Until Season 5 came out.
To truly explain why Season 5 was so jarring, let us look at the general plot and atmosphere of the first four seasons. We follow Arthur Lester, a detective who worked in 1930s Arkham, Masschusettes, immediatley placing him in a setting of gritty cosmic horror and crime noir. After making contact with an eldritch book, he becomes possessed by Something, losing use of his eyes and killing his detective partner (Peter Yang) in the process. The podcast opens blind, scared, holding a corpse and on the run from the cops. Working with the entity, Arthur finds himself in increasingly dangerous and supernatural situations, finally until he reaches a hotel with an entire city underneath sending him somewhere called the Dreamlands. Here, we move onto Season 2 and meet our apparent antagonist: The King in Yellow.
As the podcast progresses the entity encounters humanity and gradually longs to feel that for himself, taking the name John Doe. He's curious, he's snappy, but he wants to be kind. John is fascinated by Arthur's memory of poems, his music and creativity, it's what makes him such a compelling character. Something so monsterous wanting to be human. Here is when we discover he is a fragment of The King in Yellow, and at the threat of Arthur taking his own life, John sacrifices himself in turn, returning to the King.
In Season 3 we have a blind Arthur in an unrecognisable environment, with a voice in his head that sounds exactly like John but nothing like him all the while. This Arthur doesn't have time to learn to befriend this voice, instead being aggressive and threatening. He's tackling his own grief, that of John, but also the loss of his daughter by his own hand, a grief that carries the show. The town he's in, Addison, is a constant reminder of Faroe as the town itself is named after the daughter a man sacrificed for a higher power. The season's mission is to hunt and kill this pathetic monster of a man named Larson. It is this season that solidified this show as something beautiful. After a horrible and bloody confrontation, John is returned to Arthur, fighting unknown battles himself, and the two have to make it out of the town and its mines whilst unable to recognise eachother's ferocity. They are at their bedrock doing their best to drag eachother out.
In return, Season 4 is a victory. They are able to return to civilisation, New York of all places being a bustle of life and joy. We are even introduced to a person from Arthur's old life, his father-in-law of his late-wife. Arthur is able to shine as a detective this season, trying to hunt down an organisation that Larson is connected to. What makes this season so refreshing, though, are the side characters. For once we have characters that live longer than a single episode, Oscar being my favourite and the one I latched onto like a barnacle. It allowed the audience to imagine a possible future for Arthur and John after the show had ended, them getting their happy ending with friends. But this is a horror podcast and these things never last.
So Season 5 ignores the noir detective setting and instead plays entirely into the eldritch. So naturally it is set in 13th century England.
What makes this choice become increasingly worse is that the writer (and voice actor, and editor, yes it's all one guy) knew this was a bad decision. It killed the flow of the story. It purposefully places Arthur into the medieval period and yet doesn't utilise any of its history. Before this, the podcast's historical research was done so well, using music from the period, playing with what could realistically be available to this character in this time period. In Season 4, you could follow Arthur's routes on a map, it was that precise. We don't even get a location in England. Our protagonists were dumped into a generic field mid-argument with no sense of place. Anachronisms follow them as the episodes progress in a way that starts to feel like a betrayal. For a story that previously felt so grounded, it suddenly attempts to become a fantasy. It's revealed that this is an England over run by France and yet we meet only one french character who then dies within the same episode. Any elements of environment are immediately removed the second they are introduced, as if they were forgotten by the creator.
What makes these last two seasons so disappointing is that the stakes become so high the characters no longer act like themselves. Suddenly the big bad is so important that character conflict doesn't last longer than a single conversation. Arthur even dies multiple times in Seasons 5 and 6 to the point where the logic behind each resurrection is weaker than the last. Season 5 was meant to be John's season so when Arthur dies, we thought 'finally, we get to see John stand on his own', and we did. Briefly. After all this time, John establishes himself as an individual, he's not human but he isn't the King in Yellow. He is simply John. But Arthur is revived, and suddenly John is thrust to being Arthur's eyes again. What's worse is that after this grand speech of individuality, we barely get to hear that much from John, as once Arthur reaches a castle and it part of a pity attempt at a murder mystery, John has to stay silent. Arthur cannot be seen talking to himself, and so he ignores John. What is the point of having such a poweful moment to then have to hide the character away. This is a problem that doesn't stop, even leading to the finale, because the stakes keep increasing and so John and Arthur have to work perfectly together or risk the end of existence. We lose connection to everything that made the podcast great in Seasons 3 and 4, instead becoming a worse version of Season 2 which used to mark the podcast's lowest moment.
I've been trying to stick it to the ending, coming out on the 30th, but it's been a trudge. Every decision made in Season 6 has felt like the wrong one, to the point it feels like the writer is mad at the audience for being emotionally attatched to the characters. I have no interest in dealing with these sorts of creators again, especially after surviving BBC Sherlock, which is why once Season 6 established that Arthur was the only character that mattered I no longer had the patience for the show. For a brief moment at the start of the end, I had the hope that we could return to the incredible writing of previous seasons but episode after episode, myself and my friends were increasingly disappointed. It's like realising that you are falling out of love with someone you used to be head over heals with. You can see at the bottom some of the art I had made for the show, I truly loved it, the writer even has an art print of mine framed on his wall. But something changed.
You cannot have a self insert as the main character of a show. It has been said on record multiple times that Arthur Lester is a self insert and it makes analysis of the character increasingly difficult. In order to question certain aspects of the character, suddenly people produce details of the writers life, and whilst yes, real life affects fiction, but they should remain seperate enough that the character can be analysed independantly. I do not need to know anything about the author's sexuality to question a character's sexuality, because then things become speculative and uncomfortable. The self-insert nature of Arthur really hurt the show in its last season where it's revealed that he is the Elder God's favourite boy and that's why he never dies. It's why no other character is granted the same levels of character growth or plot importance or anything. The entire ordeal becomes fustrating. You cannot kill the same character multiple times in one season and reveal he is the most important person in existence and expect me to still care.
What made the show interesting was that it could have been anyone who opened that book and lost their eyes. By deciding that it wasn't actually just anyone, but specifically Arthur, and that his first introduction to John was in fact retconned, it discredits the first season drastically. It wasn't some guy down on his luck, he was the most important man in the universe, even being given a batman-like origin story where his parents were cultists. We never solved Anna Stanczyk's mystery. I do not mean to say that the stakes in Season 1 should remain the stakes for the entire show, but reaching cosmic levels loses the humanity that was such an important theme of the podcast.
I will finish this show.
I will close it's eyes, lay a sheet over its body and say goodbye one final time. The memories and friends made along the way was worth it and I'll always appreciate that. Once it lays to rest, and grass grows over its grave, I may return and find comfort in its presence again. Let us hope for a good finale.
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