![]() ![]() Natalie Seery/HBO It’s not happy endings that prove elusive, but endings altogether. In “Ego Death,” Coel pushes the argument further: it’s not happy endings that prove elusive, but endings altogether. Throughout all 12 episodes, very bad things happen to mostly good people who also do bad things with little indication there’s some positive trajectory at play in the background. None feels more true or likely, in part because Coel has spent a full season rendering a world in which victims are regularly denied justice and where there are no reliable measures to correct for inequality. Life is but a dream.Įach of these endings reads as implausible as the last. She and her friends secure loving partners and professional success. She doesn’t need anything from her attacker. And in the fourth fantasy iteration, Arabella's trauma is already processed. They have sex at her place, and when she asks him to leave, he takes with him the version of the attacker still rotting below the bed (in this world, there are no attackers). In a third timeline, gender norms are flipped or are maybe even nonexistent: Arabella's attacker is now a conquest, and she has the upper hand. There’s a fantasy of mutual understanding in which she comes to see the darkness of her rapist’s internal world before police ultimately cart him off to face retributive justice. There’s a revenge fantasy in which Arabella kills her attacker and leaves his corpse under her bed. Rather than fix on a certain conclusion for Arabella, whose arc has charted the aftermath of her sexual assault, Coel presents four alternative and exclusive codas for the I May Destroy You finale ending. Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You ended this week with an episode aptly titled “Ego Death” - and summer TV is more boring again for it. Spoilers ahead for the season finale of I May Destroy You.
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