I’ve already said on here multiple times how Martin’s season 5 development was all over the place. But now that I think about it, Jon was also underdeveloped.
Some time ago I’ve said that it felt like Martin was needed in s5 so that Jon, as an all-seeing being, could explain things that he knew to him and the audience. But besides the fact that he’s all-seeing and barfing up horrors and it feels even more awful than reading the statements, there isn’t much said about how it impacts him as a person. We don’t know exactly what is it that he sees, all we get is brief glimpses of horror that he describes aloud when overloaded with information.
The audience stays in the dark in regards to Jon and his thought process. He doesn’t talk to the tapes about anything other than the horror surrounding them which is only needed so that the audience knows where the episode is meant to play out. and it doesn’t really have any importance to the plot other than to set a scene. Plus since Martin actively shuts him up whenever he tries to say something about the Fears themselves, we can’t even know any of the more basic info that Jon is said to be aware of. The audience is just suddenly locked out of Jon’s pov and instead we got the Jon-Martin relationship treating them as a singular entity, with Jon only filling the role of the “inhuman” partner.
It’s like. Up to this point, the audience got to consistently witness Jon’s development. When we met him, he was putting up the skeptic act. Then we saw his fear-induced paranoia. Then he was staying over at an ex-girlfriends house and frantically searching for clues. Then was the whole operation to stop the Unknowing. After that there was Jon’s coma, and the audience got to see him be slowly consumed by his patron and be abandoned and hated by nearly all his coworkers. We got first row seats to whatever he was going through at the moment.
But for the majority of season 5 all that we are presented with is the JonMartin apocalyptic hike, Jon slaying some of the avatars they come across, and Martin complaining about how scary it all is and how the avatars are evil. Maybe I’m wrong, but the only few moments the audience got to actually see Jon’s point of view and the self-hatred that being the one who started the apocalypse have forced upon him was when he got repeatedly ignored during the discussion regarding his life and the fate of the universe.
Idk maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s just because I dislike the way season 5 was written. But I feel like in most of the episodes JonMartin were reduced to just being a couple.