#poor five

Spoilers for S1-S4

I still don’t know if I like this pairing, but I’ve thought a lot about Steve Blackman’s (TUA main producer and writer) comment about Five needing a love arc this seasons;

totally ignoring the fact that a lot of Five’s arcs are love related (he loves his sibling so much he’ll do anything to protect them and he showed his love and determination with Dolores before this - Five’s whole character is about how deeply he loves) .

So, he’s also a massive hypocrite because Five’s whole character is also fucking TRAGIC, his deep love for his family fucks him over and over again and eventually kills him after this. He arguably wasted his life trying to save himself and his siblings from a tragic but ultimately inevitable death.

And his love for Lila was also fucking tragic because she rejected and possibly used him in the end. His first real heartbreak at 71 years old and it destroys his relationship with one of his closest siblings (yes, he literally saves Diego’s ass the most and then suddenly hates him in the finale??) and they both die full of hate.

That’s trauma, Steve Blackman, how could you think this was a good reward for Five’s character after everything (yes he said this too)??

Five literally named his wife misery (Delores’s name means misery) and dedicated most of his life to her.

I’m crying about Five agony and trauma again. I loved you and you’ve been through much in the story but now also in the writers’ room which I could never protect you from.

Jody: What? How?

It's not just the big things, either. It is those things too, of course, and they're the things he thinks about. Becoming an assassin. Being a child soldier. Every jump through time, every new apocalypse, every broken timeline. It's all those things.

But it was also just the decision to keep living after the first jump, and everything that entailed. Resources were scarce, and had to be rationed. Every bite destroyed it forever, could no longer be saved for when he was even hungrier later, and the relief never really lasted that long. When he had to resort to cockroaches, they were one of the few living creatures left. Maybe he respected them for being like him, survivors, and hated the fact that he killed them, as if he were killing a version of himself each time.

It's the way he would wear down his boots to nothing until he could feel pavement on his feet, because he walked so much, and he got attached to even the smallest comfortable familiarities. The world was all his, but it wasn't, really. There were so few things he kept. Every time he picked up a new pair of boots, or goggles, or clothes, he was reminded of how he wore down the last one to nothing, how he actively ruined a thing he cared about just by using it. He would always watch Dolores carefully for awhile afterwards, so delicate, afraid he would wear her down and away too.

It's the way he would get injuries large and small, sicknesses and wounds alike. Each choice he made could lead to pain, to unproductivity, to a slow death that meant the end of the world was a forever thing. He couldn't afford that, and each scar became not only a mark of survival, but also of poor judgement, miscalculation. The world was not the thing destroying him, not really, only the choices he made. After all, the end of the world was the result of a choice he made, because he is destructive, no matter how hard he tries not to be.

Even when he tried to fix things, he only destroyed them. The chalk he used turned to nothing so quickly, and when he made a mistake, as he so often did, the equations would need to be discarded, just a waste. He would prick himself with the needles he used to repair clothes, which would always rip along new seams a few days later. Feeding cockroaches just meant he had less food of his own, which turned him once again to needing to eat them to survive. Breaking a bone meant a slow recovery, a harder time scavenging, less daylight to work on equations, and a body that never quite returned to normal.

The things that are most useful get destroyed. Five is the one who destroys them. These are the lessons he learned at the end of the world, and ones he relearns every time he tries to fix what he has broken. Another apocalypse. Another family. Another mistake.

However once he had touched the surface and was convinced, he ran back to Dolores on the trailer, swept her up, and delightedly took her down to the bank.