The age gap between Thragg and Nolan isn’t appreciated enough.
Mind you, Nolan hadn’t even been born yet when Thragg had already been established as Grand Regent for who knows how long before his birth.
Nolan had just turned 18 Viltrumite years old (whatever that even is) by the time he was infected with the scourge virus. At the same time we’re shown Thragg and Kregg alongside the other higher up Viltrumites trying to mitigate the effects of the damage the scourge is doing.
Not to mention the time Nolan spent working on expanding the Viltrumite occupation as he illustrated in his Novels. I mean chalk it up to character design if you want but it’s worth wondering how much time would have passed for him to start looking like this;
PLUS how long did it take for him to be assigned the mission to go to Earth? He looks visibly older courtesy of the change in his hair;
And we know it’s not an editing mistake because the show was pretty consistent with what Nolan looked like when he met Debbie;
(In the comics he doesn’t even have the age indicator of whitening hair)
So rewatching the scene with Thragg and Nolan trying to ‘negotiate’ feels so bizarre because the way Thragg starts it off so amicably with “It’s been too long Nolan” you would think they had been working side by side but that’s his Boss, worse, that’s the almost carmic being he’s been brainwashed to worship, the walking apex of his species, and the symbol of everything he believed in.
The dialogue afterwards is so telling:
N: What do you want Thragg
T: Simply to talk to an old friend.
N: Since when do we talk.
T: We’ve always talked. Some simply chose not to listen.
Their dialogue feels so detached from the supposed shared experience Thragg seems to be recalling to, and it’s clear that Thragg isn’t really referring to a time where he and Nolan were literally talking to each other one on one because of his follow up use of the plural term ‘some’, but rather the times he would talk AT him along with all the other Viltrumites conditioned to obey him.
Note the emphasis of Thragg holding out his hand to Nolan. It’s a gesture the show clearly wants us to pay attention to since we get THREE different angles of it;
It feels so coercive and condescending when speculating the amount of time that would have passed since their last meeting which arguably wouldn’t have been face to face even if Nolan was regarded highly amongst Viltrumites.
(I argue Nolan only appeared on Thraggs radar when he started working against the Empire, after his capture on Thraxa and since there were so few Viltrumites left.
Otherwise Nolan would’ve been treated like the other disposable soldiers. Just a means to expand Viltrum until he’s not deemed strong enough via being killed in combat. As is the Viltrumite code of conduct.)
So this gesture feels like Thragg is trying to placate Nolan as if he’s some irrational runaway child, “come home Nolan, come home and all will be forgiven”, even the repetition of ‘come home’ is chant-like, perhaps Thragg is attempting to gage if there’s a part of Nolan that is still susceptible to being groomed back into the Viltrumite Ideology.
The obvious framing of Nolan looking up at Thragg not only reveals their former dynamic as subject and regent, but also shows Thraggs active attempt to reassert those roles.
This only further emphasises their age difference because it makes Thragg seem so out of touch and deeply deluded in his mentality. I mean it’s so on the nose, a younger open minded dude vs a close-minded old man.
For all the sentiments about Thragg being a cool headed, callous, and calculated Villain, he sure seems to fit the stereotypically crazed, easily rattled, and overly defensive paranoid old ruler archetype. All of which this scene subtly hints to with him briefly losing his composure
Alongside being so far gone he repeatedly disregards Nolan’s efforts to reason with him.
Compare this frame with the one below, before their fight begins;
They are both level and in frame as it’s finally made clear to Thragg that Nolan can no longer be persuaded or rather manipulated into joining him.
I put ‘negotiate’ in quotation marks for a reason because that scene isn’t actually depicting two men negotiating a volatile situation instead it’s akin to a young man trying to convince a really elderly one that he has made and is continuing to make a deranged mistake of trying to keep up the facade of Viltrumites being unstoppable.
Neither of them are operating from a place where the other can begin to consider reasonable which could only come from such vastly different experiences in life hence them having such a GIGANTIC age gap.
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