I’ve watched Past Lives (2023) three times now. My first watch, I was unimpressed. Then I went back and was a little more impressed. With every viewing my opinion shifts ever so slightly. Every criticism I have seems to generate an equally convincing defence. Every answer opens another question. I still don’t think I like the film in the uncomplicated way I love my favourites, but every time I finish a watch, I realise that I find myself thinking about it more than I thought about films that I’d actually enjoyed. But why? Why couldn’t this film that had unimpressed me with my first watch leave my mind?

My first watch of Past Lives left me feeling inexplicably mild. For a story so devastating, and a person normally so easy to devastate, it was incredibly strange how uncharacteristically apathetic I felt. I think my biggest struggle with the film was the emotional distance I felt between what the film told us about Nora and Hae-sung’s connection, and how it was actually translated on the screen. Writer-director Celine Song traded the intimacy and actual tangible gravity between Nora and Hae-sung for an (albeit beautiful) depiction of the quiet erosion of time, with the years slipping away almost imperceptibly. You blink, and 12 years has passed – often how quick real life feels. But this trade-off, at first, didn’t work for me. The film tells us that Nora and Hae-sung share In-Yun – a connection that stretched between them in all of their past lives. The tragedy was that this was not the life that their In-Yun was full enough for them to be destined to be together, which is why the ending was supposed to hit so hard when they inevitably walk away from each other. But I thought that the film actually rarely dramaticised this bond. A lot of it was us being told that Nora and Hae-sung were “meant to be”, but their connection felt strangely lacking for the tragedy to hit. The film wanted us to ache with the sense of these two people being pulled in different directions, Nora up the stairs as the one who leaves, and wants to leave, but Hae-sung on the straight path, the path that is expected of him.

But I couldn’t ache with the loss of their love, because I never felt it in the first place. I felt it from Hae-sung, for sure. His longing for Nora permeated every scene he was in. He searched for Nora for years, carrying her memory with him for his whole life, the thought of the life they could have had. Nora, on the other hand, forgets his name in adulthood. Even as a child, she wants to leave Korea and dreams of building her life somewhere more than Korea could allow of her. This is the exact reason why Hae-sung loves Nora, but why does Nora “love” him? Why does she mourn him?

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With my second watch, I thought of an answer to that question, and I began wondering whether I had misunderstood the film. Maybe the love story was never about Nora and Hae-sung, but about Nora and Korea. What if Hae-sung wasn’t the object of her longing at all, but he reminded her of the intense love she had for her homeland? Through this lens, Past Lives became something new entirely – and something better. Hae Sung embodied her first language, her childhood, her country, and who she left behind in Korea – who she would have been if her family had never emigrated. On my second watch, this seemed so clear to me that I couldn’t fathom how I had missed it initially.

“I feel so not Korean when I’m with him, but also, somehow more Korean.”

“It’s really intense, but I don’t think that’s attraction. I think I just missed him a lot. I think I missed Seoul.”

On my third watch I expected to reach the ending with a newfound appreciation and sadness. But then I reached the end… and I still felt the same emptiness. I understood that she wasn’t mourning any “love” that Arthur thought she had for Hae-sung, but she was mourning who she used to be when she was with him. But I realised that I didn’t feel much because I think if we were meant to be mourning that different version of Nora that could have loved Hae-sung, the film didn’t put enough focus on her at all. As the protagonist, the film remained strangely elusive about her. Her writing dreams were muted to make room for her relationship with Arthur; she said she was so passionate about writing that she wanted to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but these dreams were always figurative and never something we actually saw her strive towards. Hae-sung constantly said he saw a passion in her that I never actually saw. Her dreams were kept abstract so they could be defined by how Hae-sung and Arthur saw her. If the central tragedy was meant to be the loss of Nora’s identity, then I wanted more Nora. I needed someone tangible to grieve.

You might have guessed where this is going, but I once again backtracked on that idea. Wait! I thought. What if she’s not necessarily mourning her Korean identity, but the version of herself when she was in Korea that Hae-sung loved? The passionate, driven, ambitious little girl that dreamed of moving to America and winning a Nobel Prize? Because now she isn’t that, she didn’t achieve any of her dreams, and seeing him reminded her of the person she used to be when she had goals, and drive? This is currently what I think the central theme is circling around - the pain of losing a version of herself that could have been loved by him (although you never know with a fourth watch I might have another epiphany and completely change my mind again). But I do think that Nora cried at the end because she was mourning not Hae-sung, not Korea or her Korean identity per say, but specifically her childhood self whom Hae-sung once loved, and whom she can’t get back. The love between them wasn’t tangible because she wasn’t the version of herself
that he used to love - and that was the tragedy.

Initially, I kept comparing Past Lives to The Sun Is Also a Star (2016). The NOVEL, not the 2019 adaptation. At first, I thought it was because TSIAAS convinced me of the romance between its protagonists, Natasha and Daniel, which is why I violently sobbed when the uncontrollable forces of fate and destiny inevitably pulled them apart, while Past Lives didn’t. But now I realise that Past Lives was never trying to convince me of their bond. At the end of the day, the story was about Nora. It wasn’t asking what could have been? but, what can never be again? For many people, Past Lives’ restraint and refusal to indulge in the melodrama was exactly what created the devastating ache that broke them, but it didn’t for me. And maybe that’s just for the simple reason that melodrama is the kind of story that reaches me more. Or maybe it was because I didn’t ‘get’ the film on my first watch, so now any element of surprise and devastation has passed me by. But that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to revisit it time and time again.

