How did you feel about the tma finale? I thought it was fine but after all of Jonny's warnings that "it will be sooo tragic don't get your hopes up" I was kind of disappointed by how mild it was. Nothing against a hopeful finale but it felt a little bit like it fizzled out. Any thoughts as a Tragedy Enjoyer (tm)?
You know I’m just theorizing, but as someone who has only a fraction of a fraction of the audience TMA has and is a Tragedy Writer, I’ve seen how a portion of an audience can get really intense and antsy about “if this has a sad ending I can’t take it.” My impression is the TMA audience was both large and had a lot of interaction with the writers so like, I’ll bet Jonny heard that kind of thing hundreds of times. I could easily see that becoming like “the safety of my mental health is your responsibility” kind of message from a lot of people, which could really push someone to err on the side of over-warning about the ending.
My overall thoughts on s5 are… hard to pin down? I do think it’s my least favorite season, but not because of any quality drop but because I just kind of didn’t love the structure of it, I think. The sort of linear “we’re questing to London” structure… I dunno.
A number of the stand-alone horror statements were some of the strongest in the whole series, I think! Rosie’s statement about working for Elias all these years and Knowing something was wrong but just remaining complicit–excellent, loved that one. Jared Boneturner’s one about twisting people’s body dysmorphia against them with flower metaphors really hit. The meat processing plant one with the years worth of lines. The hospital that would try to make you better or worse on a whim each day. And I loved the reveal about The Spider pulling the strings all along. I was totally fooled thinking the tape recorders were just The Eye’s way of snooping, but the fact that they were The Spider’s web all along *chef’s kiss*.
Oh also I loved that Jon could smite people. Good for him.
But it’s. hmmm. It reminds me a little bit of a problem with later-season Supernatural, where they’d killed off near the entire recurring cast save for like 4 people. Just steadily lost people to be invested in. Sasha’s dead. Tim’s dead. Daisy’s dead. Bigger antagonists like Peter are dead. Eliajonah spent 90% of the season in the gay baby panopticon (and killing him happened… kinda way too fast and short for me? Jonah was really the main antagonist and planned this for 2 centuries and puppeted Jon into becoming The Beholding’s Special Little Boy but he didn’t have a countermeasure for Being Beholded by said Special Boy?) Helen was fun but then Jon killed her! :< Georgie and Melanie were gone for most of the season too. Basira was the only kinda-regularly-present central character. And you know it’s always kinda been The Jon Show, but there was a little more fun in that when Jon was being a stuck-up curmudgeon. He’s… understandably… a bit more of a downer in s5. (Also found myself liking Martin a little less this season, but can’t pin down why exactly.) Oh and, VERY much just a personal thing: but the way Jon would need to compulsively make statements just sat uncomfortably with me. Basira was joking about the bathroom metaphor but it really was like that.
Also THIS part is inevitable and there would be literally no way to avoid this - so much of TMA was built up as a mystery and now that we have most of the answers in s5 there’s just. less to be intrigued about. We have most of the puzzle pieces so there’s not much left to theorize about. And besides The Spider reveal, there wasn’t really anything in s5 that was able to surprise me. The ending felt very straight-forward. And I figured from just about the beginning of the series Jon wasn’t gonna survive to the end so that didn’t surprise me. I was kinda thinking it might do one of those “we take the 3rd option!” things where they neither follow The Spider’s plan nor Jon’s plan but.
Anyway! I relistened to Angler Fish yesterday and it DOES hit much harder with retrospect