The Magnus Protocol Reviews: “Catching Up”

“Catching Up” Brings Back Up The Series’ Quality

“Catching Up” is such an improvement from the last two episodes. It’s weird and horrific and takes its time to build to the horror. And the horror story both informs the overall story and works on its own. It’s an excellent entry. And the scenes with Helen are great, too.

And this is (partially) because it’s a standard statement. No outside justifications like how “Raising Issues” had someone talking into a baby monitor or “Futures” using a customer service complaint as a framing device. I know that The Magnus Protocol is trying to play into the magical computer system plotline, but personal anecdotes are such a good medium for horror. There’s a reason The Magnus Archives could use them basically the whole time without it getting old.

My main theory for this is it’s because there’s a backstory. We can know why this character is interacting with this horror. “Catching Up” has a simple premise: a person running constantly to escape a horrible fate. But because we know these people’s history, because running is a core plot point, it works. It’s a little bit of a coincidence that they ran into one another right as the pivotal horror happens—but it works. It’s small scale. It’s inexplicable. And every conceivable answer for what happened is disquieting.  

The Horror In This Episode Relies On Implications

Giving yet more credit to this one, the Helen part of “Catching Up” with Celia and Sam manages to keep the excellence going. It inspires some serious curiosity. My theory about Celia knowing Basira from the last article seems almost confirmed now. Hearing that active tinge of fear just being around a non-Spiral Helen is both great voice acting and solid worldbuilding. I now wonder if Celia was inside the hotel that Helen used to torture people in The Magnus Archives. That would make some sense. It doesn’t explain Celia’s teleporting, though.

As to the romance elements, it was an unsurprising turn of events, except I had assumed that they had already slept together. In hindsight, The Magnus Protocol is fairly vague about the timeline, so I don’t know how long they’ve been dating. I don’t know if it’s been months or weeks since Sam joined the company. I don’t think each episode takes place a day after the last or anything, but there’s no obvious way to know.

Regardless, “Catching Up” is scary because it doesn’t need a ton of external magic or hidden locations to work. It hints at how dangerous The Archivist is without detracting from the tale—and all but confirms some more of the original cast will be returning.  

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