I can’t stop thinking about Jon’s reaction to hearing about Naomi Herne’s complaint:
He reacts with absolute hostility, fully embodying the rudeness that Naomi Herne reported him for. And then he deflects in a way that outwardly puts the blame on Rosie, but which also implies that Naomi getting upset was the inevitable result of Jon dealing with her. Jon is bad with people. He’s rude and unpleasant, and that makes people upset with him. He knows.
Except…none of that is true of the way Jon talks to Naomi Herne. He isn’t rude to her in any way. He listens to her. He doesn’t get angry with her even when she directly insults him. He says he doesn’t believe her, but he still treats her gently, and he does try to help her.
From the beginning of her statement, Naomi is the one who is rude to Jon. She insults the tape recorders and the Institute, and she gets angry when Jon doesn’t give her the answer she wants. The heart of her complaint has nothing to do with Jon’s behavior, and more to do with the fact that she wanted to hear the words, “I believe you” and didn’t.
It breaks my heart how Jon clearly doesn’t realize that. He doesn’t even try to defend himself against the complaint, he just immediately agrees that he was rude to her. Jon is so used to people not liking him that it never even occurs to him that their reasons might be completely unfair
I keep listening to it, and it really seems like Jon’s is genuinely trying to be gentle and pleasant with Naomi. He knows what it’s like to have a run-in with something supernatural. He knows, better than probably anyone else Naomi has spoken to, what it’s like to recover from something like that.
Jon does lie to Naomi about believing her story. (He tells her that it was probably a reaction to the trauma she’d been going through, but then in the follow-up, he lists a lot of evidence confirming that it actually happened. Not to mention the fact that her statement won’t record digitally.) I think a lot of people take that, along with him suggesting that Naomi see a mental health specialist as proof that he’s simply being rude and dismissing her out of hand. But his tone is so much gentler than when he’s picking apart the written statements, and honestly, everything about Naomi’s statement points to her needing to get a good therapist.
Naomi gets angry at Jon because he won’t say, without a hint of doubt, that he believes her. (Which he was never going to do because, like he says in 39, acknowledging that the Bad Things is something that scares him.)
She yells at him. Even though Jon really tried, he failed the interaction. Then Naomi files a complaint, and now Elias, who Jon still desperately wants to impress and prove himself to, also knows that Jon failed. So? Jon pretends that he didn’t try. He talks about Naomi with all the hostility that would have justified a complaint.
At the end of the meeting with Elias, Jon assures him that he’ll “be more lovely,” and that more than anything else breaks my heart in this scene. Jon doesn’t really sound like he means it, and how could he mean it? He was already trying to be “lovely” to Naomi, and it failed. What else is he supposed to do?
