“Oversight” Starts Directly Into The Scary Section

“Oversight” is a cool drink of water after a disappointing reintroduction to the series. The majority of the episode is one continuous, spooky story—and then, at the end, we get a nice little check-in with our characters.  

This does mean, however, that I have less to say about its position in the overall narrative. Good horror stories are often simple (I mean this in a positive way) because to complicate or over-explain the premise is to undercut the scares, and “Oversight” is about as barebones as it gets.

It does, however, employ two of my favorite “tropes” (for lack of a better term) when it comes to Domains. To explain the first, I’ll need to explain its disappointing form. For you see, at different points in this series, but more so in The Magnus Archives, we witness various configurations of how the Dread Powers arrange things to take someone’s fear, and a lot of them are basically torture. They’re seriously just torture. Drowning, falling, getting eaten by ants, etc. And while that’s obviously nightmarish, it’s not very narratively interesting. And even with the ones that do have a little storyline that plays out, we often find out that it’s the same torture each time, once the little ritual finishes. I vastly prefer the ones that really set up a scene and progress somehow—and that is what we get with “Oversight.”

And not only do we get that, we get multiple interesting avenues of fear presented. It’s obviously a statement about The Dark—but it’s not only Mr. Pitch playing. The Stranger is technically, well, the fear of strangers, but it’s usually manifested as off-putting puppets and stuff, but it does cover the fear of someone you simply don’t know. A person lingering in the dark, who likely means you harm, is an excellent campfire story (and “Oversight” would fit right in with a slasher story) and is a great way to explore group panic. We don’t even know what happened to those poor people out in the dark—and what’s even more disturbing is perhaps nothing happened at all. Everyone is scaring everyone for little reason but their own fear.

“Oversight” Has One Of The Best Domain Stories

And that’s only my first beloved “trope.” My second is the reminder—and both series do make a point of this—that Avatars are afraid, too. This continuous nightmare of paranoid infighting happens, partially, because our narrator keeps running from the things he put out in the dark, and—perhaps—he initially formed his malicious patterns of scaring people to elongate how long he gets to stay in the newest tent. It’s perfect nightmare logic.

On a similar hand, Sam becoming increasingly interested in violence after witnessing a version of Alice dying is also solid character logic (“Oversight” is just really well thought out). It deepens their bonds in ways only a multiversal story like this could, and I like how it sets up Basira as Sam’s mentor and sows the seeds for the showdown between (probably) the main characters of both series. It’s admittedly a little thriller-like for my taste, with the ticking time bomb of people being pulled toward what remains of the Dread Powers, but I suppose the first series was also a character drama, at the end of the day. There needs to be some character arch, or Protocol would just be an anthology series.

All I hope is, if I’m right about where we’re going, that there’s still a big, dramatic reveal or twist to make it not entirely straightforward. The Magnus Archives is one of my favorite examples of incredible foreshadowing and laying down clues you simply missed, and I hope that Protocol has managed to trick me even after all I’ve scrutinized.