Helen Magnus
Dr. Helen Magnus is the protagonist and central character of the Canadian fantasy-science fiction television series Sanctuary. She is portrayed by Amanda Tapping. In the series, Magnus is a biologist from Victorian era England, who currently runs the global Sanctuary Network, an organization tasked with finding a series of creatures called "abnormals", and later bringing them to a Sanctuary base for refuge, to protect them from the human population. The character is over two and a half centuries old, having been given her advanced longevity by injecting herself with vampire blood, as well as reliving the 20th century from temporal displacement. After traveling back in time, Magnus had to avoid people, so she isolated herself. In the season 4 finale "Sanctuary For None: Part 2", it was revealed that Magnus spent the 113 years creating a new Sanctuary.
Tapping was offered a part in the original web series by series creator Damian Kindler and director Martin Wood. It became the actress' first regular role since playing Samantha Carter on Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis for eleven years. She initially had difficulty playing Magnus as her personality greatly differed from Carter. She also dyed her hair darker and spoke with an English accent throughout the run, as she herself was born in England. In addition, Tapping serves as the series executive producer and on some occasions, director.
Magnus and Tapping's portrayal of the character received generally mixed reactions from critics, with the negative comments pointing toward's Tapping's accent. However, Tapping was nominated for four awards, one Gemini Award and three Leo Awards, for her role as Helen Magnus, winning a Leo Award for "Best Lead Performance by a Female in a Dramatic Series" in 2009 for the episode "Requiem".
Character arc
Background
Helen Magnus was born on August 27, 1850 to Gregory Magnus and Patricia Heathering. Her father was regarded as a controversial medical researcher of his time, and exposed his daughter to his profession when she was a child. Years later, she helped form a secret group known as "the Five", along with John Druitt, Nikola Tesla, James Watson and Nigel Griffin at Oxford University. Each member voluntarily injected themselves with pure vampire blood, a species that had become extinct centuries before. This granted each member unique abilities. Magnus' ability was longevity, allowing her to live several times longer than any normal human. At this point she entered a relationship with Druitt, whose ability is personal teleportation. However, he became insane and murdered several prostitutes, thereby becoming Jack the Ripper. They did conceive a child. Magnus later took the embryo and froze it.By the turn of the 20th century, her research with the abnormal population went into full swing, and she founded the Sanctuary Network. To get the funding she needed, the Prime Minister reunited the Five to stop and kill Adam Worth, who was turned down as a sixth member and blamed the Five for the death of his daughter, from releasing a toxin in London. In the season two episode "Next Tuesday", Magnus states she was a passenger on the RMS Titanic in 1912. In July 1944, she worked with the French Resistance in Normandy to prevent the Nazis from controlling a fire elemental before D-Day. She then charged the head Sanctuary in Old City, a fictional city in the Pacific Northwest, during which she decided to use the embryo to bear her daughter, Ashley. On one of her expeditions, she saved a young Will Zimmerman from a dangerous abnormal, but failed to capture it before it killed his mother.
Season one
In the first season of the show, Magnus appoints an adult Will, a forensic psychiatrist who worked for the Old City Police Department, to become her new protégé, which he eventually accepts. Druitt returns to the Sanctuary to ask Magnus to cure him from an unknown affliction; Magnus tricks him into injecting poison, though Druitt escapes. Later, in "The Five", it would be revealed that Druitt survived, and Tesla was able to suppress his insanity. In "Fata Morgana", she becomes aware of an underground organization known as the Cabal, who plot to control all abnormals for their own gain, and in several episodes throughout the first season, will become her and her organization's primary focus. In "Requiem", Magnus becomes exposed to an aggressive parasite in the Bermuda Triangle when going with Will to see a group of mermaids who massacred each other because of the same parasite. To stop Magnus from killing Will and herself, Will locks her in a cabin in the submarine, and drains all the oxygen, killing her. She is later revived after Will captures the escaping parasite. In the two-part season finale "Revelations", the Cabal launch a bioweapon called "Lazarus", which causes any exposed abnormal to attack humans. To combat this, Magnus regroups the Five to Bhalasaam, a lost city, to recover the source blood. However, by the end Magnus is distressed to learn that the Cabal have turned Ashley against her and the team and steals the blood sample.Season two
The second season begins six weeks after the end of the first, where Magnus works hard to defeat the Cabal and save Ashley, whom the Cabal transformed to a vampire-hybrid superabnormal, one of six tasked to destroy the Sanctuary Network. When the superabnormals arrive at the Old City Sanctuary, Magnus is able to get through to Ashley, who recognises her in time to save her from another superabnormal, and then teleports. Because an electromagnetic field is active, it would mean whoever teleports inside would be vaporized. Despite this, Magnus believes Ashley's life energy may be in the electromagnetic field's buffer. When it does not, she is forced to accept that Ashley has died. Because of her death, and other loved ones because of her longevity, she tried to find a way to age at a normal rate again. She finds an elixir used by the Mayans in Honduras, but it has the side effect of turning humans into zombie-like creatures. After being shown the potential consequences of the elixir's release by an incorporeal guardian, she decides to leave it behind.Later on in the season, her leadership of the Sanctuary Network would be called into question by the other heads of house. In "Veritas", she sets up an elaborate scheme to apprehend a telepath named Emma, whom she suspects of working against the Network. In the scheme, Magnus forges a mental illness and fakes the murder of her butler, Bigfoot, and makes Emma believe she kept alive Big Bertha, the most dangerous abnormal on Earth, which Magnus was thought to have killed. However, it is revealed in the season finale "Kali", Magnus did indeed keep her alive in secrecy, but sedated, as she believes that killing Bertha would jeopardize the planet. When Big Bertha is being controlled by Edward Forsythe, Magnus attempts to sedate Big Bertha again, but by then, Terrence Wexford overrides her authority and assumes control of the network. His attempt to kill Bertha only succeeds in angering her, and she launches a tsunami.
