File #116 (S3-36) - "The Show Must Go On"

[Oneiros]

OR: "Stranger gambits"

Things are gearing up in the Archives, as our team make ready to take on The Stranger and try to stop the Unknowing. But Elias has some choice words from Gertrude, and it doesn't look like Martin or Melanie will be going along for the ride. The stakes are high and the risks even higher, plus there's the matter of any 'rogue' elements...

Seriously creepy episode this week - one of the strongest statements of the season, I feel. The lyricism of the speech, especially as Janssen's viewpoint gets twisted by the Stranger... really excellent. And kudos to Jonny for yet again taking a historical event and managing to find a new way to skew it - the Mechanical Turk always was a bit of an odd thing, but now, even more so.

So, what next for our intrepid team? Should Elias be making plans to replace the Archivist? Is that why he agreed to Martin staying back? And just what is Martin's plan?

Get ready - I have a feeling the finale is going to be explosive, in more ways than one.

[julian]

This episode was, indeed.... uh.... it was.....
You know, when I was in university, decades past, we had a fellow who was a 'perpetual student', that is, he had several derees but never could pull away from the life of a student, so as soon as he finished a series of courses, he would enroll again. He was a charming, kind fellow but it was known that he was a great fan of hallucinogenic recreation.Mushrooms, and various acid related things filled his weekends. So Herbert would sometimes be telling a fascinating story about his youth, growing up as his father traveled in India, later in Cambodia, back to Germany - and he wsa an superb storyteller. But occasionally, he would be getting to a deeply involved prt of a story, and then with no warning, would shift into a third person narrative about someone working an an olive grove and the unique shoes that the man wore, which came from a small village in France, but had been left in an unclaimed baggage depot in New York, and lots of people went there and found incredible deals on things.... so those of us who had been following him closely, were suddenly adrift in the ozone layers of a reality which only he could perceive.
Yep. That was the way tonight's story hit me.

[archer93]

The surreality of the account sounds like something out of Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, albeit some 150 years earlier! Artaud's meaning of cruelty was about the shattering of a sense of reality rather than about the infliction of pain, which wouldn't totally clash with the Slaughter (inflicting pain for the sake of pain is definitely the Desolation). And shattering reality could be seen as antithetical to the Stranger, which depends on a sense of reality in order to have something to Not-Be? If nothing is familiar, nothing can be said to be unfamiliar.
Also- possible cross reference between Those Who Sing The Night in MAG53 and Janssen's reference to "the part of [him] that sang no hymns"?

(Drama and Theatre Studies background here. You can graduate any time you like, but you can never leave!)