I think that’s what I like so much about the film - the fact that it makes me want to rewatch it every single time I finish watching. The fact that it has stayed in my mind since I first watched it in 2023. Which brings me to the title of this essay, the saying: “The one in love never loses.” It wasn’t about Nora, nor Hae Sung, but about me. Because I think that’s true of films as well. I keep returning to Past Lives, even if I’m not sure if I love it or not. I keep replaying every single conversation, retconning my own opinions, finding counterarguments against my own arguments. Every criticism I have seems to generate a defence just as compelling.

“The romance lacked intimacy!” Well, that’s because the absence of intimacy was the point.

“But the emotional distance weakened the tragedy!” But the tragedy exists because of that distance.

“Okay, but Nora could have been more fully realised!” But perhaps her elusiveness reflects the fragmented identity that she’s spent her life constructing.

Circles and circles and more flipping circles. It’s insanely aggravating and is on my mind constantly. So how can I call that a failure? Is that not what art is? Leaving you with questions long after its over?

I return to Past Lives hoping to settle my opinion once and for all over and over, only to find that my interpretation has changed too. All I can do is just discover what this version of myself currently sees in it. Perhaps I haven’t spent three viewings trying to understand Past Lives. Perhaps I’ve spent three viewings trying to understand why it refuses to leave me. And I think that’s something quite rare, and quite beautiful.

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Unlike the last few shows I discussed in Part 1, I don’t think Killing Eve was ruined by its finale alone. I think it was steadily declining in quality since long before then. Killing Eve is a perfect example of what happens when a show refuses to kill its darlings in terms of both literally killing its characters, but also killing the show altogether. Choosing when a story ends can have just as much impact on its legacy as how it ends. The beauty of Killing Eve wasn’t simply the shock factor when Villanelle killed people, it was that nobody, especially Villanelle and Eve, seemed entirely predictable. The longer a show runs, the harder it becomes to maintain that unpredictability. Eventually the shocking becomes expected, and once the audience starts anticipating chaos, the chaos loses its power.

Eve and Villanelle in Season 1 had such a fresh and fascinating dynamic. I think their relationship is comparable to some of the most famous toxic dynamics in the history of literature; Sherlock and Moriarty, V and Inspector Javert, Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, Batman and Joker, even Tom and Jerry. Their obsession with one another brought out the humanity in Villanelle but also the sociopathy in Eve. That balance between psychological character work and entertainment was what made the first season so addictive - it was thoughtful and deep without ever forgetting to be fun. But the problem was that the show didn’t know when to end this dynamic.

A comparison that kept coming to my mind as I watched the final season of Killing Eve was The Great. If you don’t know, The Great follows a young, idealistic Catherine (played by Elle Fanning) as she arrives in Russia for an arranged marriage to the mercurial and depraved Emperor Peter III (played by Nicholas Hoult). Disillusioned by his reign, she plans to overthrow him, transform the country, and take the throne. It is an absurdist, anachronistic dark comedy known for its vulgarity, violence, witty banter, and a very similar, toxic dynamic between its two protagonists, Catherine and Peter, who seem to have an unexplainable pull and love for one another despite also hating each other so deeply.

The Great, like Killing Eve, was unique, fresh, and incredibly fun to watch during its first season. Then Season 2 came along and felt like the same story all over again, just in a different font. It dragged, the shock factor vanished, and everything became predictable. By the time I sat down for the final season, I was expecting more of the same. For the first half, I was right. Then the show did something I never expected: it completely changed its tone. One twist, right at the halfway point, transformed the entire series and had me locked in for the rest of the season. Instead of leaving with a bitter taste in my mouth, I left with a newfound respect for the show. Spoilers ahead.

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Peter III dies in Season 3, Episode 6, titled “Ice”. He meets his shocking end when he stubbornly decides to ride his horse across a frozen lake, only to plunge to his death after the ice unexpectedly breaks beneath him. Now Peter had cheated death so many times before that I expected him to just pop out and be okay like he always was, maybe make a crude joke or two before he went on his way. And then the episode ended. So then, I expected him to walk through the double doors of the court in the next episode with wet clothes and one heck of a ridiculous story. And then that episode ended too. The sudden loss of Peter changed the dynamic of the show entirely, with the subsequent episodes after heavily focusing on Catherine navigating her grief and processing the tragedy, while also trying to keep Russia from being stolen away from between her fingers. The final season of The Great had the balls to switch it up when it sensed itself becoming stale, and kill its darling protagonist in the final season, leaving his love-hate rival counterpart reeling.

Villanelle is killed in the final minutes of the final episode of the final season of Killing Eve. The show treated her death as the ending rather than a beat in a story. We never see Eve process it. We never see her rage, her grief, her guilt, or even her relief. We never see what remains when the person who defined her life, and the only other person who understood her completely, is suddenly gone.

By allowing The Great to continue past Peter’s death, the showrunners took an incredibly big risk that I don’t think the showrunners of Killing Eve had the gut to do. They consistently had a problem with “killing their darlings” not even just in the final season. Side characters, they had no problem killing off, but when it came to the main cast of the show, the show would allow them to become injured to the verge of death and then be fixed up and fine for the next episode. When there are no stakes in a show, you’re not bothered about what happens because you know everything will work out in the end. And that’s such a dangerous thing. This is why I think Season 2 would have been the perfect place to end it. The finale of Season 2 ends with Villanelle shooting Eve in the back when she chooses to walk away from her instead of being with her forever. I think there’s something beautiful about mutually assured destruction. Eve and Villanelle were the only people who could truly destroy one another, which is why a tragic ending between them would have felt more satisfying than a random sniper’s bullet in Villanelle’s back.

