It's there in the guilt her friend Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) endures after Bella challenges him for having sex with a woman without acknowledging that he is gay, a situation that arises out of Kwame himself being sexually assaulted. It's evident in the penultimate episode when Arabella invites Zain (Karan Gill), a man who she outed as a rapist after he removed a condom mid-sex, into her home to help her with her manuscript after learning that he wrote a book she admired under a pen name. Nothing in I May Destroy You is predictable, instead echoing a more uncertain, complicated reality. That's what she's learning as she's going." She doesn't know how to love it and how to come near to it so it can be calm enough to settle and leave. "They are unruly, they are tempestuous, and this is what happens with Arabella's trauma. "What happens to children when they lack love and are neglected?" Coel asks. I think a lot of time in our process, we go from being angry to then having this huge wave of, 'Oh my god, I need to move this trauma in, I need to take care of it, I love it, it's beautiful, it's everything.' There's something quite unhealthy about getting close to it like that." Coel notes that even David realizes how wrong this is, asking why he's being allowed to sit on Arabella's bed. How does this affect the rest of her life? How can you let it go if you've killed it? If you've murdered it under your bed." The following instance is what happens when you are "perhaps over-engaging, almost like engaging with the trauma as if you want to change him. Now that she's done the revenge fantasy, now she has to carry the dead body under her bed. "I'm always curious what the aftermath of that is. "One is the revenge fantasy that I think many people want to see," Coel says. Take whatever ending you want."įor Coel, the multiple endings were another way to demonstrate all the different ways people process trauma. Give me an answer.' She said, 'No, I can't give you an answer, it's completely up to interpretation. "I remember asking Michaela, 'So, which ending is the ending?' She said, 'Whichever one you want,'" Opia remembers. Finally, in the last scenario, Bella chooses not to go to the bar at all. This time, Bella and David, now calling himself Patrick, have consensual sex in which she tops him. She brings him back to her apartment and he admits to all of his crimes and they hug as the police come to take him away. In the next, when Bella springs into consciousness as he attempts to rape her, he meets her accusation with a tearful confession. There are three other versions of that night that play out. Bella brings him home and hides his bloodied body under her bed. He stumbles out of the venue and collapses on the street. The three women orchestrate a carefully executed revenge plan, in which Bella convinces the man, David (Lewis Reeves), that he has drugged her, before surprising him in a bathroom stall where Theo administers a literal dose of his own medicine, sticking a needle into his ankle. She immediately pulls out disguises for herself and her best friend Terry (Weruche Opia), and calls fellow survivor Theo (Harriet Webb) to join them. Arabella, who has been keeping watch at the bar where she was attacked, identifies the perpetrator and proceeds to take action. The show goes far beyond the inciting incident: Over 12 episodes, it explores the messiness of human nature as it relates to consent and empowerment. The finale of I May Destroy You, titled "Ego Death," is just as stunning and tricky as the rest of the series, a brilliant piece of art that follows Coel's Arabella as she grapples with the aftermath of being drugged and raped. "It seems to really come full circle, doesn't it?" she says. I tell her that I think the series is a masterpiece, and that, while I would love to spend more time with the characters, the story does feel whole. "What do you think?" she responds in a genuine, but almost cheeky manner, laughing a little. When I ask Michaela Coel whether she would make another season of her breakout HBO series I May Destroy You, she turns the question back on me. This post contains spoilers for the finale of HBO's I May Destroy You.
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