one of those

comics:

multi-part:

journalProject: cover, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (hiatus)

the umbrella aCATdemy: 1, 2, 3

comaclan: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

dragons: 1, 2

single-part:

worst plan (it's not a competition)

humans

video:

killed the radio star

party favor

drawings

collages

im at the point in the finale of s2 where harlan's starting to make it snow. and. i can't help but feel like the way the show is framing viktor going back to help him is so weird, and it's weird in the same way that the audience interpretation of five getting the briefcase is weird.

there's the dialogue around it (viktor: i know that he needs my help[...]for the first time in my life, i don't want to do it alone / diego: look im sorry, but we have other priorities). the context is that they're discussing the commission targeting them + they need to stay together, and viktor, instead of doing this, is going to the farm to help with harlan.

the weird part is that what harlan is doing Is apocalyptic and it Is To Scale with the things that they're discussing before, in fact so much so that the commission was planning to head there before they knew the umbrellas were going there. of course there's no way that viktor could have known specifically that (even though he might have had an inkling of what was going on due to his familiarity with his own powers) but still. the show frames this in almost a...selfish way. (not the negative connotation of selfish [though to be clear i am side-eyeing a little bit of how the show writes this aspect of his character ESPECIALLY in s4]*, more just in that this is something viktor is asking for while not offering anything himself, it's not transactional, it's not a deal or a threat in the way that a lot of interactions up until this point have been). but it's weird to me that even when viktor is bringing them on a rescue mission to a child in need, it's framed as something they're doing For Him and not like. what one would expect (the assertiveness of "you're heroes, this is what we Have to do to make things Right")

more than damaging to just that timeline harlan's whole Situation is shown the next season to actually transcend his immediate surroundings. and in season 3, with the way the time travel panned out, their actions in the 60's do in fact change their present, so even if the commission hadn't targeted harlan, likely he would have changed (or maybe even destroyed) enough things that they couldn't return to Normal 2019. so the counterfactual game is that had the family not gone (or had viktor listened to them and not gone at all) they might have actually jumped forward to An Apocalypse (à l'Harlan).

then that makes you think about various other things in season 1, ostensibly selfish and maybe tone-deaf things that viktor is asking for (concert tickets, forgiveness for the book without Actually Apologizing) but which. may have averted the apocalypse had they happened? we can't be sure but they sure are Framed that way, since he Is the apocalypse.

contrast this to. ok. five. five's end goal being the prevention of apocalypses. possibly The most altruistic goal out there. (yes, that line in s3 diego:"what's more important than family?"/five: "the apocalypse" does drive me crazy let's just chalk it up to s3 dialogue insanity and not think about it for now) in season 2 this manifests in that briefcase scene, which of course builds a lot of tension and is very frustrating in the end when none of the siblings sans like. klaus and luther (and ben) show up. im not necessarily blaming the show for this but i feel like this is often framed as a failure on the siblings' parts to show up. and it kind of is, seeing as the show goes to great lengths to show us that five is giving Everything including Every Waking Moment to get to Preventing The Apocalypse or Getting Everyone Back To The Right Time but the kicker is that the other siblings are put in extrenuous circumstances too, just. less pressing ones. replaying their flaw in s1 of not quite understaning the magnitude of their problem. and the second thing out of his favor is that many people theorize (and i agree) that the briefcase wasn't going to work the way he wanted to either, possibly transporting everyone to a Worse time or location. but since it's destroyed, we never see the consequence of what Could have been the show examining a flaw of five's.

it feels like two sides of the same coin on intent vs outcome. five's "your good intent may have doomed the outcome" vs viktor's "your selfish intent was somehow altruistic." and i think that worked for season 1 when the majority of the characters were early on in their development, mostly busy with their normal lives and hadn't quite caught on to the scope of what they were dealing with, but once you get to Season Three and the show still wants to punish the characters for growing and trying to be good people it started getting harsh and boring.

+the mutilated originals, now missing their birds