Which brings me to the finale itself, “Hello, Losers”. Like The Boys finale, the majority of the episode was incredibly mid. There seems to be an epidemic where there’s so much build up to the last episode of a show, and then barely anything happens for most of its run time before everything blows up in the last 15 minutes. There was so much hype around The Twelve and destroying them once and for all, but then Eve and Villanelle find them by chance, and then kill them in one long montage of blood and fighting. Really? It was so anticlimactic and underwhelming. Villanelle is killed at the end by a sniper and then the show just… ends. If she was killed in the middle of the season, like Peter, so much space would have been let up to see the aftermath of Eve getting revenge or healing and flourishing, how she deals with Carolyn, how she deals with the loss of somebody she hated and shouldn’t have loved but loved despite it all.

That’s what frustrates me most about Killing Eve. Not that Villanelle died, but that the show seemed completely uninterested in what her death meant. The Great understood that death isn’t the end of a story. Sometimes it’s the beginning of the most interesting part. Killing Eve had the guts to pull the trigger but then immediately cut to black.

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The Strange Case of Stranger Things

Season 1 of Stranger Things had incredible writing. The kids talked like kids and reminded viewers of their own childhood. They weren’t chosen ones, superheroes, or geniuses. They were awkward outsiders riding bikes around a small town, which is exactly why people connected with them. They reminded viewers that they mattered – that they were important enough to be the protagonists in their own life.

As the show went on, it started expanding. In seasons 2 and 3, this was done quite well. The introduction of the wider cast Max, Billy, Steve, Robin and Erica was done quite seamlessly, and all of the characters just felt part of the family they’d already established. There’s a reason why Season 3 is so many people’s favourite season. The dynamics between every single one of the characters is written so well and so realistically that you can’t help but feel part of their family. That’s why the deaths and the losses hit so hard. The vibes of the season are so nostalgic and vibrant and just beautiful to look at.

Ironically, Season 3 was also where the seeds of the show’s decline were planted. The Russian conspiracy was entertaining at the time, but it marked the moment Stranger Things started looking outward instead of inward. Season 4 was emotional, and needed for backstory and filling in plotholes, but that’s pretty much all it had going for it. The characters were miles away from each other, and all in different places in their own lives. There was barely any comradery or friendship that sometimes it didn’t even feel like Stranger Things anymore. There were so many plotlines, but the only one that resonated with me was Max’s.

The reason Max’s storyline resonated so strongly wasn’t because Vecna was a particularly compelling villain. It was because her story had almost nothing to do with Vecna. It was about grief, guilt, depression, and the impossible task of moving on after trauma. Vecna simply gave those emotions a physical form. The supernatural elements amplified the character drama, which is what is so well done in in Seasons 1, 2 and 3. Even though the stakes are large, every plotline is anchored to a character. Joyce isn’t investigating the Upside Down because the script needs someone to explain the mythology; she’s searching for her lost son. Hopper isn’t uncovering a conspiracy because he’s the designated detective; he’s a grieving father who sees a chance to save someone else’s child. Every supernatural development strengthened the emotional story already taking place. In Season 4, that relationship slowly reversed. Characters increasingly existed to move the mythology forward rather than the mythology existing to challenge the characters. By the final season, everyone’s scattered across different states, military bases, and side quests. The characters barely spend meaningful time together.

Hopper was plopped in Russia and for hours we watched him get beaten up by Russian guards, try to escape prison, fight giant demogorgons, in endless military operations. Yet despite all that activity, he barely changed as a person. The plot constantly moved forward, but his character remained static. After a while, it felt less like watching a story and more like watching obstacles being placed in front of him one after another. And unfortunately, it was 60% of every episode, and it bored me.

This culminated in Season 5, where the scale reached its peak while the character development reached its trough. After years of build-up, many of the central figures felt frozen in place. Hopper, particularly, annoyed me once again. It had been 5 seasons, and he remained the standoffish man who couldn’t communicate his feelings with Eleven, so chose to yell instead. Mike and Eleven talked like they could barely stand each other. The friendships that had once defined the show didn’t exist anymore. And the writing sucked. Honestly, it was so bad that it made me laugh out loud constantly. Nobody talks like that. The dialogue was so goofy and almost everybody talked in either one-liners or explanatory info-dumps. Every scene became an over-the-top explanation where characters would use objects around them to explain something incredibly simple, because the writers were chasing the hype of these scenes from the first season.

The show runners thought bigger = better. I don’t have a problem with them expanding the world, and the lore, of The Upside Down. There’s nothing inherently wrong with expanding the mythology. Of course, audiences wanted to know more about The Upside Down. Of course they wanted answers about the creatures, the dimensions, and whatever was lurking behind them. The problem was never the decision to explore those ideas. The problem was that, somewhere along the way, the show began expanding outwards instead of deepening.

The Upside Down was never the enemy of the character writing. The mythology was never the enemy of the emotion. The show’s greatest moments came when those two elements worked together. When Max ran from Vecna, when Will disappeared and Joyce spoke to him through the Christmas lights, the supernatural wasn’t distracting from the human story that we all cared about the most, but was expressing it.

