite the same thing you're looking at stuff like your helens your uh nicola orson ofs and things like that i think nick like nicola was great

because i know jess so well and i know exactly how jess delivers you really caught the voice bang on for that as well so it was it was very much just like and then jess will say this and then i remember reading those for the first time going this is very specific and odd and it's going to be quite hard to direct these lines aren't going to work. And I was like, just wait, just get Jess in the studio. One of the few times you made me take a leap of faith. You were absolutely right. Absolutely right.

But coming out that cold, I was like, this is really unnecessarily difficult to direct. Why are you doing it this way? I get it now, though, of course. And I think Melanie and Archivist sniping at each other has always been a bit of a joy just because like writing two such similar characters just butting heads like very satisfying okay in that case then we're on our last two questions for this one i think okay okay uh first one how does it feel to have a dedicated wiki, a big one as well, dedicated to something that you've made?

Really useful. That has been an absolute lifesaver. Yeah, because you know what I'm really bad at? I tried to make season one, season two, I tried to make my own timelines. I tried to keep all the details straight i made my own spreadsheets i'm bad at it and you know who's great at it the people making the wiki so yeah absolute lifesaver i tell you now the editors and myself use that a lot like a lot because you sat there going oh cool we're making a reference to something four years ago we'll

check our records but our records are more about making the thing they're not conceptual like a record of esoteric references and stuff so as a result i think there's been one or two times where it's genuinely saved like production where we have not had the answer and then done a wiki dive which pointed us in the right direction to then get the proper answer and that was a big deal a lot of it for me was like names and dates and like just making sure that timeline was at least roughly sensical weirdly i don't have much of an emotional response to it like it feels like part of the wider thing of like oh this this thing that i've made has become very real in a way that i didn't necessarily expect it to and like the wiki feels like a part of that rather than a separate thing i have a separate emotional reaction to yeah yeah that's fair in

that case then i am going to i'm kind of picking from a selection here what's a good last one i like this one from creeper because even if there weren't i know that there were a few nascent ideas were there any ideas for fear names slash entities that were scrapped so it's basically you know that final pantheon that exist what were the ones that didn't make the cut what were the ones that had options and then never really came together properly i need to find i found ages back trawling through some files i found like a version one like really diagram i'd done oh let's see if i can find it because this predates me on the project. You already had the fears kicking around. No, actually, not quite.

I think I have the fears down by episode five, I want to say. You already had a bunch of them, though. Yeah. I remember discussing final touches, but you had very much been like, I have most of these already kind of laid out. I know that there was a lot of debate as to whether to split out war yeah like a lot of it was to do with how to split things like the the corruption being both insects and disease was something that was like i think that bit bugged you more than me pun intended yeah i mean

it didn't bug me but it was a it was a more of a decision i was certainly in the early days pushing for a technologically focused one and i think that the extinction scratched that itch for me towards the end but yeah i was very much of an opinion of technology being one of them although a lot of it got addressed by like you know the other ring via the stranger or you know that the loss of self yeah it was so it kind of got addressed elsewhere it was one of those things that like there were a lot of ideas that ended up being like oh no that is a thing people are scared of rather than that is a fear do you know what i mean yeah because a fear a fear is like a well i mean let's not dive too far into

the color thing again but you're looking at you you know your primary colors you're at like a core a core memory you're a component piece like it's an element in the formal scientific sense where you can't really reduce it any further because it stops being the thing and i think that was the thing i struggled with initially is a lot of the things i was suggesting were perfectly valid as a that is something people are scared of fearful theme yeah but that's not the same as an element and i think i was a little slow to get with the program in what you were getting out there if i'm honest get with the program alex well the problem is i kept going on about programming as a fear but it just wasn't landing johnny there was one as well that i toyed

around with which got subsumed beneath the different elements in a similar way which was like the fear of humanity itself it's not just oh lots of people oh well that's the buried because you're feeling crushed beneath them it's not the vast oh there's a lot of people therefore you know you should be scared of it but something a bit more a bit more fundamental which is that ultimately like humans as a species we're born to be suspicious because that's what keeps you alive and i don't even mean suspicious of strangers i just mean like people in general are dangerous and there was something there but i never managed to manifest it properly and anytime i tried to get an angle on it to propose it it was always

covered by the other stuff here we are here we are oh have you found it yes okay go for it this this is this is real early so here uh like this this is before it was the blank so i've got terminus butchery beholding that was that was one right right from the start fang was i think uh the first oh interesting okay viscera sure hive filth yep and hive and filth eventually got mixed together into the corruption burnt pitch forsake mentis which one's forsake uh forsake became the lonely oh of course uh webb breathless sake became the lonely oh of course uh web breathless vertigo and close and breathless and close became the buried though i don't actually know how i i don't know what i was conceiving of breathless as if not i wonder yeah i just have to speculate i don't think we've we've ever really dived into that yeah like it's it's a long time since i've really it's a long time

since i've thought about the early forms but you were right in your selection i'll give you that like every time i tried to put anything else in like that humanity one or technology they never were actually fundamental they were symptomatic and that's not the same thing yeah and i and i think yeah like it took us most of the first season, I think, to fully hash out the exact list. I think there was some back and forth on a few of them right up until late season one. I know that you and I for a while weren't seeing eye to eye on where slaughter fit versus flesh versus hunt. There was a lot of give and take and pull and stretch on there.

Again, I think that was more me than you. I was pushing against that because I didn't quite i think you rightly identified that even if there wasn't overlap at the core level it would feel like there was overlap at an audience level you know yeah fundamentally the disappointing thing there is there's a very interesting look into deep deep very super early conception and it's kind of distressingly similar to exactly what came out the other end if i'm honest there's not really a whole universe out there of fears that never quite made the cut unfortunately i mean what i'm what i'm hearing is we started out pretty much perfect and just got better is that is that the takeaway

okay you know what let's leave on that note, because God forbid I say anything else. Obviously, we'll be doing another one. I think the next one we might have to rattle through a few of these in a little more speed to get through them all. But apart from that, I should thank you for your time, Johnny. I know you kind of assumed that you would be off living your life, but no, you stay in that room. You stay there and you record content forever.

That's the deal. Magnus is over and still I record. Bye, everyone. Yeah, until then. Bye, everyone. 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 TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us at mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening. Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchart from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling 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.

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