#tma 185

ohhhhhh i am scared

MAG 185 - Locked In

doodle 185/200; days left - 17/110 1/128

In 184 he encounters a man who was made into an avatar and learns that people can end up becoming part of the 'bad' side because of circumstance and not because they are actually inherently bad or choose to be connected to the Fears. Alot of the time avatars are just people the Fears choose for one reason or another. Mistakes, manipulation, penchant for a certain feeling, a chance meeting, unforeseen circumstances. These are all ways a person can inadvertently cause others pain and even though there is a clear dichotomy between watchers and watched, there isn't one between good and bad. He also learns there is a choice and if he has Jon, he can choose to 'switch sides', a power most others in this world don't have.

In 185 he has an opportunity to utilize these lessons and admit he does have some power of choice over the fate of others given his position, that he's 'one of us' as jon puts it. He sees Not So Good people can also suffer and needs to make a choice whether to let them continue suffering or make them the torturers instead. He makes a choice based on his personal judgement and admits to having a very specific moral compass which does lean towards punishing the bad rather than allowing them reprieve and the tools to hurt others. But it's no longer passive. He has the power thus actively leaves another person to suffer. And comes to term with that choice.

Martin could enter his domain only after he admits to being one of the watchers and choosing to refuse the inspector's request. In his domain he talks about how he won't be able to continue living like that and that the fact that now he knows he's actively feeding off of other people's pain he can't go on if they don't find an all encompassing solution to the apocalypse.

He could have potentially changed all of the people in his domain into watchers but, as he learned, the balance would find a way to make them suffer anyway, like Jordan still does, and putting someone in that position is an enormous responsibility.

Having learned that his actions and choices have those kinds of consequences was imperative before continuing on to London to find Jonah in the tower and learning Jon can replace him and change the balance of things around. His lessons in these few episodes of good and bad, of responsibility and power, of the balance of the apocalypse and the pain it inflicts, influenced his actions and choices greatly going forward. He realizes that kind of power should never belong to one man and refuses to allow Jon to become that man and shoulder that kind of responsibility over humanity. He knows what it does to a person because he experienced it himself, even if it was on a smaller scale. And he doesn't want Jon to have to handle that kind of burden anymore than he already does.

There isn’t anything in the statement portion of MAG 185 that I would consider to be horror. The driving force of the horror element of this episode is a hyper realistic account of a woman being wrongly imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit and being dehumanized by law enforcement. There isn’t anything else scary or horror related in this episode. No supernatural forces or entities in here. And this is the part that bothers me the most. Using a police brutality as a stand alone, driving force of horror to invoke a sense of fear in your audience is cheap tactic. You’re relying on your audience’s trauma or fear of police abuse to make the contents of this episode scary. It’s kind of like using jump scares or triggering rape scenes in movies to get a reaction out of your audience. It’s just gross and problematic. Trauma and triggering scenes (on their own) aren’t horror. (I also think it’s different from the Doctor David ordeal because there was enough metaphors and innuendos to suggest that the author was making a point about medical professionals that abuse their patients. And the fact that Doctor David was almost cartoonish-ly villainous, which is very different on how the cops were depicted in MAG 185)

There are previous episodes that I think handled police brutality a lot better like  Wonderland (MAG 177), The Processing Line (MAG 178) and The Accomplice (MAG 179). There were other elements to horror. There were supernatural elements (which adds some surrealism to these situations) and police brutality weren’t the only horror element in these episodes.

I felt very lukewarm about the thematic message of this statement. “Police brutality is scary” or maybe even “police brutality effects more people than the people it targets and should be considered a societal problem” isn’t a scorching hot or powerful take. In my opinion, it’s not as powerful or insightful as the other takes we’ve gotten in season 5. “You can’t hunt a monster you refuse to see” in reference to police defending their co-worker’s murderous altercations with civilians and unlawful behavior, is a take I liked much more. (here marks the end of my personal take of MAG 185)

I think I’ll also address some of the fandom controversy while I’m still typing.

To the people that are saying that “some people aren’t aware this is a horror podcast and only came for Jon/Martin”: There are some people that are uncomfortable with the huge tonal shift of escapable, almost entirely supernatural horror to season 5′s more realistic/meta sort of horror. It’s a shift that few people were expecting and some people didn’t sign up for this type of terror.(Unlike how when we all started this podcast, we knew it would be a tragedy.) So when some POCs think that trauma doesn’t have a place in horror or are uncomfortable with Jonny writing about a trauma he doesn’t experience, it’s not the job of white people to speak over them or tell them they are wrong.

And it struck me in 185 that Martin's faith is having a real effect on Jon. Jon started out fully convinced that every bad thing was, directly and maliciously, his fault. We could feel his distress in every episode because he was carrying so much guilt. But day after day, Martin has been making it clear to Jon that he isn't a bad person, he's a good person making hard choices in an impossible situation.

I've been feeling nervous lately because Jon has seemed so nonchalant. I thought he was starting to get comfortable with the apocalypse, that he was no longer registering the horror surrounding him. Now, though, I think it's just that Jon no longer blames himself.

I've been worried about what will happen when they catch up to Melanie and Georgie, because I think it's likely that they'll immediately blame Jon for everything. Before 185, I was kind of hoping that Martin would call them out for it, but given that he didn't say anything when Basira blamed Jon for everything, I didn't actually have a lot of hope that Melanie and Georgie wouldn't just be back to their s4 bullshit. But now? I think //Jon// is going to stand up for himself.