By the end, the writers seemed convinced that bigger mythology automatically meant bigger storytelling. More locations. More villains. More lore. More explanations. More spectacle. Stranger Things began as a story about lonely kids trying to find one lost friend. By the end, it was a story about saving the entire world. And somehow, despite the higher stakes, it felt much smaller.

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Arcane vs League of Legends

I will sing the praises of Arcane Season 1 till the day I die. I truly think it is a masterpiece of animated television from not only the stunning visual effects, cinematography and art style but also from its deep understanding of its characters, their foils, their counterfoils, their hamartia, and their dynamics with others. It is one of the greatest seasons of television I’ve ever seen in my entire life (and no, I’m not exaggerating). You can imagine my disappointment when I watched the second and final season.

After watching the finale of this show that I loved so so so much, I felt empty. But I didn’t feel empty in the good kind of devastatingly sad way, but in a “what?” kind of way. Honestly, I feel like I’m a broken record the amount of times I’ve said that a show has done the thing that a lot of shows do where they want to go bigger and expand on the lore, and in consequence forget what made their earlier seasons so lovable. Arcane was one of the only shows I’d seen that understood the relationship between its characters, and how everybody related and impacted each other’s story, so well. It turned Season 1 into a beautiful tapestry of character arcs and moves and countermoves that I hadn’t seen in a very, very long time.

My favourite dynamic by a long shot was Jinx and Caitlyn. Although I don’t agree (obviously) with Caitlyn’s decisions in Season 2, she was one of the only characters whose actions were understandable from a storytelling viewpoint. We’d seen her grow up in this sheltered, posh lifestyle, and be indoctrinated into believing everyone from the Undercity were criminals who lied, thieved, cheated and deserve to be enforced. Then, everything her parents and her friends fed to her became true when Jinx bombed the Piltover Council Building, killing her mother. All of her discriminatory thoughts became validated, and she became almost a dictator trying to get revenge. I think, despite her love for Vi, she had an innate prejudice against anything and anyone that wasn’t Topside.

Caitlyn was hellbent on catching Jinx, and didn’t care who got hurt in the process because in her mind, Jinx was the ultimate representation of Zaun, and of everything she was told to hate. Killing Jinx, in her own twisted way, was justice for all the harm that Zaun had ever done to Piltover. But what I loved most about their dynamic was that Jinx thought the exact same. We’d seen the mechanisms that turned her from Powder into one of Zaun’s most feared pirates in Silco’s underground reign of terror. We understood why she had such a hatred for Topsiders, and why she thought she was validated in bombing them after they had stolen her sister away from her and killed the one person who had shown her love in years.

In Season 2, Jinx went from being the “villain” to the hero of Zaun, fighting for equality and peace. Though her arc was inevitable, I think it was went about in the worst way. As much as everybody loved Isha, all I could see when I looked at her was a plot device used solely for an explanation of Jinx becoming good. We first meet her when she crashes into Jinx after being on the run from some men who are after her. Why are these men pursuing this random child? I have no idea. Why is she an orphan? How did she get into this situation? How old is she? Where is she coming from? She’s initially scared of Jinx, and then 5 seconds later she trusts her with her entire life. Why? Why is she scared of her in the first place? Why did she change her mind? Isha often felt less like an actual person and more like a narrative tool. Her purpose was obvious; she existed to force Jinx to confront her younger self and rediscover her capacity for love. But the problem is that Isha rarely should have felt like a person outside of that function. We learn very little about who she is, what she wants, or why she’s so attached to Jinx, which makes the emotional payoff feel strangely manufactured.

Caitlyn ultimately switches sides at the end because she recognizes Ambessa’s authoritarian nature which then causes her to realise that Ambessa was who she was becoming. Ambessa was used for Caitlyn’s arc just as Isha was for Jinx’s, but I don’t have a problem with her character because she had a backstory, she had a past, she had her own motives for what she was doing. Isha didn’t have any of that, or anything that explained why she was so attached to Jinx. You can’t just tell me that Jinx and Isha have a beautiful relationship by a montage of them bonding and expect me to believe it. Of course, you can infer that she never really had anyone before her, but inferring isn’t the same thing as the show writing it into her character. And I do hold Arcane to higher standards than I do for most shows, but that’s because it had already shown me that it was able to do this well.

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Vi, I honestly think was a character assassination. She was written as Caitlyn’s puppet who honestly just seemed like she did whatever her girlfriend asked because she was in love with her, which is so drastically different to the Vi we’d seen prior. Vi in Season 1 had such a strong motivation of wanting to find Powder and atone for a horrible mistake she had made when she was younger. That motive was the underlying cause of every single decision she made; she wanted to find and protect her little sister. In Season 2, their dynamic grew much more complicated because obviously now, Vi believed that Powder was dead, and that Jinx had killed her. But Vi becoming the one thing she hated the most in her life and putting on an Enforcer’s uniform to hunt Jinx felt so wrong on so many levels for me. Hating Enforcers who killed her parents was such a big part of Vi’s personality. And I don’t even think her love for Caitlyn could surpass that hatred , or the bond she had with Jinx, no matter how many times she told herself that her little sister was dead.

