Arabella (and Coel) is working through the modes in which stories like hers are typically “concluded.” Here, even more than with the revenge plot, she brings something new to it. Just as revenge is a clichéd conclusion to stories about rape, so is this one: The rapist is revealed to have his own history of trauma and sexual assault that goes some way toward explaining how he became the way he is. There’s something almost tritely theatrical about this monologue, but, I think, that’s the point. You’re worthless.” Then he breaks down in sobs. He grabs her face, calls her a whore, and says, “There’s wars going on in Iraq, and you’re making a big old drama ’cause some bloke slipped a pill in your drink and wants to fuck your brains out in a nightclub?” He gets more and more emotional, threatening her, but with commands he seems to have heard before, directed at himself: “Don’t you tell anyone, David, and if you tell anyone, I will kill you. This time, when David takes her down to the bathroom to rape her and she opens her eyes, alert, he launches into a monologue. Terry makes Arabella snort an enormous amount of coke, and she energetically dances in front of David, as another version of herself-the one who was raped, in that fuzzy red jacket, with the purple hair-dances behind her. The language of the first sequence is repeated but put in different mouths, with different intonations. In the next iteration, it’s Terry who has the plan and Arabella who is uncertain. He’s dead, but that doesn’t mean he can be tucked away.Īrabella conjures a triptych that explores and explodes clichés, and in which no questions, no thoughts, no feelings are off-limits. She takes him home, pulped on the bus-“boys will be boys,” a woman says to her smilingly-and shoves him under her bed, along with everything else she’s repressing. They follow him through the city, and after he collapses on the street, Arabella holds his flaccid penis and beats him up. ![]() The women’s giddiness fades when Arabella remembers that he has taken her underwear. As he begins to undo his pants, she opens her eyes and asks “Who is the criminal, you or me?” just as Theo reaches out from the next bathroom stall and injects him with his own drugs. ![]() David takes a seemingly spiked Arabella down to the bathroom. Arabella approaches him, hilariously pretending to sip her drink-Coel’s physical comedy never fails-while Terry distracts his co-conspirator with a dance and Theo steals his drugs. They call Theo, and the three of them watch the rapist, David, at the bar. In the initial scenario, upon recognizing her rapist, Arabella drags an uncertain Terry down to the bathroom of the Ego Death Bar and explains her plan: hook, line, sink him. Coel says she’s trying not to do that, but apparently only, first, by doing it. Alex Jung’s profile of Coel for New York magazine, he describes her writing the finale at an Airbnb in rural Michigan, where her host recommended a Margaret Atwood story about a woman encountering her attacker. On another show, he’d turn out to be the culprit, but here he’s a red herring, a #NotAllWhiteMen counterweight, a safe space, and himself all at once.) Arabella conjures a bloody revenge sequence, a sentimental melodrama, and finally a romantic role reversal, a triptych that explores and explodes clichés, and in which no questions, no thoughts, no feelings are off-limits. (Ben is a saintly white-guy goof on the Black best friend trope who also stands in implicit comparison with the rapist. It’s the first of three scenarios that play through Arabella’s mind as she sits in her cement backyard, in the quiet company of her kindly roommate Ben. In this episode, she confronts her attacker in what first seems to be reality but is instead her imagination. ![]() ![]() At the end of the previous episode, she remembered the details of her sexual assault. The finale explores how Arabella finally gets all the way there. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
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