#ask dr beccerson

[deathandindignitybedamned]

Ooooh why not share it! Post it and lets talk about what we agree and what we dont agree! Its fun.

Okay then….let’s take a look at a few points I’ve been mentally circling today: (this is very stream of consciousness think and type thing…but I think it makes some sense. also my computer froze while I was in the middle of working on the first version of this so now I say fuck it here it is)

You talked about Felicity and her conscious and subconscious isolation and how it becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy with both John and Oliver (and pretty much everyone else in her life). I 100% agree with that. She isolates to protect herself and when Oliver reads that as “give me space” she subconsciously reads it as an affirmation of that “I’m broken” idea that Noah first planted in her mind which is at this point buried so deep that is has seeped into every inch of her. Being left behind is a visceral fear for her. So rather than reach out to these men, she draws everything so close to her that all she is able to project is these ideas “humor” and “lightness” that John and Oliver are unable to see beyond. I also think Rory was so unexpected that she couldn’t see out of her guilt spiral bring herself to project Fine-ness to him. (I miss Rory can he come back please)Billy’s death is that final straw that breaks the layers of compartmentalization that she’s built up since the middle of s4. The EPs keep calling it a dark arc. I think a more apt description is aggressiveness. She works aggressively around Oliver’s tunnel vision when Black Siren turns up. When asked to get the files on Walker she follows any breadcrumb in order to do that. This is not a new thing for her. She uses an invaluable resource in order to help the team track down Prometheus. Blindly? Yes. But she, perhaps more than anyone else on the team, can see how powerful Pandora/Helix can be as a weapon if yielded properly. She uses it again when Thea indicates that there is a Clear Threat to the team and is then immediately talked down to about her fucking empathy. All of this is playing into Helix’s hands, yes, but she is still trying to take action to protect the people who are closest and most important to her.So on to last night: I laughed at the 5x19 episode blurb because WHY ARE WE STILL ACTING LIKE SHE HASN’T BEEN COMMITTING FELONIES FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THIS SHOW. She straight up committed corporate espionage in s1 by hacking into Merlyn Global. In s2 she blew up a building and it was her idea. We learned in s3 that she wrote the equivalent of a cyber-nuke before she was 19. She stole from her own company in s4, and had to make an impossible choice to save millions of lives (there is a part of me that thinks Lyla arranged for her to be given immunity for Havenrock because the President was aware of the situation, but that’s for the day I actually make notes on the What If Helix/Chase Chose to Out Her as the Person “Responsible” for it). So please, let’s not pretend that Felicity hasn’t been crawling around in the shit since season 1. Nevertheless, the perception of her that Oliver and John have mean that they think she is protected from making those decisions. It’s why Oliver and John were both so out of their element when dealing with her in this episode. (I think I read somewhere that Lyla comparing James to a nuke was her talking about Felicity…..and I just gotta call bull on that. Lyla as a character is not about Subtext, she’s about Text. If something is Relevant to her Cause, she just goes for it. And while I think they’re friends, I have never read Lyla as being super close to Felicity. In part because I think Lyla understands through Waller, just how dangerous Felicity is. And I’m sorry, but reducing everything about Lyla Michaels to her relationship with Oliver and Felicity is lazy and reduces her importance as her own character and within her marriage to John).The thing that I kind of got (happily?) stuck on tonight was an idea that the series of confrontations Felicity had with team leading up to the last one in the bunker felt like they cut all of the ties that were keeping her tethered to Oliver. I know she never expected to sway Lyla, but she expected something like trust from Oliver, if not that then at least an acknowledgement of her position from John. The lack of anything in that moment was the first cut and yet another sign to her that she wasn’t worth it. The conversation in the loft was stunning to me in its honesty. What exactly is she losing if she feels that her soul has already been burned away? There’s nothing left of her but her drive to love and protect Oliver from the monster he helped create (Chase), and the monster he sees in himself.I was texting with a friend of mine (@vivisectyourheart - I drop kicked her into this black hole so that I have someone to text yell at and she finally caught up to watch in real time) and I said “5x19 was like kicking a rock off the edge of the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear it hit the bottom. With them on opposite sides” and I’ve had some time to digest that and sort of shift it a little bit. I think we could say that this whole season has been the two of them standing on opposite sides of a canyon and Oliver is staring at his phone trying to figure out why she hasn’t called him while Felicity is over there kicking rocks over and waiting for Oliver to hear her. They both were trying to communicate but they were expecting each other to be using a different language. So that moment when he says “don’t count on it” was for me the final cord being cut for Felicity. She’s a runner. She’s been a runner since Noah left and she first learned how to change herself to best fit her surroundings (welcome to my Chameleon Felicity™ black hole). She stayed after season 4 because she still felt tied to the people. And in failing to trust and support her, and taking action against her, those ties were gone. Part of me thinks that Felicity didn’t expect to go back to the bunker after that. She’d be able to get the tech and make her move against Chase on her own terms. I get really tired of it, but there are a number of apt parallels with s3 and I think her not going back would have been the same play as Oliver’s stupid plane idea. Flawed from the beginning because it assumed that success would only come by sacrificing herself. Fighting to die as it were. So she leaves Oliver and the team behind and plans to move forward again with Helix only to be left behind and forced to go back to the bunker with all of her defenses down and a half drunk scruffy ex. Again, the honesty and acting choices in that scene did things to me.And that is……pretty much where I run out of steam for tonight. I’ve always got stuff percolating but *beccashrug*