Vi becoming an Enforcer wasn’t the problem - it wasn’t necessarily inherently impossible. People betray their values all the time, especially when they’re grieving. The problem is that Arcane never fully convinced me why Vi would abandon one of her deepest beliefs so quickly. Hatred of the Enforcers wasn’t a minor character trait; it was one of the foundations of her identity. It just felt like they made her do something that went against everything she stood for because Caitlyn asked her to, and it was so jarring to watch.

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The last season of Arcane was the first instance that I truly felt like I wasn’t watching Arcane - the show I had fallen in love with, but that I remembered that this was technically League of Legends. From the Hexcore, to Mel’s random powers of the Black Rose, and Viktor practically becoming a god, it just felt like the writers were trying to pack in as much League of Legends lore as they could without it making sense for what they had set up with the show prior. I felt like I was watching Season 7 of Riverdale. Whether or not the groundwork existed, the reveal of Mel’s powers felt so disconnected from the story Arcane had spent a season building. When it suited them, they dumped in her League of Legends lore just so she could defeat her mother in battle. Nothing felt earned, and thus nothing felt rewarding.

What made Arcane Season 1 extraordinary wasn’t its worldbuilding. It wasn’t the Hexcore, the politics of Piltover, or the mysteries of Runeterra. It was the characters. Every conflict, every tragedy, every twist emerged from people making understandable choices. By the end of Season 2, it felt as though the characters were no longer driving the story, but the story was dragging the characters wherever the lore needed them to go. Season 1 felt like it transcended its source material but Season 2 felt beholden to it.

I do think this was completely deserved – Obsession is a great movie, and I loved it. I watched it twice in the cinema within a week (which isn’t odd for me but still). However, one thought I couldn’t shake throughout the entirety of both my watches was: ‘I’ve seen this film before.’ Not literally, of course. Obsession is its own film. It has its own story and its own aesthetic, but as the plot unfolded, all I could think about was Don’t Worry Darling (2022).

Both films are ultimately about toxic relationships built on the removal of female autonomy. In Obsession, Bear becomes so consumed by his desire for Nikki that he wishes for her to love him more than anyone or anything else. This wish strips away her agency. Her discomfort becomes irrelevant to him. When he hears her screaming, or when she snaps back to herself and tries to harm herself to get away from him, or when she asks him to kill her and he replies with, “What’s so bad about being with me?”, we consistently see him actively choose to sacrifice her pain and free will just so he can possess the version of Nikki that he wants. Don’t Worry Darling also revolves around the same theme. Jack knows his relationship with Alice is failing. He knows he is losing her. Rather than accepting that reality, he traps her inside a virtual world where she can play the role of his perfect wife forever. He removes her ability to choose. He decides that possessing her completely is preferable to her leaving him, because he knows he is nothing without her. Both movies are about lonely men being so terrified of losing women that they would rather imprison them than let them leave.

That’s why I was so surprised by how differently the two films were received. Don’t Worry Darling currently sits at a 38% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Critics Consensus reads: “Despite an intriguing array of talent on either side of the camera, Don’t Worry Darling is a mostly muddled rehash of overly familiar themes.” A muddled rehash of familiar themes? Many argued that its commentary on womanhood, misogyny and toxic masculinity was obvious, repetitive, and overly familiar. Yet four years later, Obsession arrives exploring remarkably similar ideas and receives near-universal acclaim. Critics praised its originality. They praised its discussion of consent, body autonomy and gender dynamics. One review that particularly stuck with me states: “It snowballed into a much larger conversation about body autonomy, consent, and pitting women against each other — something I haven’t seen in a movie, let alone a horror movie, facilitate in such a well-crafted way.” I think this stuck with me so much because I thought the complete opposite. I thought that I had seen this in a movie before, 4 years prior.

Part of what has fascinated me most about Obsession’s reception is the number of videos and articles I’ve seen treating its most obvious themes as ground-breaking discoveries. I’ve seen countless “ending explained” posts insisting that Nikki isn’t actually the villain, that Bear is the truly obsessed one, or that the film is secretly about male entitlement and control. But none of this is hidden. The film isn’t burying these ideas beneath layers of symbolism waiting to be excavated by internet detectives. Bear literally removes Nikki’s autonomy for his own benefit. The entire plot is built around his inability to accept her as a person with desires independent from his own. This isn’t subtext. It’s just text.

While Don’t Worry Darling was criticised for being too obvious about its themes, Obsession was praised because people kept rediscovering those same themes and presenting them as profound revelations. And that’s what makes the comparison so fascinating. Because the more I look at these two films, the harder it becomes to understand why one was criticised for recycling familiar ideas while the other was celebrated for reinventing them.

Obviously there are arbitrary differences between the two: Obsession is a horror film while Don’t Worry Darling is a psychological thriller with horror elements. Obsession uses supernatural wishes while Don’t Worry Darling uses virtual reality. But both rely on the same kind of unease. Neither film derives its horror from monsters, demons, or supernatural evil. Instead, both are terrifying because their central fears are entirely human: control, obsession, entitlement, and the possibility of having your autonomy stripped away by someone who claims to love you.

That’s why the praise of Obsession being, ‘completely original’ just doesn’t sit right with me. People have been talking about this topic for years, in Men, The Stepford Wives, The Handmaid’s Tale, even in sitcoms like Kevin Can F**k Himself. Even just last year, Companion - a sci-fi thriller about a man who literally programmed his ideal partner into existence - was released. Like Obsession, it centred on male entitlement and the desire to mould women into something more convenient. It raised many of the same questions about possession, autonomy, and insecurity that these stories have been exploring for decades. Passengers (2016) starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence was a romance for the men, but a horror story for the women. If the ‘originality’ praise comes from the use of the One Wish Willow, I would argue that The Victory Project in Don’t Worry Darling is also as original. The concept of the virtual world gave the film the unique framework to operate through just like the use of the One Wish Willow. So why was one embraced while the other was ridiculed?

