Everyone has landmarks in their life. There was life before that moment and then life afterwards. The moment changed the way you saw the whole world so strongly that all that can possibly exist is life after that moment. Everyone has these moments, factual or fictional Usually we don't remember these moments consciously.
What I didn't remember was that a bunch of these moments for me are here, in Season Five.
This is one of the most expertly handled final seasons I've ever seen. The web has been spun, the plot points have been built competently, at worst. It's now time for the chickens to come home, roost and bring forth the apocalypse. There's just moment, after moment, after moment that wouldn't have meant what they do without the four seasons of buildup. It's hard to understate just how good this season can really get, with all the bombs they drop.
And the big one is the death of Mary Jane.
Yes, I know it's a clone.
No, I don't care. This hurt to watch as a kid. There's a ton of complicating factors. For one thing, it just comes out of nowhere. Absolutely. Freaking. Nowhere. Yeah, Mary Jane coming back mysteriously is weird and all that, but a clone??? There's a level of cruelty in the writing that was not lost on me, at all, as a child. Peter wasn't even losing Mary Jane, it was that she had never returned at all and this was actually a stranger, had always been, and was now dying, but she looked like Mary Jane and just... she was able to just accept her death? That was overload for me as a child. She just looked her death in the face and made sure that she could give to Peter one last ray of hope, something, anything.
Let's not forget the incredibly badass way "MJ" takes out "Morrie". This show had always been really good about empowering female characters, and this was a wonderful scene where "MJ" got to send Morrie off one last time, directly. And it felt good to watch that. Morrie has always had the "whiner entitled piece of shit" shtick down to a T, and it was nice to see him get kicked down again. Catharsis much?
But "MJ" was dying. And Peter didn't fix it. Couldn't. For all the times that Peter had figured out how to save someone with his mind it was just flat out impossible here. There wasn't time. There was never going to be any time. Peter's failure was not his fault but it was a failure nonetheless. Granted, I had that concept from The Return of the Jedi, but it was a completely different thing here, given everything previously stated. All Peter could do was to watch and listen and try to absorb the horrors.
And then there's the clone stuff with Miles Warren. I didn't realize it as a child but this was a huge plot bomb to drop. Even if Peter managed to get Mary Jane back, he'd have to deal with Smythe finding out his identity, nevermind a clone! The implied problems coming in were enormous. Peter's entire life was about to be screwed up and he had no idea it was coming. The show had a moment to hit the audience and picked every last opportunity to do it.
The biggest advantage of serialized story telling is accumulation. You don't have to tightly construct a narrative to land a big moment. You just plop down plot point after plot point, on their own, and build them as well as you can. Eventually you'll have a web of points that don't look connected... until you pull the magic trick. And then you have these huge moments, where your context has been shifted and juggled and messed with and your understanding of the previous points are irrevocably changed. You can no longer see what happened in the past the same way because of what just happened. And when it's done well you're totally upended.
That scene at the top of the post is one of the best moments in serialized storytelling. I don't care who you are, it's hard to understate just how masterfully they pulled it off. You don't get much better than the death of Mary Jane.
That howl of despair from Peter was stamped into my consciousness as a child, and it's carried forward into everything I've ever done. Sometimes there are moments where there is no good, no bad, no greater telos. There's just pain. The present, in all its awful glory. You can try and avoid it, but eventually the present has its reckoning, one way or another. You'll run out of tricks, escape routes, and flat denials, and the present will come crashing in and there's only thing to do.
Grieve.
A wise man once told me that grieving was the sum total of our activity in life.
The older I get the wiser that statement becomes.
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