DEADLY LITTLE THING

Hi Anon,

You have no idea how much that means to me. I look back on this blog very fondly, and I'm happy you liked the mildly organised mess that it was. S1 will always have a special place in my heart, and it did lead to incredibly fun times on this blog specifically. I wish you all the best, Anon 💖💖💖

RIP king, we wish we could've seen your deviousness and style and manipulation in the show

Yeah, she is.

In my opinion, their dynamic would be worse off if she wasn't.

I'll be real, the one thing I have to say about Five losing his arm is that they should have given that plot point to Allison because it was hers in the comics, and it was an unexplored part of her story there, so they could've actually fleshed that out for her.

There's a version of this story where Allison is with Five on that balcony, she spots the pattern on the floor and that's why she gets taken out by the guardian. You know, the one sibling that has a vested investment in finding the pattern. Five can bandage her up because I did love the bit where he used his tie to save his life, and she shares the location with him. They come down that staircase together and Five takes his place not for underdeveloped reasons like in the S3 we got, but because she's hurt. That injury would be more meaningful with Allison too, recalling her throat laceration that she got while trying to get through to Viktor, but this time it is a willing sacrifice she makes to get back to her daughter. Or something like that, I think one could make the arm loss way more thematically relevant to her than it would be to Five.

The thing is losing his arm didn't matter apart from being a visual confirmation that Five is four for four in terms of creating diverging timelines that hold unspeakable, new and exciting horrors. So it not mattering in the story just makes me not care for it.

I can't believe I'm getting bullied in my own askbox!!! I am now purposefully delaying publishing it JUST to spite you personally 🍩🍩🍩 actually I am holding it back to post it during the tuamre rewatch of episode 1 because if it fits, it sits, so keep out an eye for it tomorrow sometime 🤗

I mean, just because you're wearing a snazzy suit doesn't mean you're not a cringefail loser, there's eight Artemis Fowl books and about four seasons of Succession that really drive that point home. And the crux of Bruce Wayne is that he quite crucially comes from generational wealth, I doubt Five would get to that level of success, simply because the man never succeeds at anything.

Half-jokes aside, if they really go with that one throwaway line about Five and the stock market from the comics, I just. Don't really see the appeal of Five being successful and sticking it to his father that way? Like, Reggie seems to have a monopoly on the world, what's Five supposed to do with that?

Five is also just not a petty man in the show, so yeah. I'm not really engaging in speculation about S4, but Five being a company owner doesn't really strike me as compelling. I would take it over him going to high school a million times though.

I will continue leaving those kinds of tags then 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

love looking out for the small stuff in your pieces every time I come across them because I know they're there on purpose and deserve to be appreciated

Yup, very much so! I still think the implication that Five killed Stalin is one of the funniest things in this entire show.

I mean, succinctly, tua s3 feels like the tua s2 writers trying to write tua s1, which, as it turns out, is a bad idea.

Precisely, some things off the top of my head that I do not particularly care about are the whole 'Reginald wants to reset the universe for his wife'-retconning, the Luther/Sloane romance sure was a plot that existed, the Diego/Lila stuff continues to be rushed (just in general, the pivot towards more romance-focused arcs is not it for me), I dislike part of the framing for Allison's actions, the way Harlan (the show's only canonically confirmed autistic character) was treated is honestly gross, Hotel Oblivion being Hotel Orientalism for no reason, Five being the founder makes no particular sense, and also they severely underused the Sparrows. But mostly, it just continues the s2 trend of misunderstanding/stripping of nuance/retconning the themes of s1, which is disappointing.

I think that'd be a bit ambitious. I reckon we're looking at an early 2024 release if they start filming in the coming weeks. However, there's four episodes less than in previous seasons, so I don't know how that'll affect post-production.

I don't know, Anon.

You tell me.

Jokes aside, it's Five, it's always been Five, it was Five from the moment he first appeared. He was honestly engineered to appeal to my taste in fictional characters specifically.

S1 my truly beloved, I miss her and the impact she had every day.

I will say this, so far the first episodes always delivered what it said in the title. 'We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals' had the siblings come back together for a funeral after not seeing each other for literal years - plus it worked as foreshadowing for Reginald killing himself to get the band back together. 'Right Back Where We Started From' had both the titular song and it showed Five seeing the apocalypse after crashing in the 60s, going right back to where he started from, the world going under. 'Meet the Family' had them coming face to face with Reginald's new family. So I hope that this first episode of S4 will be about Allison.

I think it'll be about Allison, but who knows. I think something is going to be very off in the world that Reginald rebooted. Or maybe it will be perfect, but her conscience about the deal with Reginald and going behind her family's back might creep up and she can't enjoy it. Whichever version it is, I hope it'll do her justice.

Oh, thank you, that's very helpful! Good for Sparrow Ben to channel his inner frustrations into poetry, love that for him :)

That seems pretty impossible though, Sparrow Ben was with the Umbrellas at the end exiting Hotel Oblivion, throwing a strop, and Subway Ben was in Korea and wore glasses. Is it meant to be a sneak peek into the near future and that's what Sparrow Ben turns into? I thought Subway Ben was meant to be the Ben from that timeline, with powers, while Reginald stripped the OG Umbrellas and Sparrows of their powers and identities and effectively made them fundamentally different people. Meaning that there's two Bens now, OG Sparrow Ben with no powers, and Subway Ben that Reginald never bothered to adopt, who still has his powers but also never had any incentive to leave his family or his place of birth.

I am absolutely just cribbing from this post by @actualtimetravelingcat, but I want it to be open, and I want it to be hopeful. I want them to end at a point where they can start healing, and they can do it together, having each other's backs. That's what I want. I don't know what it will end up, and I've lost enough of the plot to not really feel up to speculating. What I do think is that the ending will not be bleak. It may be bitterweet, but it won't be pessimistic.