But his blood continues to seep outward even as Arabella adds more notecards to her book outline, establishing the meta quality of this sequence - Arabella is writing what we’re witnessing. She eventually drags him into her home and hides him in the place where she dares not look, both literally and symbolically: under her bed. Theo and Arabella react instinctively as Terry watches on, Theo strangling David with the underwear while Arabella pounds him with her fists until his face is bloody and raw. But when has Arabella ever been a dame to play it simply? She declares that she wants to see his penis, and just as she’s taking a look, he regains consciousness. Theo finds Arabella’s underwear, which should be the end of the story.
So the women follow him, meandering the London streets until he finally staggers, looks Arabella in the eye, and crumbles to the ground. The celebratory adrenaline rush shared by Theo, Terry, and Arabella is cut short when our prickly lead mentions that David has her underwear, which could be evidence. “Hello, David,” Arabella says solemnly before harshly kissing him. “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, but who’s the criminal? You or me?” she says, just before Theo stabs him with the syringe. He takes off her underwear, but before he can do anything more she looks at him with pointed recognition, freezing him in place. Then David drags Arabella into the restroom, her body like putty in his hands. While Theo mixes the drugs with toilet water (gross) and fills a syringe, Arabella pretends to be drugged - despite finding comical ways to not drink the spiked gin and tonic - and David trails behind her, pretending to be gallant and caring. Meanwhile, Terry distracts David’s friend Tariq, allowing the plan to go smoothly - which it does, at first. She’s meant to garner David’s attention in order for Theo to see where he has the drugs he uses to roofie women and swipe it from him so he can understand the horror he has put others through. She even stumbles over her words, asking for a “gin and orange” before she corrects and says “gin and tonic” (a detail echoed in the third fantasy). Arabella approaches, hesitant at first, anxiety written across her face and visible in the tight movement of her body. The three women, clad in black like avenging angels, watch David as he hovers around the bar. She completes the team by making a call, roping in former high-school peer/current group-therapy head, Theo. Rummaging through her bag, Arabella dons an inky black vinyl dress and a snow white wig (the costume design by Lynsey Moore deserves so much praise for its precision in echoing the personas these characters sometimes try on). Instead, she allows the viewers to sit with the violence they witness long enough to understand its grooves and reverberations.Īfter the initial rush of remembrance, Arabella and Terry rush into Ego Death’s bathroom, where Arabella reveals she has a plan.
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Of course, Coel, who not only stars in the series but wrote and co-directed each episode, doesn’t tip her hand immediately to let us know that what we’re watching isn’t strictly reality. “Ego Death” comprises three fantasies and a coda, each fantasy echoing the others and pushing the show further into uncomfortable territory, questioning what it means to find closure. What follows, though, isn’t a simple narrative of vengeance and closure, but something far more ambitious and trickier to parse. After hanging around the titular bar for nights on end, Arabella finally sees her attacker at the bar with his friend and is overcome by a rush of memories, seemingly jarred loose by her epiphany about her book in the penultimate episode. In the finale, Arabella is confronted by the memories of the night she was drugged and raped - memories that have been out of her grasp throughout the show, save for one lucid image of her attacker, David, looming over her in a bathroom stall. Undergirding the finale’s neon-lit escapades is a series of questions that don’t have easy answers: Is closure a reality, or is it a lie that life can abide by neat narratives? Are we bound forever to our traumas, or is it possible to heal from them? And, if we can, how do we make that a reality? Within the folds of this single season of television is one of the most profound considerations of not only the stories we tell about sexual assault, but the stories we tell ourselves - and others - in order to process trauma, to move through it, if not necessarily beyond it. “Ego Death,” the final episode of I May Destroy You, cements the genius of Michaela Coel with its nimble handling of a subject of considerable magnitude, both cultural and emotional.
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