TMA Sideblog

Despite all this, I feel like it does a disservice to his character to flatten him down to the solely villainous. To pretend the humanity in him was any less important or influential than the horrors he served. He was a passionate academic, endlessly terminally curious, funny, outgoing, and a deeply terrified man himself, so possessed of and by his fear of death that it drove him into the kinds of logical fallacy many intelligent, frightened people fall prey to. The idea that he could somehow know enough, plan enough, orchestrate the circumstances of the world enough to remove himself from clutches of entropy. Of uncertainty.

It destroys him in the end, of course. You can't do that, there is no way to engineer yourself out of your own mortality (yet I suppose), and it's evident all across the series. Not just in the way he seems to miss the dissonance of genuinely liking the Archives crew while also constantly sickening and picking them apart for his machinations, but really quite literally in the way he allows his human form to deteriorate and waste.

Jonah Magnus the brilliant, curious, frightened human man that started his journey sat in the Panopticon until the Eye opened, and was burned away to dust and ash without ceremony and with barely any mention at all. Elias was all that remained, neither the man who started the journey nor the one who had been born to the body being occupied. And it's very clear, when Jon pulls him down for that final confrontation, that the parts the Eye allowed him to keep were the exact things he'd tried to escape for so long: his fear, and his mortality.

Because while the Fears give you power, extend you and elevate you beyond the boundaries of your human form, they are fundamentally appetites, instinctual and driven by their own hunger first, foremost, and only. No matter how familiar, how comforting, how right it feels to root your conception of the world and your place in it inside of fear, it never saves you. It's not designed to. Especially not when that fear exists in a universe where the emotion is sentient and knows you need it.

The series does this really incredible job of laying out monsters and nightmares and then showing you the human beings inside of them, turning that darkness back towards you and making you consider yourself in them, the inherent humanity of horror, darkness and light in equal measure. It's very neat packaging. It's a lot easier to follow that with Jon, of course, but it happens all through it. Michael Crew and Michael Shelley, avatars of their respective fears, through no fault of their own. Julia Montauk's father, manipulated into what he was by Maxwell Rayner, Oliver Banks a manifestation of death itself because of a series of nightmares.

Then you have figures like Gertrude Robinson, arguably on the side of good but ruthless and cold and cunning, willing to destroy people that trusted and cared for her as easily as those she considered enemies. Jurgen Leitner himself, a specter whose name is synonymous with evil for the first 2 seasons, turning out to just be a misguided old man who lost control of his fucking library. Both entirely human, and both responsible for catastrophic harm in ways both large and small.