the thing that continues to make me the MOST unwell about season 5 is how s5 jon is essentially tim. he is preoccupied with revenge; he is desperate to sacrifice himself because he sees no way to live beyond the circumstances in which he finds himself trapped; he wants most of all to cause suffering that has meaning as a response to all the meaningless suffering he has witnessed. whereas s1/2 jon’s most prominent characteristic was that he didn’t have the stomach for the archivist position, s5 finale jon does not hesitate to kill jonah magnus when the time comes. it is not an efficient murder; it is a blow each for sasha, for tim, for gertrude, for “all the others” who didn’t want to die but did. it is not a strategic killing; it is a revenge killing. it is revenge for everyone jon has lost, including many past versions of himself. jon also didn’t want to die but did; he became something that horrified him and lived past what he felt was the point his life should have ended many times over, which is in itself a kind of death. to live on past meaning, past connection and justice, past any hope of a livable future; this is a death, and it is a death that jon is determined to make someone answer for.
as girard says above, one of the classic tragic elements is that each protagonist thinks themselves above mimetic violence only to become caught up in it as the plot progresses. s3 jon thinks of tim as a loose cannon whose unpredictability and preoccupation with vengeance is immature and inconvenient, especially when taken in context with the rest of the archive staffers’ ability to play the long game and wait for what they think is the right moment to strike. s5 jon, on the other hand, clearly parallels tim in his desire to hurt those who have hurt him and the way he approaches his own death as a foregone conclusion. s5 jon has to die because tim has already died; jon is dead from the beginning of s5 because tim and so many others have already died. s5 is simply jon fulfilling tim’s revenge arc, the same knife wielded by another.
and yet even as jon drives home the blade that is guided by tim’s hand, jonah magnus has already achieved what he set out to achieve; he has released the fears, seen as the eye sees, he has “had the most wonderful dream.” revenge never comes on time; the tragedy of jon and tim is that tim was too early, and jon was too late.
“in the transference of revenge from the dead to those who survive, questions of duty, justice, and loyalty are amplified, while a vibrant and eminently theatrical territory of ghosts, dream-visions, and graveyards opens up […] the displacement of revenge from one character to another creates a structure of obligations which modifies the economy of vengeance […] it is an observable fact that, until revenge is exacted, those close to an injured or murdered person feel the guilt or shame of betrayal. the structure of displaced agency is not free from irony. if the victim of an injury resembles his opponent in the act of vengeance, the revenger who assumes the burden of another person’s resentment suspends his own identity. his predicament is imposed on him, and to know this is a part of his plight. injured by another […] he is forced to adopt a role. his qualities colour the drama of which he is part; tragedy can mourn the waste which follows from the narrowing down of his personality to the bare demands of actions; but for as long as he remains a revenger the proportions of the acts he engages in are determined by an injury he never gave or a request he did not make.”
“those who kill in revenge are so often, in their pale and worn desperation, ‘more dead than living,’ bearers of death if not 'undead.’ their affinity with the realm beyond life is what brings ghosts [and] revengers together”
- john kerrigan, revenge tragedy: aeschylus to armageddon
