WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Archive 81, now streaming on Netflix.
In Season 1 of Netflix’s Archive 81, Dan (Mamoudou Athie) played a sinister game with the boss who hired him to restore footage from the Visser hotel fire decades before. The businessman, Virgil (Martin Donovan), seemed genuinely interested in solving the mystery of the blaze, but Dan discovered he was the brother of a cultist living there at the time, Samuel (Evan Jonigkeit).
However, while the eight episodes, which spanned different timelines and dimensions, suggested Samuel and Virgil were never on the same page, key clues were dropped which might suggest they’re actually the same person.
Now, Dan never really found out the family history of the brothers. All he knew was that in the ’90s, Samuel wanted to use a woman with the Baldung witch blood in her, Melody, to open a portal. Samuel hoped a dark god, Kaelego, would come over to Earth and remake the planet as a paradise for himself and the other acolytes, however, the ritual backfired as Samuel didn’t have all the tools.
Shockingly, in footage Dan recovered just before the resulting explosion, he saw both Samuel and Virgil talking to each other after a junkie committed suicide. The latter was trying to help expose Samuel to Melody, which left folks wondering if anyone threw him off the building. It may well be that Virgil was the perp, because Melody and Samuel were both talking on the streets when the body fell in front of them. What’s quite intriguing is that Virgil looked the same back then as he did in the present, which Dan didn’t notice. Thus, rather than helping his brother out, he may have been helping protect his own identity. Admittedly, later on in the show, Virgil confessed he wanted the footage to open a portal himself so his company could seek resources and energy out from the dark dimension, indicating he didn’t care for Samuel’s cult or their demonic alien.
But again, this could be his way of throwing Dan off the scent. After all, why would he not have told Dan he had a brother who seemingly perished in the fire when the rift was opened back then? The most telling piece of evidence of Virgil is indeed Samuel, though, came in the final moments of the season when Dan got into the portal and found Melody in the Otherworld. However, it was Samuel, who was trapped there too, that grabbed her and threw her into 2021.
The portal closed, locking Dan in, but it was never revealed what happened to Samuel. It stands to reason, if he wanted out, he could have gotten out too. Instead, with Dan stuck in ’94 now, Samuel may be using the dimension to hop around space and time, growing old to become Virgil and knowing all the info needed to be a puppet master. It’d explain how Virgil built his empire, why he’s not obsessed with bringing his brother back, and why he didn’t keep security guards with him.
Virgil manipulating everyone as part of a closed time loop would be a similar twist to Dark, where a time-hopping Jonas eventually grew up to be the scarred Adam, sending intel and people across many timelines for his endgame. In Virgil’s case, once he uses the only person he could trust — his younger self — he’d get the Baldung witches, the tuning fork, the Kaelego statue, the proper inaction and all the missing pieces of the puzzle to complete his goal of opening a portal with no explosion, and Kaelego coming over to bless him with a gift.
To see how Virgil could be Samuel in disguise, stream all eight episodes on Netflix.
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