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I think the answer has very little to do with the films themselves. The difference is that Obsession only became popular after people had seen it while Don’t Worry Darling was notorious before anybody even had. Obsession arrived without much baggage. Audiences discovered it through word of mouth once people had actually started to watch it. Its reputation was built almost entirely by reactions to the finished product.

However, long before the release of Don’t Worry Darling, the film had already become an internet event. It was expected and waited for and had gained its aforementioned notoriety from being Olivia Wilde’s second feature film that starred her boyfriend at the time – Harry Styles, a global pop star with very little acting experience who was suddenly appearing alongside some of the most respected actors and actresses of today. Many people walked into Don’t Worry Darling already convinced that it would fail, that the Harry Styles nepotism would shine through and validate the narrative that had already been formed online – that Olivia Wilde was biased, that Harry Styles couldn’t act, that the production was a mess and consequently, that the movie was doomed. Thus, every flaw of the film became proof of that narrative. While I obviously don’t think Harry Styles displayed the best acting in the film, I think the claims that his acting was so bad that it ruined the film are frankly ridiculous. I think his performance was perfectly satisfactory. When anybody is acting opposite Florence Pugh, they’re going to look worse by mere comparison. Nobody was asking whether Harry Styles was convincing enough for the role, but were asking whether he was good enough for Florence Pugh. And, of course, the answer was no.

In Obsession, that imbalance didn’t really exist. The performances by the underground leads, Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston, both operated on roughly the same level. They were both still phenomenal, especially Inde, but because there wasn’t much discrepancy between the two, it allowed the audience to focus on the story rather than constantly evaluating the actors against one another.

The second thing that I think harmed Don’t Worry Darling that actually might have helped Obsession was the timing of their release. Don’t Worry Darling arrived at the height of the “elevated psychological thriller” boom and was constantly compared to films like The Invisible Man, Fresh, and Watcher. Obsession arrived during a horror-renaissance. I think most people will agree with me that horror is arguably more popular than it has been in decades. Obsession entered a landscape eager to embrace inventive, low-budget horror and was allowed to succeed on its own terms while Don’t Worry Darling entered an already saturated market.

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There are also instances where I think Don’t Worry Darling is stronger than Obsession, though neither are flawless. For all its faults, Don’t Worry Darling spends considerable time establishing Alice as a human person. We understand her desires, her frustrations, and what has been stolen from her whereas the women in Obsession for me felt much more passive by comparison.

Nikki is placed under male control before we truly get to know her as an individual and Sarah ultimately becomes defined through her relationship and crush on Bear. This is a very minor point as I do think there was attempts to flesh them out with Sarah’s application to art school with a hope of becoming a tattoo artist, and Nikki wanting to quit her job at the music store to focus entirely on her writing career. It is slightly unfair as Don’t Worry Darling follows the perspective of Alice, so it obviously has more opportunity to make her an active character in her own story, and by following Bear in Obsession the girls don’t get quite the same liberty. Which, I guess, is part of the point of the film. But my point is that Obsession was allowed the liberty to make mistakes but every flaw in Don’t Worry Darling was magnified.

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I do very much like both movies, and I do think Obsession deserves its success. But every glowing review of Obsession only leaves me wondering what the conversation around Don’t Worry Darling might have looked like if audiences had been allowed to discover it the same way: without the baggage, without the discourse, and without already knowing what they were supposed to think. None of this is to say that people are wrong to dislike Don’t Worry Darling. Plenty of viewers watched it and simply didn’t connect with it, and that’s no problem at all. Sometimes people just don’t like a movie. My problem isn’t that people didn’t like the film, it’s that so many seemed determined to hate it before it had the chance to prove them wrong.

Maybe that’s why this whole conversation frustrates me so much. I try to go into every film as blindly as possible. I rarely watch trailers because they almost always distort my experience. Either they make me expect something incredible and I spend the entire runtime waiting for a film that doesn’t exist, or they convince me a film isn’t worth my time in the first place. A friend of mine skipped Sinners because he thought Michael B Jordan’s accent in the trailer was bad, and thus the film must be bad. He missed out on one of the best horror films of the decade. The same thing happens on a much larger scale online. Before a film is released, audiences consume trailers, casting announcements, interviews, controversies, review scores, think-pieces and TikTok discourse until they’ve practically decided their opinion already. By the time they finally sit down in the cinema, they’re not just watching a movie — they’re looking for evidence that confirms what they already believe. I think the greatest way to enhance your viewing experience of any film, is to give it the chance to surprise you. Go in with no expectations. With no preconceived narrative. With no knowledge of the plot. With no internet consensus telling you what you’re supposed to think. Just you, the screen, and the opportunity to form an opinion that’s actually your own.

In Adaptation (2002), Charlie Kaufman is tasked with adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. He quickly runs into a problem: there isn’t really a plot. The non-fiction book is literally just about orchids. Yes, Orlean used the orchid heist as a lens to investigate the nature of passion, obsession, and human desire, and the narrative delved into the history of plant smuggling, intense rivalries among fanatical collectors, and the unique, haunting ecology of the Florida swamps, but what’s that got to do with a movie? Kaufman was paralysed by the challenge. How do you adapt a story that isn’t really a story? How do you make a film out of something whose appeal lies in mood, ideas, and atmosphere rather than events?

