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aneilert · 5 years

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The One With Everything [MAG158: Panopticon]

This episode was delayed almost 20 hours, sending the whole early-access-community into a gradually deafening frenzy even before it launched. And then it took off for real.

The rest of the day has been a bit of a blur, to be honest, and if I’ve done anything not connected to relistening and speculating, then at least I can guarantee that neither my brain nor my heart was involved in it.

It’s hard to be eloquent when faced with this much content. I have raved elsewhere about the quality as well as the sheer quantity of content this episode can boast, but I’d like at least to post my List of Things We Had Expected, Hoped For and/or Dreaded and that happened, were confirmed or who returned in this episode:

1. Tim mention and grief

The fandom has never stopped grieving Tim Stoker, and every once in a while, someone will sigh about how they miss him and how much they wish his death would be at least mentioned on the show. Did he have no impact? Have they forgotten him? Well, canon has spoken: They have not.

2. Not!Sasha coming back

I can honestly say I never spent much time on the theories that muttered about how she had been enclosed in the tunnels and probably still was there. My bad. I will certainly never again forget the old rule that if someone (or something) doesn’t die on camera (as it were), they’re not dead. (And fuck were those amazing voice distortions!)

3. Leitner’s book coming back

Don’t forget where you put your evil book. It might not be there anymore when you come back for it a year or two later. (The blood on it, btw? Also Leitner. That bit was hilarious. I despise Peter, but he has brought some of the funniest lines this season; «In my defence, it’s still quite funny» is my personal favourite.)

4. Elias escaping prison

We didn’t think anything was keeping him there longer than he wanted to, and we were right; it was just a matter of timing. He would never want to come sneaking back if he could be making an Entrance.

5. Jonah!Elias

Probably the most popular fan theory (apart from those concerning various ships) is canon. And what a deliciously disturbing visual it is; Jonah Magnus’ eyeless body aging in the Panopticon while his eyes do what they have always done: watch over his Institute. Never has Elias sounded more smug and delighted with himself than in this episode, and you know what? Much as I hate him, I’d say he’s earned it.

6. Elias/Peter meeting

Trust fandoms to make feverish ships built out of characters who have never interacted in canon. And boy, do the LonelyEyes shippers feel vindicated today! Not only did the two horrible old men finally interact, but their dynamic was revealed to be exactly that of an old, dysfunctional and probably multiple times divorced couple. Even Jonny said so.

7. Martin having A Plan / having played Peter

We love Martin and worry about Martin, and we have been extremely worried about his latest signs of being fully on board (sic) with Peter’s nebulous plan. Is he that naïve? Is he that far gone? Or … is he playing Peter? Is he weaving his own little web, like in the previous season, when he managed to play Elias?

The truth, as so often, is a place in between. He has been playing Peter (and God was that an amazing reveal and a heart-rending speech! And Christ was Elias gleeful when he reminded Peter that he had been warned not to underestimate Martin, but that he still did it!), but he has also been joining the Lonely. There is something to be said for being able to keep distance, I guess. Even though it makes me heartsick.

8. Tape with Gertrude’s death and last confrontation with Elias

This is something I have been wanted for some time now. Gertrude is awesome and marvellous and badass and truly scary, and I have been wondering: did her hubris kill her? How did Elias take her down? What happened?

Well, now we know. Or … we know part of it. Gertrude’s body had three shots fired in it, but the tape only contained one. And the tape was numbered #0182509-A, hinting at possibly a B existing somewhere. Maybe we haven’t heard the last from Gertrude yet?

Also: How very satisfying it was to see that Gertrude had basically the same plan as Martin: Burn some Institute stuff to keep Elias from seeing the real threat! I love what this says about Elias’ complacency and underestimation when it comes to Martin (but I worry what yet another parallel with Gertrude might bode for his future …).

9. Peter taking Martin into the Lonely

The premise of a lot of fics. Can’t wait to see how it plays out in canon.

10. Hunters returning at an inopportune moment

We all, including Jon and the gang, knew they were out there and that it was just a matter of time. Still fun! (Particularly Trevor yelling JONNY BOY!)

