The Magnus Protocol Reviews: “Solo Work”

“Solo Work” Is What I Wanted From This Podcast

“Solo Work” is a fantastic episode. The horror is weird and cosmic. The character work is great, and we get a lot of it—and there’s a cameo that made the ending all the better. There are even little audio oddities that seem like hints for future plot points. If your favorite episodes of Archives are the ones where we spend most of it with John and the archival team, and the statement is a minimal aspect of the plot, then this has almost the exact same structure and pacing as those. It’s like reading a chapter of a book.

Really, this one was so good, that I don’t have a lot to say in terms of a review besides the above praise. It was fun to listen to “Solo Work” this time, and it’ll be fun to listen to “Solo Work” the next time with more context. “Augustus” episodes are swiftly becoming my favorite because of how strange they seem to be. “Taking Notes” was marred by excessively purple prose, but this one has great delivery and isn’t annoying.

So, with that lack of anything else to critically evaluate, let’s instead do some heavier-than-normal speculation. This episode offers tons of connections. It’s the first time we’ve had a story within a story within a story, and each section of it tells us more.

This Episode Uses All Its Framing Devices So Well

To begin, it appears that Alice almost certainly believes that the stuff she listens to on the computer is real, but is trying her best not to get pulled into it. That’s not a surprising character trait—John has a similar one in early episodes of Archives—but with Gwen actively talking about meeting monsters and Sam continuously almost working out some aspect of the plot, we’re due for a big moment any time now, regardless of Alice’s best efforts.

And then we have our examiner, who has to deal with a talking dead body. The reoccurring ideas of tattoos, corpses, and finding tattoos on corpses makes me wonder if this series has parallel ideas to Johnathan Sim’s novel Family Business (which I have also reviewed), which had a plotline about finding cosmic horror while cleaning up the remains of the dead. Protocol is somewhat about the government being aware of supernatural stuff going on, and with how often hospitals and medical staff keep popping up in episodes, I wonder if finding victims is what instigated the government involvement in the first place.

Finally, we have the statement itself—and here I’ll slip back into more of a traditional review alongside the speculation. Because this is a truly eerie story. A house that might be real, might not be. That might’ve killed people, might not have. That exists in someone’s head or their dreams, but is a place they cannot escape. I wasn’t scared, exactly, but it had my attention. It was truly cosmic horror in a way we don’t always get from the series. It’s also full of references. A hallway that goes on forever? A hand beckoning? It’s Spiral, Stranger, and Lonely all wrapped up into one nightmare—and considering the Dread Powers often are locations as much as beings, it’s possible that these poor people are falling into pseudo-domains.

It’ll be fun, of course, to see how much I’m right about any of that—because I don’t have much else to back up my speculations—but, regardless of my hunches, I love that this episode gave us so much to think about. You can tell this series had a lot of planning put into it, and we’re seeing the pieces come together in so many ways now. I’m so happy with “Solo Work” that, even if the next episode just spins some wheels, I’ll be perfectly content—because I can tell we’re getting somewhere.  

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