it’s fascinating how, in the end, the group of survivors (excluding Jon, sort of) made the same choice as Jonah did. faced with the question of “do I have the right to doom the universe/many other universes to endless suffering to ensure my safety and comfort?” they both said yes, I do. Jonah definitely did more self-reflection than they did, but the end result is the same. it’s so great. no matter how much any of them hated Elias, they ended up siding with his view.
there’s a lot of discussion about how Jonah is not inherently evil, how his actions are actually deeply understandable and relatable once you stop to think about it, but there’s live examples of that within the show itself! except they are deprived of that freedom he was talking about so passionately—they don’t know what they did. they don’t want to. they are good people—aren’t they?—and they made the only choice there is—didn’t they? (these repressed feelings will haunt them forever)
ALTI do agree with this (and some other people in the tags saying it felt annoying to them). I feel like this is the issue with s5 in general; sometimes it does something interesting, but it feels accidental because it’s like the podcast itself doesn’t acknowledge it properly. I was trying to explain my issue with s5 jmart to someone who doesn’t listen to TMA and at some point I said “I know that it sounds like the text addresses what’s going on between them, but when you listen to it, it doesn’t actually feel like it does”.
there were some instances of that before s5 (the main one to me is the Jonah issue, by which I mean that they made an incredibly compelling character and then seemingly refused to use him to his full potential? though it’s also worse in s5), but it’s especially bad there. it’s probably partially because you’d expect that everything that was glossed over before to have a satisfying ending here, which largely didn’t happen.
I can’t really pinpoint what it is exactly that makes me feel that way, but I get what you’re talking about.