11. Daisy going feral

Oh, this is hard; she wanted so much to be free of the Hunt. But honestly: this is why she was brought back, whether she (or Jon) knew it or not: To reconnect with her humanity, and then to give it up willingly to save her friends. And, why not, to have the savage joy of ripping out a few more throats while she’s at it.

Will Basira honour their promise? Well, that’s a tale for another day, as the story says. For now, let’s just enjoy the amazing sound distortion on Daisy’s breath, her voice and finally her growl. Daisy scared fucking Julia Montouk, and not many can boast that.

12. Jon and Elias talk

It’s been a long time coming. It was not at all what I had expected in any way, but it was amazing. And Jon hardly even noted what Elias was saying or how he gloated, because he was 100 % focused on …

13. Jon following Martin into the Lonely

Of course he did. Of course. He went into the Buried to get Daisy, and he didn’t even like Daisy, and she tried to kill him. Of course there’s no limit anymore to how much he will risk himself for a tiny sliver of hope that he might save Martin.

I worry so for them, though. Martin has refused Peter’s plans, true enough, but he has not refused the Lonely. He has been sliding into Forsaken for Jon’s sake, but he has still been sliding into Forsaken! And Jon’s journey into monsterdom is if anything even more worrying and harder to reverse.They have both been trying desperately and without any real clue as to how to save the world for each other’s sake, but what have they given up along the way?

Still. Jon clawed his way out of the Buried fuelled by Martin and by the signal from his rib. Who’s to say it might not work a second time?

Also: the one person we didn’t meet who I almost had expected, was Annabelle. Someone must have put this last tape on Jon’s desk – and someone must also, long ago, have given him that lighter that he never can focus on long enough to remember he has. Is there a silvery Web thread connected to it, where it lies in his pocket? Could he be able to follow that thread out again?

I have no idea. I also have no idea how I am supposed to wait for the next two episodes. Or how my head felt before this podcast ate my entire brain.

#the magnus archives #tma 158 #The Magnus Archives spoilers #panopticon #popular theories #text #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #Elias Bouchard #peter lukas #gertrude robinson #holy crap this show #have I mentioned lately that I love this show #«are you scared?» «yes.» «perfect»#only two episodes to go #oh fuck

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thinktosee · 5 years

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JOURNAL TO DAVID – 39TH MONTH – A REMEMBRANCE

Flowers arranged by Edna this morning

Dear David, my Son,

Today is the 39th month. Nothing changes. We remember and honour you every moment. You are much loved.

This morning, we heard from Sara that she had landed safely in Lima, Peru. She flew from Santiago, Chile. Your sister has been touring Argentina, Chile and now Peru for the last 5 weeks. She is learning a good deal about these places. We are students after all in this life. We are most grateful for this privilege which Sara is blessed with.

A couple of days ago, I came across an essay by the award-winning journalist, Robert Fisk. It is a story of remembrance. An eternal love. The love of a child and later, a woman for her grandfather. A love which transcends the ages. This story is amazing. It too is heart-breaking. War is after all senseless and tragic. You, David had written a number of poems about the subject of war. Pacifism is the bravest act. You proved this with your life.

I am reproducing Mr. Fisk’s story as reported in the The Independent. We shall read it aloud to you during prayers tonight :

“On the banks of the Tigris, the lost grave of Scottish shepherd David Bell takes us deep into Iraq’s bloody past

A barren war cemetery in Amara houses the dead from the allies’ most calamitous defeat in the First World War. It was a request from a canny grandmother in Lincolnshire that took me there.

· Robert Fisk, Amara, southern Iraq @indyvoices

This is the story of an elderly lady in Lincolnshire, a long-dead Scottish shepherd and a kindly Shia Muslim in southern Iraq. First, the lady. Moira Jennings, who is now 87, wrote to me from her home in England when I was covering the aftermath of the disastrous – and illegal – 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. We would exchange letters several times in the coming years. But her words are more eloquent than mine:

“My Grandfather was killed on 22nd April 1916 and is buried in Amara War Cemetery, Iraq. He was in the Black Watch, left the farm in Scotland where he was a Shepherd and never returned, as did so many men in the First World War. As a child I spent a lot of time with my Grandmother who had my Grandfather’s medals in a frame on her wall. I asked her about them and she told me he had been killed in Mesopotamia by the Turks. To a child this made a lasting impression on my mind and I’ve tried to find out more.”

