#can I go five minutes without stumbling on eleanor creel crumbs

[givehimthemedicine]

"dead" vs "gone"

the relentless UD/Henry-coding of the word "gone" (+ a bonus implication for Max)

chewing on how often El says the word "gone" where you would expect "dead":

where could she have gotten that?

I promise the length of this post is mainly due to screenshots

so did El just not learn the word for death til she got older? no, because this predates the Henry "gone" line:

so she knew "dead" in '79. and those lab kids are obviously super dead, so she must understand Henry's "gone" to mean something other than deceased.

having no memory of this, El goes on to use almost exclusively "gone" in the first couple seasons. but she says "dead" too, especially later on. as if they're a tight venn diagram, but not a circle.

we've got "Mama is dead" and two "Papa is dead"s, which is pretty neato. the first two are false and the third one is true in that she's referring to Brenner but... what do you want to bet that it's also false in the sense that her biological papa is alive and closer than we th[gunshot]

other times I can find her speaking any form of the word:

love the combo in the Papa one. Henry's not dead but if only Papa would've let him go he would be gone!

so chronologically:

mama is dead

barb is gone

mother is gone

sara is gone

papa is gone

papa is dead

so many dead

they are going to die

papa is dead

once she switches from "Papa is gone" to "Papa is dead" in season 2, she's never said gone again, so far, but we have a season left. I would put money on somebody, probably her, saying that Henry is "dead and gone" by the end of 5.

I also want to talk about the way literally everybody else uses the word "gone"

SO MANY of the times the word is "gone" is used on ST, especially as an adjective, we know that person's circumstances to have something to do with the lab/the UD/Henry - even when the speaker doesn't, and is merely using it to mean "dead" or "away".

an example? I can find you one or two:

and with that in mind, let's look again at Max's final words:

if you needed proof that "dead" and "gone" are two different things, they had Max say both "I don't wanna die" AND "I don't wanna go."

Lucas, with her in the natural, spoke to the dying. El, with her in the supernatural, spoke to the going.

El's line isn't referring to stopping Max from dying, which we already know she did. El promised she's not going. as a separate thing. :)