Trivia / The Magnus Archives

• Acting for Two: Alexander J. Newall is credited as both Martin Blackwood and Jared Hopworth, when he finally appears in Episode 131.
• Colbert Bump: As indicated by its YouTube video, Episode 97 ("We All Ignore the Pit") got a major boost thanks to a TikTok video based on Jon's meeting with Nikola. The video's description even says that it's the episode where it happens and gives a timestamp of when the scene begins.
• Creator Backlash: The introduction to episode 185, "Locked In," is a trigger warning and apology from Jonny Sims. In it, he explains that he had failed in this episode to create a suitable separation between fiction and reality, and thus had crossed the line from horror to trauma, a line he decided not to cross from the very beginning of writing the series.
• Creator's Favorite: Jonny has claimed that the Flesh is his favorite Fear to write for because it allowed him to get very creative & weird.
• Creator's Pest: In one Q&A, Jonathan Sims(the writer) admitted that out of the Fears, the one he enjoyed writing for the least would be the Dark, as he personally isn't particularly afraid of the dark and found that he fell back on cliches too much when writing a statement for it. He's also stated he has a specific regret about the character of John Amherst & tying him by implication to real world historical atrocities.
• The Danza: The writer/actor and his character are both named Jonathan Sims. He came to regret this.
• Development Gag: In episode 196, Annabelle says that she planned to turn Martin into an avatar of the Web, but later decided against it. This refers to an Aborted Arc that the creators, themselves, planned but decided to drop.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: On an episode-by-episode level, Jonny confesses to being surprised at how popular "A Guest For Mr Spider" is, because he didn't consider it very inspired — in his own words, "It's horror on easy mode."
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Jonathan Sims and Sasha Sienna are both bisexual, while their characters, Jonathan Sims and Georgie Barker, are also at least romantically interested in both genders.
• Real-Life Relative: Some to Jonny Sims:
  • Gertrude Robinson is voiced by his mother, Sue Sims.
  • Jurgen Leitner is voiced by his father, Paul Sims.
  • Georgie Barker is voiced by his spouse, Sasha Sienna.
• Reality Subtext: During the Unknowing, two mannequins dressed in the skins of Gertrude Robinson and Jurgen Leitner, who were played by the real Jonathan Sims's mother and father, try to break Jon's will by calling him out on his failure to save them, sounding very much like disappointed parents.
• Shrug of God: When asked about Basira and Daisy's relationship, Jonathan Sims responded that fans could interpret it however they wanted but it would never be confirmed as romantic. Basira's Fatal Flaw is a tendency to overlook and ignore the failings and crimes of people she consider to be on her side, namely Daisy, and making it an explicitly romantic relationship would muddy that point, as making excuses for a romantic partner is different from making excuses for someone "on your team".
• Spoiled by the Cast List: In the season 1 finale, Sasha's voice sounds different after she comes out of Artifact Storage, but it's easy to overlook or chalk up to sound editing (which the series has played with before). Until you look at the cast list in the episode's ending credits and realize that Sasha's original actress is absent and a completely different actress is credited as "Not-Sasha", revealing that Sasha has been killed and replaced by one of the Not-Them.
• Throw It In!:
  • According to a cast retrospective, the part of the script for episode 187 where Helen begs for their life was intentionally left blank to encourage the actor to fill it with their own ad-lib.
  • Episode 198's subject was originally up in the air, but when Jonny was workshopping the ladder idea, another member of the crew joked, "What if they had to jump off the ladder?" He loved the idea so much he immediately decided to work it into the episode.
  • The production team apparently did not intend to make a deliberate Call-Back with episode 199's "Can I have a cigarette?" line, but chose to run with it once they realized.
• Troubled Production: As for many other shows, the COVID-19 pandemic made producing Season 5 very difficult. It took a lot of work to get everyone set up to record at home, audio editing was much harder, and so on. (Alex J. Newall jokes in "MAG Roundtable - Making of Season 5" that it's a nice arc that the show started out being recorded in someone's room under a blanket, and ended being recorded in lots of someones' rooms under blankets.) In particular, Chioma Nwalioba, voice of Annabelle Cane, didn't even get to meet the rest of the team or get a real mic before it was time to do her first episode—luckily, Annabelle first "appears" via phone, so it worked to record her lines over a call.
• What Could Have Been:
  • When the first season was being written, it was planned that Tim would be killed and replaced by the "Not-Them". However, Sasha's actor had a scheduling conflict and couldn't commit to the large scale multi-season story, so Sasha died, Tim lived and (presumably) got her backstory.
  • In an interview at Virtual HorrorCon, Jonathan Sims explained that he initially pitched the series as pure anthology, with "the Archivist" as merely as a presenter figure rather than a character in his own right, which is the reason he's The Danza.
  • The post-finale Q&As reveal that Alex and Jonny considered killing off all but one character (undecided which one) during the final episode, and that there was almost no romance subplot before they decided the Jon/Martin dynamic was too good to pass up.
  • The post-finale Q&As also reveal that there were plans for a Buried avatar as a recurring character, but Jonny just never found a place where they could fit.
  • The Q&As also revealed that the original plan for the ending would have Martin becoming an Avatar of the Web, rather than the Lonely. This was actually fairly heavily foreshadowed early on to the point that fans picked upon it. Jonny says that the reaction to this foreshadowing told him that it wouldn't play out as intended(i.e., that it would be seen as Martin turning evil/having been evil all along, when the intention was more nuanced) and so it lead to them reexamining Martin's character & deciding that while he was manipulative, at his core he was a lonely person, and shifted his development in that direction.
  • Some of the Fears originally had different names during development, with some being multiple entities before being merged into one. The most consistent change across all of them is they were given definite articles as names in the final product. Known original names are as follows:
    • The Buried: Breathless, Close
    • The Corruption: Hive, Filth
    • The Desolation: Burnt
    • The Hunt: Fang
    • The Slaughter: Butchery
    • The Vast: Vertigo
    • The Web: Weaver
• Word of God:
  • According to Jonathan Sims in the Season 4 Q&A, the ritual enacted by Jonah Magnus in Episode 160 is not the Watcher's Crown, the ritual previously associated with the Beholding; Jonah Magnus attempted that one before and failed. Instead, he tentatively called that ritual "The Magnus Archives".
  • The description of episode 132 refers to Jonathan with the pronoun "they". Jonny posted on Twitter to clarify that this was "not directly reflective of anything currently within the canonical text", but also that this clarification wasn't intended as denying the headcanon of Jonathan being non-binary, just that he didn't want to take credit for representation he hadn't actually intended. The same thread made a similar comment on the headcanon of his being autistic. And then jokingly confirmed Elias as a Juggalo, just because someone suggested "confirming headcanons nobody has".