Archive 81

During the first two attempts the gate didnt open until after they'd killed the sacrifice. The mom witch did all the rest of the steps but skipped the sacrifice. And the gate opened anyway.

I know they hand waved this with "i'm just opening the gate" but they don't explain why the gate opened for her but not either of the other times.

On an unrelated note, it seems pretty clear the ritual needs to be done outside instead of in a basement, so when the fire part of it goes off the building doesnt fall down on top of it. I mean, they successfully conjured Kalaego twice but he never made it out into the world, both times the building collapsed in a fire at the end of the ceremony. Its like they succeeded but ultimately failed, both times.

Or maybe Kalaego has no intention of coming through and its all a trick to get his loyal followers to feed him sacrifices?

yeah, hard to say. she says the lacked the key.. a tuning fork. but, they did have tuning forks.. and she also implies the fork was used to tune into the right frequency.. which, they did dial the right dimension...
I'm not sure any of that made much sense. some other more likely stuff, is "the demon is lonely". so presumably the door was only one way. The difference being her door was both ways. also, since it was an artificial comet, perhaps the demon simply wasn't ready for the door to open.

theres a few other ways I would have liked to see the ending go. like, that no longer being Melody. 20 years in a demon dimension. that would have been the demon just pretending to be her. That could have been the demon meat puppeting her. That could have been her totally corrupted into a loyal wife/slave of the demon.

what happened to Iris Vos? like here, she shows up in the gate, when opened the second time. why? was she in league with the demon at this point? controlled? why would the demon have let her near the doorway? she wasn't pregnant and didn't have kids? so it didn't give her, her wish. did I miss something with her? why wasn't she still in there, the third time?

Did "archive 81" ever get explained? was it just supposed to be the name of the tapes being auctioned? I think the title hurt this.

I would kindof like to see more movies/tv take this from the other side. like, midnight mass kindof does it the same. they touch upon the cultists backstories. but don't REALLY dive into it, in the way they should. Think about it. imagine if you came across some supernatural being, or event. something undeniably real. atheisms is wrong. Christianity is wrong. not many films really explore someone finding the truth like this. platos cave. from the point of view of the new cultist. They don't even have to be an entity with enmity.
like, Apostle and the druid/forest god. The druid was not evil, the cultists fucked it up. The Ritual from the villagers perspective. the god testing people. forcing them to face their traumas. Starry eyes kindof does this, with evil outcome.

There is also the video playing. Melody's mother said the video was thinning the veil which is why he almost got through the computer screens. So I guess that's also part of the reason they didn't need a sacrifice. Basically it seems like anything can call to him and start to meld the dimensions together as long as it involves belief in him in the first place. The stuff with Lillian Voss is inexplicable though. For real why wasnt she there when Dan went in and where did Samuel go when pulled Melody back through? And how come the demon is trapped behind doors even in his own world?

They didn't need to kill anyone because they weren't trying to summon the demon, only open the portal. At least this was their rationale in not needing to kill someone. The tuning rod wasn't any different than the early cultists used, she just actually had one, and made a point of telling the black dude, "hey, you can't do this without a tuning rod stupid, aren't you glad I showed up to help." I don't think there is much reason to try and figure out anything else, nothing was explained.

Show was pretty good and had a creepy vibe till the end. Was a bit of a let down during the ending though. Was there any reason stated why they couldn't just re-open the portal? Since it was all synthetic materials, you'd think she could just cut her other hand and try again. Also Samuel dragged her into the portal, where'd he go? I guess it is set up for a S2 now and all that will be answered. With a lot of the mystery gone, I am not sure they can keep the creepy vibe going still.

Seems almost like the show Dark with multiple time loops and people traveling between them. I'm guessing there's 3 (maybe 4?) portals. The 1994 one, then 2021 one, and the 1928 (or whatever) one. MAYBE the 15th century one with the original Balvung as well. So Dan goes from 2021---> 1994. Melody goes from 1994--->2021. Iris maybe went from 1928--->1994 (guessing she vanished during the explosion). The Samuel probably went from 1994--->1928 OR the original Balvung ritual in the 15th century. Kind of sets up season 2 as concurrent story in multiple timelines, a lot like Dark.

Does Annabelle have her own camera? As far as I could tell, Melody had her camera at the seance the whole time, yet, at the end of episode we see the recording of one of Annabelles drawnings on the monitor at the LMG estate place.