When Arabella subsequently loses control, accidentally beats David to death and has to drag his body home to be hidden under her bed, that purposely ridiculous conclusion suggests that if she does something truly terrible to her attacker, she’ll never actually be rid of him. “I wanna see his thing.” It’s here that Coel confronts viewers with the absurdity of the standard rape-revenge plot-the way it turns victims into the spitting image of their assailants and perpetuates a cycle of violence and degradation. At that point, Arabella can’t resist the temptation to unzip his pants: “He saw my thing,” she says. David lurches out of the bar with her underwear, which could be used as evidence, so the women have to follow him through the streets and take it back once he collapses. Fair enough.īut because this isn’t actually a spy movie, things start to go wrong. “But who’s the criminal, you or me?” When she lures her attacker, David (Lewis Reeves), to the bathroom where he raped her, Theo emerges with a syringe to inject him with the same dissociative drug he slips into women’s drinks. “A criminal always returns to the scene of the crime,” says Arabella. Wearing a platinum wig and patent-leather jumpsuit, our hero lies in wait at the bar with her best friend Terry (Weruche Opia) and their angry, problematic childhood acquaintance Theo (Harriet Webb). The episode, titled “Ego Death” after the Jungian concept of total psychic transformation and the show’s fictional bar of the same name, opens with the slick revenge scenario viewers might, at first, cheer. Like those touchstones of time-loop cinema, Sliding Doors and Groundhog Day-along with more recent takes, from Palm Springs to Russian Doll- I May Destroy You offers multiple potential endings. So it’s fitting that most of the finale takes place in Arabella’s writerly imagination. As Coel explained in a recent interview, “The show is calling for introspection.” Not everyone has survived rape, but we all have formative experiences to which we must either respond, ideally by growing into more self-aware versions of ourselves, or make the passive choice to repress and therefore stagnate. Before she acts, this emerging author needs to weigh every possible outcome, because she’s reached a crucial juncture in her life, and her decision will dictate the kind of person she becomes. So when the series’ penultimate episode ends with Arabella recognizing her rapist, it’s apparent that vengeance alone would make for a hollow resolution. Her approach to life shifts more often than her ever-changing hairstyle.Īnd yet, as the finale underscores, the stages she goes through aren’t linear or mutually exclusive they’re cumulative, even when they contradict each other. In the 11 episodes that follow, we meet many more Arabellas: the party girl whose friendships aren’t as solid as she thinks, the Me Too warrior, the social media influencer, the adult scarred by aspects of her childhood she’s blocked from her consciousness. By the end of the premiere, she has been a pink-haired Londoner traveling to Italy to see a man who’s clearly not worth her time a goofball who conducts business calls while rolling a joint in the loo, with the door wide open an author who needs to submit the manuscript for her first book but can’t resist a night of partying at the bar with her friends and, finally, a young woman struck by the sudden realization that she was raped during that outing. The semi-autobiographical story of her character, Arabella, doesn’t zig-zag from incident to incident so much as it expands to absorb the fullness of her experience.
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