The Magnus Protocol Reviews: “Public Image”

“Public Image” Is A Standout For Multiple Reasons

“Public Image” is a classic little horror story of an episode. There’s the tiniest cut back to the OIAR, but mostly we spend all the runtime with Heinrich Unheimlich.

And, holy crap, is Heinrich Unheimlich a great addition to the villains of Magnus. He instantly shot up to the highest levels of my favorite Avatars/monsters. I adore the idea of essentially an evil Santa who continuously has to keep up a certain ambient fear through the stories about his toy’s murders and is struggling to update his methods to meet the new technological level of humanity. It’s such a cool usage of the fear-as-food magic that this series operates on and such a great way to tie back in the themes of technology inherent to Protocol.

And that’s not even mentioning the vocal performances in “Public Image.” I cannot tell how accurate the German—language or accent—was, but I’d happily hear another menacing monolog from this character. It’s so well written, even down to Heinrich’s slightly hilarious focus on making sure his human “friend” gets to sit in a nice chair.

“Public Image” Introduces Another Iconic Monster

That’s not the only performance I was praising in “Public Image,” by the way. Alice is, of course, wonderful and sarcastic as always—and the moment she moves right past a murder to get the job done shows how serious she is about this. And our doomed Dane was a perfect parody of someone trying to be all macho. He was—ultimately—just trying to defend Alice from what is a canonically human-eating monster, and died doing so, and there’s a blend of comedy and horror there that’s going to stick in my head. It does make the security company that the series has been hinting at seem a lot less reliable than I expected, though. Whatever tension about them being dangerous, like the Externals, just kind of went out the window.

But maybe that will change. And, besides, it doesn’t seem as important a plotline as the essentially double-running narratives we have going. It’s possible we might be flipping back and forth—with slight breaks to introduce a new employee—from Sam’s exploits in the post-apocalypse, and Alice’s continued conversation with Heinrich for the next small run of episodes. And I’m now feeling impatient because I want those episodes so much.     

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