Meta: Hypervigilance and Conspiracy (HTGAWM s5)--DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: CSA, PTSD, paranoia

Season 5 is arguably the most tragic season for several reasons, tragic in the sense of genre as well as content. This is because the season involves the killing of several innocents, necessitating the protagonists’ eventual downfall, and the consequences of the characters’ fatal flaw: hypervigilance. The characters have spent so long in the throes of conspiracy, traumatized at every turn, that when things do start to become less awful, they don’t trust it and end up creating new enemies to stand in for the already defeated or accounted-for ones at the first sign of trouble.

 

Hypervigilance is a symptom of trauma: “in hypervigilance, there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma” (“Hypervigilance”). Hypervigilant survivors will often do things like avoid crowds, choose seats where they can see all the exits, compulsively check safeguards, startle at loud noises, or—most relevant for our purposes—look compulsively for red flags in relationships that signal potential retraumatization, allowing them to end the relationship before it can get too intimate. In this sense, hypervigilance can lead to paranoia, though they are technically separate experiences (“Hypervigilance”).

To be clear, the main characters have every reason to be paranoid. The FBI has built a fairly solid case against them, and the threat of prison is real. Governor Birkhead and Xavier Castillo really did put out a hit on Nate Sr. and DA Miller. However, now that the stakes are much higher, their healthy paranoia about the government and the Castillos metastasizes into distrust of everyone except each other (and even that goes out the window the next season). Crucially, this paranoia invades their intimate relationships and prevents them from finding love or support outside or inside the group.

When Laurel finds blood on Christopher’s blanket, she fears for her child’s mental health having obviously witnessed something traumatic, especially since he was already abducted by her father once before. This leads her to disappear with him without a trace so that her father, the FBI, and the others in the Keating 4 can’t find them. Michaela is attracted to mysterious newcomer Gabe but doesn’t trust him enough to do anything about it for much of the season (wisely, as he’s technically an informant for Miller and is investigating his father Sam’s death, which she had a hand in). Annalise moves into a new apartment and pointedly doesn’t tell anyone else, noting once they start showing up that “none of you were supposed to know where I live” (5x5). Her relationship with Emmett is constantly strained because even though he consistently goes out on a limb for her and seems to do his level best in showing up for Black women, she has trouble trusting that given her experience both professionally (he’s technically her boss) and personally. At the reveal he’s running for DA, she’s quick to believe he’s involved in the Governor’s plot and spurns his feelings for her, only to discover he’s innocent when he’s poisoned. Side note: “DA” doesn’t stand for District Attorney, it stands for Dark Arts, because literally no one can keep this position. (*other personality whispering in my ear* What’s that? We don’t make H.P. references anymore because J.K. said what?? Yikes…)

The clearest example of hypervigilance supercharging their paranoia in s5 is Bonnie’s relationship with Miller. Bonnie is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, which makes it very difficult for her to trust people, especially intimate partners. Combined with the various intrigues she ends up involved in, she has a very jaded worldview that tends to expect the worst from people. When confronted with Miller, who by all accounts is a genuinely good guy, she is unsure how to process his sincerity.

The fight between Bonnie and Annalise before Bonnie starts dating Miller foreshadows the relationship’s demise. At this point, Bonnie is actually pushing very hard against her worst instincts to trust him (demonstrating a lot of growth in this conversation), and Annalise is the one who puts the thought back into her head.  The whole scene is revealing, but the most heartbreaking part is this exchange:

Bonnie: He doesn’t know anything.
Annalise: How do you know that? Because he’s nice to you? Calls you pretty? […] How do you know he’s not playing you?
Bonnie: Because I spent the last three months getting to know him.
Annalise: Falling for him!
Bonnie: He is falling for me! That is why I trust him, because if he saw what was in my file, he’d want nothing to do with me. (5x2)

Bonnie very much appreciates the change of pace when they start dating, such as the cute positivity Post-its Miller leaves on her desk throughout the day. But at soon as there’s even a hint that he’s involved, her paranoia takes over. Miller was able to get Nate Sr. transferred from prison to a mental health facility, but on the night of his transfer he’s killed by the guards at the behest of the Governor and Xavier. Miller orders an inquest into the death, which had been marked “justifiable homicide”, but Nate Jr. and Bonnie come to believe Miller was really the one who ordered the hit when a photo of him at a phone booth calling the warden surfaces. Miller comes to Connor and Oliver’s wedding intending to propose to Bonnie, but Nate beats him within an inch of his life and Bonnie suffocates him to finish the job.

After killing him, she has to believe that he really was a bad guy, because otherwise she has to deal with the fact she killed an innocent man whom she loved. She doesn’t want to know the truth about his involvement, because that knowledge would confirm she sabotaged one of the few good things in her life for nothing. But the others keep digging, because his excuse that his phone died bears out and other things aren’t adding up. She also keeps getting reminders of what kind of guy he actually was: Frank defends him, Nate reveals he was going to propose, another Post-it waits on her computer detailing his excitement at being her plus-one. Eventually, Bonnie caves and asks a colleague for the audio of the call, then learns he was innocent after all.

It’s telling that the first sign of turmoil between them is his concerns for her relationship with Annalise. He (rightly) points out that their relationship is toxically codependent, but Bonnie is unable and unwilling to hear this, figuratively and literally—the sound of him talking becomes muffled and we see flashbacks to Bonnie incorrectly piecing together his involvement. Partially, her immediate loss of trust in him is because his critique is itself also a potential red flag for intimate partner violence. She could easily read this as a move to distance her from her support system, isolating her from her found family, which could give him more power over her, and her rampant hypervigilance predisposes her to this reading. And when combined with the suspicion that he helped orchestrate Nate Sr.’s death, everything in Bonnie’s considerable experience says not to trust him.

That’s what makes it tragic; their love was doomed not because either of them was necessarily in the wrong but because Bonnie’s fatal flaw is that she doesn’t know how to trust or even recognize a good thing when it comes to her. They’re all so afraid of being caught up in more conspiracies that they start inventing new ones themselves, and it becomes their undoing.

 

Works Cited

“Hypervigilance.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, accessed 4 Sep. 2022.