I know we all laugh at Jon for taking one look at the Arachnophobia statement (MAG016) and going “DRUGS. POPPYCOCK. HUMBUG.” but like-
This is early s1 Jon who has stated out loud that he believed his colleagues might try to haze him, who is afraid people might knowingly try to get to him.
Jon’s prissy, high and mighty attitude after the statement ends might just be him performing confidence to the people he knows has free access to the tape - his fellow archive workers. Especially after his earlier slip ups (wondering about hazings and oh, wanting to personally screen every new statement before the research department can even start working on them).
If you think about the statement as a fake planted by a coworker who wants to humiliate him, it’s chilling. It has so, so many details that run parallel to Jon’s own life, that we can safely presume nobody at the archives should know about given how private Jon seems to be.
Even disregarding the obvious - that would be the supernatural childhood spider trauma - there’s the lonely, workaholic existence, the smoking, the childhood wandering, the feeling of having your body controlled by an outside force, a goddamn cat named after a military rank.
Who knows what other details fit perfectly with Jon’s life that we as the audience don’t know about.
And the statement giver is looking into getting psychiatric help. He’s trying to establish if he’s in need of anti-psychotic medication. To the audience this might seem as a pretty grounded and potentially positive way to try to move past the trauma of the spider haunting.
But to Jon? Who is holding a piece of paper in his hand with something that could represent proof that someone is looking into his life? It might as well be calling him insane.
Jon was deeply marked by the Spiral by the end of it all, wasn’t he.
Also, like, reminder that Jon, deep down, knew the statement was real because he wasn’t able to make a digital recording of it.
His two alternatives in this situation was to be in denial about it and direct his unease and ire at his immediate surroundings… or accepting and internalising that the cause of his childhood trauma is still out there, killing people just like him.
You know what - I read your tags and I could literally hear in my brain the tone of Grandma Sims going “don’t be ridiculous, Jonathan”
The way she might sigh, or roll her eyes, or-
And like
I think that is especially impactful because I absolutely think Jon cared about her opinion, in lack of any other. He didn’t rebel like a lot of us do when we’re young - he never tried to distance himself from the things his grandmother stood for. He did the OPPOSITE. He tried to emulate her. He tried to live up to her expectations.
He berated himself when he made mistakes, because that’s what she would have done. He faked being a full decade older to make himself seem more authorative and experienced, because in his grandmother’s home, that’s how you got to have a say in important matters.
She worked hard, she pretended to be fine to onlookers, she did things even if they were painful, she didn’t ask for help and Jon looked at her and thought “that’s what an adult is”.
hnghgk. come to think of it, this reading of Jon’s grandmother would mean that a lot of his best traits – his moral sense, his sometimes overboarding empathy, how he handles deep loss and insurmountable odds by carrying on and just trying to do the best that he can with what he is given – are echoes of her, things he learned and admired about her