Private David Cameron Bell of the 2nd Battalion, the Black Watch (Royal Highlanders), came from Fife – his parents were called Henry and Catherine, that much we know – and his wife, Moira’s grandmother, was called Annie (originally Annie Anderson). She was from Frithfield, Anstruther, which is also in Fife.

Moira Jennings, a canny lady whose articulate fury at the Bush-Blair invasion matched her horror at the bloodshed of the Great War which ended 14 years before she was born, knows the story of what was “Mesopotamia” all too well. When he was killed, Private Bell was already 41 – a truly “old soldier” by the standards of the Great War in which my own father fought in France (and survived) at the age of just 19.

In a series of military actions, the British – including thousands of Indian troops – fought their way up the Tigris river towards Baghdad in 1915, but were finally surrounded by the Ottoman Turks on a plateau of land between Kut and Amara under their self-satisfied but ineffectual general, Charles Townshend.

Despite efforts by Lawrence of Arabia and others to bribe the Turks to release the British army, the trapped soldiers were reduced, under constant shellfire, to eating horses, and even rats to survive. In the reduced front line, cholera broke out. There were desertions, and when Townshend finally surrendered on 29 April 1916 around 4,000 British dead were packed into the Amara cemetery beside the fetid waters of the Tigris. It has rightly been called the worst defeat of the allies in the First World War.

This deeply depressing tale of military collapse was only compounded when the Turks forced the British survivors to undertake a death march up through what is now Iraq, through Mosul, into eastern Turkey and Anatolia, where they died – again by the thousand – of cholera and overwork, often close by the dying “survivors” of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

General Townshend, however, was taken up the Tigris by boat, treated with princely courtesy in Constantinople and – speaking little of his own troops – returned to Britain expecting to be treated as a war hero. Like so many of his kind, he later became an MP and an “expert” on the Arab world.

But here is Moira Jennings, writing to me now in 2012. “…I know my Grandfather ‘fell’ and his mate bent down and took his wallet to bring home to my Grandmother, so he didn’t die of Cholera. I heard all this from my Gran and its [sic] stayed with me all these years. My Gran was very bitter towards the Turks, understandably. I feel sad that my Grandfather was killed and didn’t come back to his family as my Gran’s life was very hard with five children to feed and having to leave the farm. She remarried, out of necessity, to feed her children.”

Could I, Moira Jennings asked, locate her grandfather’s grave? She sent me a detailed map of the great cemetery at Amara, showing that Private David Bell, service number S/7283, lay in LOT XVII. E. 6. The old Commonwealth War Graves Commission map she sent me should – in theory – have helped locate her grandfather’s grave. But I’d been to British war graves in Basra 15 years ago, and that cemetery had long ago been desecrated during Iraq’s civil war.

The War Graves Commission could not guard these cemeteries amid the dangers of kidnap or murder. Yet last month, on a trip to Baghdad and the Shia Muslim cities of southern Iraq, I suddenly realised I could at last honour a promise to Moira Jennings.

By extraordinary chance, I set off south from Kerbala on 22 April – the very day on which Private David Bell met his end at Amara. The road was straight and hot and the Tigris, beside which Bell was killed, was flooded. I feared the cemetery itself – or what was left of it – might be in the same state. But it didn’t take long to find, next to a gruesome new children’s “funfair”, a slew of gas stations and a massive builder’s dump.

The outer wall of the British cemetery was of 1920s brick and there was a small gatehouse – much dilapidated and secured with barbed wire – which I could find on the map that Moira Jennings sent me.

In theory, of course, this should have been a well-tended if deserted cemetery dedicated to those whose names – as every British cemetery tells us – “liveth for evermore”. But the gatehouse was empty, the drivers of the huge construction dump trucks indifferent. Yet one cheerfully told me that the man who lived in the little brick house – Hassan Houteif Mawsa – was at prayers in the local mosque and would soon be home. I padded round the graveyard perimeter in the hot sun.

