Turns-out he's...
...a high-functioning sociopath. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
shareWho, Johnathan? Is this about when he killed the ex-con by burning him?
That sub-polt really should have been cut out.
It was totally unrelated to the rest of the story, a pointless call-back to an episode almost 20 years old, and worst of all led to Jonathan killing a guy.
Make the hero of your show a murderer for no real reason. Great idea!
I can see the desire in doing a call back to an older episode, for nostalgia's sake and to basically show how far your show has come, but it ultimately wasn't needed. They could have at least had Johnathan kill him by accident or better still had the ex-con kill himself by accident - like he does something to try and kill Johnathan, but it goes wrong and he ends up killing himself, but doing it the way they did, just leads to a glaring "What The Hell, Hero?" moment. That's a TV Tropes thing, for those who don't know.
Also, I wonder if David Renwick (I assume it was him who wrote the episode?) remembered that the murderer in The House of Monkeys was an Animal Rights activist (or was at least stated to be one)? Because I can't picture this Patrick character as someone who has compassion for any living creature, unless we're supposed to assume that prison made him worse.
Well, once the guy was on fire, he had no chance of saving him. You could say that him closing the fire pit door was his attempt to put out the fire by starving it of oxygen.
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