Recap of MAG80

Jurgen Leitner! He has been living in the tunnels since his library burned down, and was in contact with Gertrude when she was still alive. He uses books ('The Seven Lamps of Achitecture' and 'A Disappearance') to change the tunnels and to hide himself from Jon's 'master'.

Jurgen mentions 'Powers' or 'Entities', beings of vast, dark power. The way he explains this is incredibly vague, so I'll do my best to explain this a little bit (though not more than what he talks about obviously).

There are multiple Powers or Entities, and each of them manifest in mulitple ways, for example as creatures, monsters, artifacts or books. Jurgen does not specify how many there are, but he does identify some of them:

'The Spiral', also called 'it is lies' or 'it is lying'. A part of this is the Distortion, which we know as Michael (the door). The Spiral is about fooling the senses, making you see and hear things that aren't there, mazes, making you doubt your own sanity, fractals.

'The Eye', also called 'Beholding'. Everyone in the institute belongs to the eye, and Elias is at the heart of this (the institute is 'his place of power' according to Jurgen). The Eye is also who Jurgen refers to when he talks about 'Jon's master'.

'The Stranger'. Gertrude was looking into this. They are planning something called 'the Unknowing'.


Anyway, turns out Elias killed Gertrude and he just came in when Jon was smoking a cigarette to smack Jurgen with the metal pipe Jon picked up in the tunnels. Jon runs.

Martin and Tim get out of Michael's corridors :) and then they find a dead guy in Jon's office and think Jon killed him :(



Fun fact about this episode: in the transcript, Elias murdering Jurgen Leitner with a metal pipe is referred to as [EXTENDED SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PIPE MURDER] and February 16th is celebrated as 'extended sounds of brutal pipe murder'-day in the fandom.

A valued piece of literature in the fandom is the Jurgen Leitner Rant, a rant someone in the official discord server wrote, which went viral and is translated into multiple languages. It is often agreed upon that if there was someone in the Magnus Archives universe to have gone on this rant, it would have been Gerard Keay (Jurgen mentions being beaten up by an angry goth in this statement, this is the same Gerard).

Another fun fact: Gertrude is voiced by Sue Sims, Jonny's mother, and Jurgen Leitner by Paul Sims, Jonny's father.