My Iraqi fixer and driver were my protectors on this trip and they began to catch my enthusiasm. “Who was Mr David?” they asked. He was a shepherd, I said, who had five children, and he died right here in Amara. The faces of both men lightened. Private David Bell suddenly became real for them. A farming man – like many of the people of Amara – with a large family, like so many Iraqi families. For them, he belonged in Iraq. For me, Fife did not seem quite so far away.

And then, smiling broadly, there was Hassan himself, shaking hands, taking the padlock off the barbed-wire covered gate, inviting us to take fruit off the trees inside and bringing from his house a huge map. It was not a copy but an original British war office map – officially checked by “J Coleman” on 21 April 1922 – of the cemetery. And in those days, it was clear, each grave had a marker, a headstone, cut grass. No longer.

The dismal state of the Amara war cemetery is known, but perhaps too easily forgotten. Hassan’s schoolchild’s exercise book – which doubles as his personal visitor’s book to the cemetery – shows that British Commonwealth War Graves officials visited the site in 2015, and Trevor Lewis, a British embassy official in Baghdad, came on 18 May 2016. A colleague, Martin Fletcher, has also visited. So did many British soldiers who were part of the invasion and occupation force in and after 2003.

Hassan and I walked across the rough grass of the Amara cemetery, past the site of the great cross which now lies in concrete pieces – a vandalisation that can scarcely be repaired when Shia militias still exist across the south. The individual gravestones – for Private Bell did originally have his name here – were taken down in the 1930s when chemical erosion began to damage the stones.

Only two survive, neither of them Bell’s. But it was just possible to make out the original concrete lot marker to graves at XVII, and Hassan and I “walked out” the distance to “E 6”, until we were standing over whatever remained of poor Private Bell.

I had Moira Jennings’ letter in my file with me, so I picked some grass with purple tops from her grandfather’s resting place and put them in a plastic folder.

It was then that my driver shouted across to me. He was standing at a far wall of the cemetery, upon which the names of many of the dead were still visible. Hassan had told me how hard it was to preserve even this wall from vandals. Only a month ago, thieves had come into the cemetery at night and torn the brass fittings from the slabs, some of which – I noticed the Staffordshire Regiment, 1915 – had fallen into the grass.

My driver had found the slab for the Black Watch. And there it was: “Private D C Bell XVII E 6”. So even here – even today – the name of Moira’s grandad survives.

As for Hassan, he complained that he had not been paid since 1991, that his father was salaried as keeper before him but that he now worked for nothing, with no salary, to protect these graves.

This was sad, true, but not quite all the story.

Saddam’s Iraqi government told the War Graves Commission in 1992 that they should no longer employ their 22 staff in Iraq. The commission paid them generous indemnities and allowed all to continue to live in their cemetery buildings rent free. Which is why Hassan lives – for nothing – in his little house today. But he made one other, deeply moving remark.

“Some years ago,” he told me, “my neighbours and friends and people who knew I worked here told me it was forbidden to look after these foreign [Christian] graves. They said this over and over to me. I became very worried, so I went to see an ayatollah and explained the situation and sought his advice. And he said: ‘My son, you must continue to respect the dead – and look after them for their families who may one day come here’.”

And so the blessing of a Shia divine lies upon the 4,000 dead of Amara, along with Private Bell. I called Moira Jennings from Kerbala to tell her I had found her grandfather’s name on the wall and located the exact location of his remains. Who knows what these now are? But his bones – or what is left of them – are mixed in this earth, not far from his name. And this week, back from Iraq, I posted the small pile of grass from his grave to Moira’s address in Lincolnshire, where she lives in the ancient village of North Hykeham, far from Fife, and many thousands of miles from Amara. Or perhaps not that far.”

End of story.

We are thankful to Mr. Fisk and The Independent for this touching report. Mr. Fisk is without a doubt a most passionate journalist.

An oil painting on canvas by Denmark, Julie Anne and Meryll Dominguez which they presented to the Singh family when they visited our home recently. We are most grateful for this priceless gift. It hangs on the wall in your bedroom.

A Life is priceless. Every Life should be treasured and respected. These are the lessons you taught me, David. I go on walking in your footsteps. Always a student of yours.

Daddy outside St. Joseph’s Institution International School today to lay flowers at the spot you always waited for me to fetch you home.

We love you, David.

- Daddy

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