Season three
The third season begins with Magnus forcing Wexford to step down as head of the Sanctuary Network, thereby putting herself back in command, while the rest of the team deal with the tsunami. Though they are not happy that Big Bertha is still alive, the other Sanctuary house heads decide to keep Magnus in charge, while also firing Wexford for breaking several protocols. She learns from Will that when he talked to Kali, the avatar manifestation of Big Bertha, into stopping the tsunami, he saw her father, who left her clues leading to a map leading to Hollow Earth, thought to be the home of every abnormal species on the planet. In "Breach" Magnus learns Adam Worth is still alive, and he also intends to find Hollow Earth, having been there before and resurrected. After finding an entrance to Hollow Earth in Tibet, she and the team venture to the underground city of Praxis, where leader Ranna executes her and her team for trespassing. However, they are later resurrected as she wants their help in saving the city, which is facing destruction because a hyperspecies abnormal is not controlling the city's geothermal energy. After saving it, Magnus and her team and Ranna part in good terms. It is also revealed Worth also came to the city to steal a power source with unlimited capabilities. Though it was assumed Druitt killed him before he could leave with it, it is later revealed in the season finale that Druitt kept him alive and that he is using the power source to create a time machine and cure his daughter's leukemia, which could cause untold consequences on the planet. His first failed attempt causes the destruction of Praxis, and a time dilation bubble in Carentan, France. Magnus fails to stop him from succeeding, but does follow him through a time portal to London in 1898.Season four
Magnus pursues Worth throughout London to stop him from curing his daughter Imogene, who is meant to die in the timeline. During the pursuit she tries to avoid her past self, but fails to stop encountering Watson, who quickly discovers she is from his future, but he promises to keep quiet for the sake of preserving the timeline. When Worth chases Magnus later he accidentally kills Imogene, restoring the timeline. After killing Worth, Magnus ends up in hiding for the next 113 years before she can resurface to help Will dealing with a mass of Abnormals invading the surface. In the season finale, it is revealed that Helen had been secretly working with several important figures of the 20th Century, including Albert Einstein and Buckminster Fuller amongst others, and had built a new underground Sanctuary.Characterization
The Syfy website describes Magnus as a "beautiful and enigmatic" character who has "devoted her life to the practical research of cutting edge medicine and science". Her work is to explore the world of abnormals. While the rest of the world dismissed them as monstrous figments of their imaginations and elements of childhood nightmares, Magnus realizes that they are the world's triumphs and mistakes. Magnus hence becomes their protector, but in some cases, their captor. She is also described as "bold and straightforward, brave and no-nonsense, yet she remains proudly true to her formal Victorian English sensibilities". Portraying actress Amanda Tapping described Magnus as a "crazy character" who is "very eccentric and very sexy and very unapologetic".Magnus "adores her daughter Ashley, respecting her independence and self-reliance – but that doesn't preclude some occasional mother-daughter friction". Tapping has said that there is a "huge amount of respect" between the two characters, adding "Ashley knows that when her mother says she needs to do something then she says it for a reason. And Magnus has a huge amount of respect for Ashley because Ashley can do things that she can't." Magnus made a hard choice of having Ashley even though she does not have her mother's longevity, and Magnus would outlive her daughter. In the first season, Magnus recruits Will as her protégé. When asked what Magnus thinks of Will, Tapping stated "I think Helen finds him fascinating. He's so idealistic, she sees in him all the qualities that she admires, but all the qualities that she knows will probably get beaten out of him over the course of time. His idealism and purity of thought and the way he analyses things ... she absolutely respects that, but I think she also realises that there's going to come a time when he's going to become a bit jaded ... There are a couple of episodes where there's been this bizarre sexual tension between the two of them ... but generally there's just a huge healthy respect." During a Blastr interview in 2011, Tapping further explains Magnus' relationship with Will; "I love how this relationship has developed. "It's been a really organic transformation of Will's character and Magnus. To actually bring somebody on board who, initially, it's all about teaching him the ropes. And then as the seasons have gone on he's come into his own. He's come into his own as a scientist. He's come into his own in terms of his relationship with the people in the Sanctuary." Dunne meanwhile stated "there's a nice synchronicity that has formed between the two characters. And really, they're two people that depend on each other for survival. And therefore, that's where the respect comes out of."