He seeks advice from Robert McKee, a famous author and lecturer. McKee tells him this.

“First of all, you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears.”

But the problem is that Kaufman doesn’t want to hurt the artistic integrity of The Orchid Thief. He wants to honour Susan Orlean’s story. So, instead of forcing a plot onto the movie, he instead writes the screenplay about his struggle to write the screenplay about The Orchid Thief. This is what becomes Adaptation. Brilliantly, he makes fun of McKee’s statement that, “The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit,” by turning the last act of Adaptation into a drama filled, action-driven chaotic ending that, ultimately, has nothing to do with orchids. It’s one of my favourite films ever.

I’ve been thinking about Adaptation a lot while reading reactions to Backrooms.

One of the most common criticisms levelled at the film is that it “has no plot.” Depending on who’s saying it, this is either an observation or a condemnation. But I find myself wondering why so many people assume that is a flaw. After all, what exactly was the ‘Backrooms’ before it became a film? I’ll tell you - it was an uncanny picture that turned into a short film series about liminal spaces. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t a novel. It wasn’t a character-driven mystery. It wasn’t a sprawling mythology with carefully mapped narrative arcs. At its core, the ‘Backrooms’ was a single image and a feeling. An endless maze of yellow rooms. The hum of fluorescent lights. The unsettling sensation that somewhere familiar has become profoundly wrong. More importantly, it was the feeling of being trapped somewhere that seemed to exist outside of meaning itself. A place that could not be understood, conquered, or neatly explained.

Yet, everybody seemed to want exactly that with the movie – some sort of explanation. Many of the criticisms aimed at the film seem to begin with the assumption that it should have transformed this premise into a conventional narrative. The expectation appears to be that there should have been more lore, more explanations, more revelations, more answers. In other words, the expectation is that Backrooms should have become a normal movie.

But why? One of the strangest developments in contemporary storytelling is our tendency to treat plot as the highest artistic virtue. Increasingly, audiences seem to evaluate films less by how they make us feel and more by how efficiently they move from one story beat to the next. Atmosphere has become secondary. Ambiguity has become a problem to solve. The modern blockbuster has conditioned us to expect constant narrative propulsion. Every mystery must have an answer. Every image must have lore attached to it. Every question must eventually receive an explanation. Nothing can simply exist anymore.

Perhaps the clearest example of this shift is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in 1968, the film became one of the most influential works in cinema history despite being slow, ambiguous, and often deliberately opaque. Audiences weren’t captivated by a carefully explained mythology or a barrage of plot twists. They were captivated by the experience itself. The vast silence of space, the hypnotic imagery, the sense of encountering something beyond human understanding. Half a century later, people are still debating what the film means precisely because Kubrick refused to explain everything. Today, however, it’s difficult to imagine a major studio releasing something so comfortable with uncertainty. Contemporary audiences are increasingly trained to expect answers and constant narrative clarification. What was once considered revelatory—the idea that atmosphere and mystery could be the point—now risks being dismissed as a film “where nothing happens.” There’s something a little sad about that. The most frightening thing about the original Backrooms concept was that it resisted understanding. The endless rooms were scary precisely because they didn’t fit into a larger explanatory framework. The moment you explain everything, you transform existential horror into a puzzle. And puzzles can be solved.

A lesser version of Backrooms could easily have become a government conspiracy thriller. Or a monster-hunting adventure. Or a lore-heavy mystery about secret organisations and hidden experiments. It could have provided pages of exposition explaining exactly how the Backrooms work and why they exist. It would almost certainly have had a stronger “plot”. It would also have been a worse Backrooms movie. Because the thing people actually fell in love with was never the possibility of answers. It was the absence of them.

And what I find so funny about the complaints that the film ‘had no plot’ is because it quite literally did. Audiences seem to confuse plot with information. A mystery is introduced. Questions are answered. Twists occur. Exposition is delivered. We move from Point A to Point B. That’s what many people now mean when they say “plot.” But plot isn’t information. Plot is change. A character wants something. A character believes something. A character becomes someone else by the end of the story.

By that definition, Backrooms absolutely has a plot.

The main protagonist, Clark, begins the film convinced that he is a victim of circumstance. His divorce wasn’t his fault. His unhappiness wasn’t his fault. The world keeps happening to him. That’s why the therapy scenes matter, even if they’re a bit clunky. They’re establishing a man whose defining trait is externalising blame. The discovery of the Backrooms gives him the one thing he’s missing: a sole purpose. He isn’t merely fascinated by the place. He’s validated by it. For the first time in his life, he’s special. He has found something nobody else has found. That’s why he keeps returning. The Backrooms become less an object of curiosity and more an escape from self-reflection.

And the film repeatedly presents the Backrooms as a world of copies. Not perfect copies, but degraded copies. Copies of copies of copies until the original meaning is lost. That immediately reminded me of Jordan Peele’s Us. The horror in Us isn’t simply that doubles exist. It’s that they’re warped versions of the originals. Familiar but wrong. Human but not quite human. The Backrooms operate similarly. Every room resembles something real but has become uncanny through repetition and distortion. It’s a world that mimics reality without understanding it. I actually thought it was used as a commentary on AI. Generative AI functions through endless reproduction. It creates approximations of things that already exist. A copy of a copy of a copy. The further removed it becomes from the original source, the stranger and less recognisable the result can feel. The Backrooms are essentially architectural hallucinations: synthetic recreations of reality stripped of context and meaning.

