Archive 81: What Lies Beneath
February 11, 2022 11:17 AM - Season 1, Episode 8 - Subscribe
The Otherworld beckons; Melody circles back to the Visser, where a new devices captures a sacrifice; much depends on Dan's journey into the unknown.
Season finale. Steve locks Melody in with Annabelle for her own good, but she escapes. Dan and Mark find their way to present-day Annabelle, who gives them some tapes from Jess (who survived the Visser fire and became a nun.) They watch the tape, which shows Steve running the sacrificial rites, invoking the demon. Ha-ha Jess filmed it all on her Fisher-Price camera which records on ... audio tape. Dan goes to confront Virgil, wants to save Melody to make up for past wrongs. Virgil pulls a gun, Mark clocks him. The groundskeeper turns up and ... twist. The run the rite again, with no sacrifice, to try and bring Melody back from the Otherworld....
Season finale. Steve locks Melody in with Annabelle for her own good, but she escapes. Dan and Mark find their way to present-day Annabelle, who gives them some tapes from Jess (who survived the Visser fire and became a nun.) They watch the tape, which shows Steve running the sacrificial rites, invoking the demon. Ha-ha Jess filmed it all on her Fisher-Price camera which records on ... audio tape. Dan goes to confront Virgil, wants to save Melody to make up for past wrongs. Virgil pulls a gun, Mark clocks him. The groundskeeper turns up and ... twist. The run the rite again, with no sacrifice, to try and bring Melody back from the Otherworld....
"So, why wasn't there a fire, unlike the last 2 times they did the ritual?"
Because the witch was there to complete the ritual properly.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:01 PM on February 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
Because the witch was there to complete the ritual properly.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:01 PM on February 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
Overall I really liked this show, but this last episode was a letdown because previous episodes hint at far weirder and more interesting possibilities, and then the finale has a witch show up to exposition dump a derivative story about clashing secret societies and a demon locked away in an alternate dimension accessed through a swirling portal of CGI. When Dan's dreams were recursively described in the séance that really felt like the show was going to go someplace a lot more metaphysical than the very conventional and literal direction it actually ended up taking.
posted by Pyry at 12:58 PM on February 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 12:58 PM on February 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
Last numbered list of the season!
1. Jess is sooooo good.
2. I don't get what Dr. Turner is doing. That needed to be a lot more developed or edited out.
3. Annabelle gets dissed again.
4. Is it just me, or are all the sacrifices women?
5. I am so mad about Annabelle. I mean, Melody has the easiest escape from a mental institutioin, ever.
6. OK, 90s technology!
7. Aw, Tamara! Don't be a patsy! Especially for fucking Samuel. Let him take the knife, the fucking loser.
8. Who cleans of Kalego after each failed summoning?
9. Mark!
10. Oh, boo, heteronormativity. Showrunners, try a little harder. Also, the way Dan's family is sacrificed for a white woman.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:12 PM on February 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
1. Jess is sooooo good.
2. I don't get what Dr. Turner is doing. That needed to be a lot more developed or edited out.
3. Annabelle gets dissed again.
4. Is it just me, or are all the sacrifices women?
5. I am so mad about Annabelle. I mean, Melody has the easiest escape from a mental institutioin, ever.
6. OK, 90s technology!
7. Aw, Tamara! Don't be a patsy! Especially for fucking Samuel. Let him take the knife, the fucking loser.
8. Who cleans of Kalego after each failed summoning?
9. Mark!
10. Oh, boo, heteronormativity. Showrunners, try a little harder. Also, the way Dan's family is sacrificed for a white woman.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:12 PM on February 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
You might think, from the last 7 posts that I don't like this show. That's not true: I like quite a lot of it. While I generally prefer the podcast, the actors are better in the show, and they did a good job moving from an audio to a visual medium (the parallels between the passages in the archive and the corridors in the Visser, for example, is very clever, and the ranges of film/video mediums, their different levels of graininess is really neat.
Both podcast and show are worth experiencing, and they give very different experiences on the same story. My largest gripe with the show is that the imagination of the writers is just kind of mundane for something that should be a lot weirder. If they get a second season, maybe that will change.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:42 AM on February 15, 2022
Both podcast and show are worth experiencing, and they give very different experiences on the same story. My largest gripe with the show is that the imagination of the writers is just kind of mundane for something that should be a lot weirder. If they get a second season, maybe that will change.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:42 AM on February 15, 2022
Who cleans off Kalego after each failed summoning?
The fires, I assume.
posted by mon-ma-tron at 8:39 PM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
The fires, I assume.
posted by mon-ma-tron at 8:39 PM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I did not watch this show but dropped in to share "Archivists review Archive81": "Let’s jump in and see how the show compares with the actual archivist experience."
posted by brainwane at 12:32 PM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by brainwane at 12:32 PM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
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posted by Spike Glee at 10:20 PM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]