Having a lot of thoughts about Holly lately and something I find massively frustrating about season 5 is the way Holly was used a plot device to set up a bunch of shit that shouldn't have even been there but more than that her characterisation with Henry was not believable to me and there should have been more emotional impact on both of them. Like, regardless to the fact that it felt like a departure from everything season 4 set up and a total curve ball there was still something there that felt like it could be really solid.
Cause like you got Henry there, and you've made it clear he's very much defined by isolation, misinterpretation, and the violent distortion of his humanity so here this guy is and he finds himself forming a connection with a child who is, in many ways, a mirror of what he once was: Holly is shown as an emotionally neglected child, and is frequently a source of conflict with her parents. We saw in TFS it was the same for Henry so this is obviously where the connection lies.
And then it goes even further by adding the visual parallels to Alice that are not subtle in anyway. The quiet fondness Henry shows Holly isn't supposed to be accidental or only part of some grand manipulation, its an actual thing, there's a real recognition wrapped up in it.
So if Henry had been positioning himself as a confidant, someone safe, someone who understands, then the relationship between him and Holly doesn’t function like a normal antagonist/victim dynamic, its way messier and becomes something far more uncomfortable and far more human than that.
And the show just… Set that all up intentionally and then refuses to actually engage with. Instead it treats the connection like a switch that can be flipped off the second the plot requires Holly to be afraid of him/turn against him.
AND LIKE, sure it's just a stupid TV show, sure, but that's not how those dynamics work.
When a child forms that kind of bond, especially one rooted in emotional neglect or isolation, it doesn't just dissolve because someone else says, "hey, this person is bad.", even if that is coming from someone the child knows and trusts. If anything, that strengthens the attachment and the child doubles down. They defend the adult. They rationalize the behavior. They reject outside interference because, in their mind, this is the one person who chose them.
So Holly's willingness to turn against Henry feels completely disconnected from the emotional reality the show itself set up. There should have been A LOT more resistance from Holly and this resistance could have made a pressure point for Henry because he clearly cared about her in some way.
Instead, it's like the relationship never actually mattered and that’s where it starts to feel less like a character choice and more like a structural failure. because Holly isn’t treated like a character in that dynamic. Nope, she's treated like a mechanism. A narrative shortcut. A way to gesture toward Henry’s lingering humanity without actually committing to exploring it
And that really undercuts Henry as well!! Because we damn well know Henry isn't all a monster. We know Henry is misunderstood and isolated and a tragic villain at best. He's not in it because he loves hurting people for the love the game, he's in it because he's been hurt and this is his terrible misguided way to stop that hurt from happening again.
Like heres Henry with a kid that is looking at him like he's the good guy, because to her he is. Hes Mr Whatsit. He listens to her when no one else does. He cares about her. He's going to save them from the monsters. She's technically the first person who has truly believed in anything good in him since Patty.
And it seems like yeah, Holly WAS meant to function as an emotional anchor, a point of contradiction in his worldview, because maybe they couldn't use someone like Patty because IDK I guess the suggestions she was dead might have been legit. But no matter cause Holly could have been that. Instead, she's reduced to an awkward plot device that gestures at emotional depth without ever actually delivering it.
That scene with Max in the cave where Holly makes a remark about what happened to Henry and shes like "is this what made Henry evil" — feels like it’s reaching for something bigger. It's almost meta in how it frames the question. It invites reflection. It suggests that Holly is thinking about Henry as a person, not just a threat or a monster, because regardless to what she's learned about Henry, there is still her reality with him and that reality was not some evil horrible monster, it was someone who was kind to her and who listened to her with others didn't.
But it just goes nowhere. No follow-through. No thematic payoff. No real impact on her, on him, or on the story. It just… Exists. Then it doesn't and instead we go back to square one with everyone just writing Henry off as incomprehensible evil when we've already established multiple times throughout multiple different mediums that Henry isn't incomprehensibly evil, he's not even really evil at all.
Which makes the whole thing almost feel like a late-stage rewrite where they couldn't quite decide what Holly’s role was supposed to be.
Was she a victim? A parallel? A moral lens? An emotional tether? The answer seems to be yeah, all of them, briefly, and none of them meaningfully, so it's just a fumble because the narrative backs away at the exact moment it should have committed. Which is the entire overarching issue with season 5. Like theres stuff there that has serious potential but it just never actually goes anywhere and it's one of the many, many reasons I'm convinced there was a whole other season 5 in the works but at some point it got rewritten and edited into the shallow gpt slop we got but as for WHY they chose to do that exactly I still don't know.
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