THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES #25 – Growing Dark

MAG012 – Case #01519014 – Mark Bilham
Statement regarding the events that culminated in a visit to Hither Green Chapel, London.

The Magnus Archives tells the tale of a young man whose partner’s friend seemingly found religion in dark places and under strange, somewhat disturbing, circumstances.

Starring: The Archivist – Jonathan Sims
Writer: Jonathan Sims
Director: Alexander J Newall
Editors: Alexander J Newall, Mike LeBeau, Murray Porter

MERCH:

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[toastghost]

May 15, 2015 was a busy day. The chapel started screaming, Gertrude died, and I had a birthday party.

[megancress]

I know that torch is just the british way of saying flashlight but every episode involving one i still imagine the characters holding an actual burning torch

[conandenz]

I literally start screaming every time I hear anything related to Jurgen leitner, an eye, or any bugs in this series. Just like "ahhh yes. A symbol. Hmm i wonder what the symbol is? Could it be an eye?" "a symbol of an eye" "DAMNIT!"

[karenlinares]

If i had realized that the lightbulbs were unscrewed then i would scream wildly at how much money i wasted at changing them

[fred_______]

Most people; Bible verse
Mark, an intellectual: *Bible quote*

[andrewclarke]

If I had a dollar for every time he said "I would ignore/disregard this if it wasn't for..." I would have 25 dollars, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it has happened every time

[bugjams]

I love that characters in TMA can be so painfully aware that something is wrong but also too Britishly polite to be rude and say something about it. It's like,

"Yeah my flatmate started singing in tongues, unscrewing all the lightbulbs and also I heard sounds from her room when she wasn't home. Said something about joining a new religion. But I wouldn't want to make a fuss about if, I might come off as rude!"

This setting would 100% not work in an American setting. Guns would start going off like fireworks the moment something spooky happened.

[amandafrazier]

So there are two significant eye symbols: the closed eye, which seems to be a cult symbol (here, and A Father's Love)and the open eyes, which seem to be a protective ward (First Aid, and the Black Forest ep). There are also frequent instances of a finite space becoming temporarily infinite or at least larger and distorted (the cave, the sky, the graveyard/fields, and here, the dark/chapel.)
Damn, this show is good.

[jeemsers]

"The lightbulbs kept blowing"

I find it interesting that the exact same wording is being used as in the episode with the serial killer dad, even though the character telling this story knows that's not what happened at all. It seems awfully deliberate.

[dirtyraccoon]

People in the comments, thank you so so much for catching little details and helping me remember names. I have terrible memory lol

[korickarmstrong]

So, something I don't see a lot of people talking about is the number of "sudden heart failures" we see across this series. I think we're up to like, 4?

[b-blythe]

im so worried about that "spinach" Cathy ate

[imakedoodleslol]

oh my god her mum dying of 'heart failure' has a whole knew meaning with this cult knowledge we learnt about in ep 9. that totally flew over my head the first time.

[rotemsosna]

so there’s the same cult as mentioned in “a father’s love” and i could be reaching with this, but the same motif of darkness in that episode, where in “a father’s love” there’s the wave of darkness that shuts off the street lamps, and in this episode he mentions the streetlights/ his car lights being too dim as well as Natalie unscrewing the lightbulbs and darkening her room

[Pieps]

So the eye is related to the cult referenced in episode 9 "A father's love".

[jvg]

Nobody has mentioned the stripped wallpaper. This could just be a coincidence but it reminds me of the episode with the priest. One of the houses he visited had wallpaper stripped from the wall and the word mentis.

[aesynthi]

as an american, it took me almost the entirety of this episode to realize "torch" meant "flashlight" lmao

[Dani_]

Things that so far are related:

- Closed and opened eyes from "A Father's Love"

- Striped wallpaper from the priest episodes, could be skinning people again...

- The chapel from "Alone" and the German tomb episode

- Yet another person that died of "heart failure"

- light bulbs not working and darkness from "A Father's Love"

- places suddenly growing large or reducing in size, like "Lost Johns' Cave" among other episodes

- things crawling out of holes/worms, like Martin's hella creepy episode...

I wonder how they're going to tie everything together

[rain-qbxv]

the imagery of someone singing in another language outside your room at night time is honestly really fking creepy

[levchenkodarya]

I'm surprised that it was a *medical student* who thought of Natalie's behaviour as strange, considering all the strange things that I was doing during being one myself. For example, I would sing our University anthem (it's on Latin) out loud, not turn on any lights besides my table lamp (which saved me quite a lot of money for electricity bills) and come to my flat with a bag of bones...