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.