Seen through that lens, the entity is not simply another creature living in the maze (which I think is what most people wanted). Instead, it’s Clark reproduced through the logic of the Backrooms themselves. So many copies that he’s been reduced to his ugliest impulses - aggression and blame. Which explains why the entity never attacked him at the beginning. Why would it? The entity embodies the worldview Clark already possesses. It acts with the same aggression and selfishness that Clark refuses to acknowledge in himself. Everyone else suffers from it, which is why it attacks everyone around him, but Clark remains untouched because he’s not the problem.

The turning point comes when his therapist finally tells him what nobody else has successfully communicated: he is in fact the problem. For the first time, Clark accepts responsibility. And the moment he does, the entity turns on him. It’s a surprisingly tragic conclusion - Clark achieving self-awareness only when it is already too late.

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That said, I don’t think the film executes all of these ideas perfectly. My biggest issue is his therapist, Mary. She exists largely to explain Clark to the audience, and as a result she never feels like a fully realised person. We understand her narrative function, but we rarely understand her as a character. She’s a plot device for Clark’s arc, and by using her, the film missed the opportunity to dramaticise Clark’s flaws directly. Imagine if we had spent the time witnessing his marriage fall apart instead of hearing about it after the fact. Imagine if we’d actually seen him dismiss his wife’s concerns, avoid responsibility, and justify his behaviour. Then, later, if his wife was the one that confronted him with the truth, the revelation would have felt much more earned rather than explained.

Too often the film tells us things that might have been more powerful if it had shown them. Ironically, for a film that trusts atmosphere so much, it occasionally lacks confidence in its own visual storytelling. But these shortcomings don’t convince me that the film lacks a plot. If anything, they convince me that the film’s actual plot has been overlooked because the conversation surrounding Backrooms often treats it as though it failed to provide enough answers when it was just answering a different question entirely. Clark’s story isn’t about solving the mystery of the Backrooms. It’s about confronting himself.

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It may frustrate viewers looking for a traditional narrative, but frustration, for me, was part of the experience. The Backrooms themselves are frustrating. They are repetitive, disorienting, and impossible to fully comprehend. To demand that the film provide clarity is, in some ways, to demand that it stop being the Backrooms.

Like Kaufman confronting The Orchid Thief, Parsons faced a concept where its appeal wasn’t rooted in story. Instead of forcing it into something that felt familiar, he embraced what made it unusual. He trusted atmosphere. He trusted imagery. Most importantly, he trusted the audience to sit with the uncertainty. And the uncertainty is exactly what scared me so much.

We live in an era where studios seem terrified that audiences will become bored, confused, or disengaged unless every moment is accompanied by exposition. In a cinematic landscape increasingly obsessed with turning everything into something, there is something refreshing about a film willing to remain, at least partially, nothing.

Whenever I tell people how much I love The Boys, I’m usually met with strange looks (which is fair enough). On the surface, it’s a show about superheroes sleeping with octopuses, massive orgy parties, and a few too many long swinging dangling penises. But beneath all the insanity, The Boys does something profound: I truly love superhero media and The Boys flips the normal superhero movie format into something deeply realistic and deeply concerning – a mirror into our own society. What would it look like if deeply narcissistic, morally rotten celebrities had superpowers? After all, we live in an era where one minute someone is the internet’s “wholesome funny guy”, and the next you find out they hosted a party with a meat platter designed to resemble the decomposing corpse of Amy Winehouse. Could you imagine if Diddy had superpowers? The Boys offers a satirical, political reality where these celebrities do have superpowers, and are superior to us puny mortals in literally every way, and what that would look like.

But satire wasn’t even the main reason I loved the show. I loved the characters. For all its gore and absurdity, The Boys understood one of television’s most effective emotional devices: found family. Hughie, Butcher, MM, Frenchie, Kimiko, Annie — a dysfunctional group of damaged people who slowly became something resembling a family. It’s the same reason I connected so deeply to the Guardians of the Galaxy films or the early Umbrella Academy. I like a spectacle, but I stay for the relationships. Which is why the ending frustrated me so much.

Once again, a television show I loved collapsed under the weight of its own finale. Game of Thrones, Killing Eve, Arcane — shows that spent years building rich characters and emotional arcs, only to rush, undermine, and completely betray them at the finish line. Somewhere along the way, television writers seem to have forgotten that shocking an audience is not the same thing as satisfying them. And it left me wondering: why??????

This will be a longer one, so feel free to skip to the show you’re most interested in and leave your thoughts below!

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Game of Thrones (aka the worst TV show ending in history).

One of the most frustrating things about the ending of Game of Thrones is that, unlike The Umbrella Academy, there was at least a partial explanation for why it collapsed so spectacularly. The show quite literally ran out of road. For six seasons, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had the luxury of adapting material from George R. R. Martin’s books. They had intricate political structures, carefully layered character motivations, and thematic groundwork already built for them. Then suddenly, they were on their own. The later seasons of Game of Thrones feel like watching a toddler take its first steps without its mother nearby, or a bird being pushed from the nest before it has fully learned how to fly. You can almost see the panic in the writing. The pacing speeds up dramatically. Seasons are cut down and down in episodes when suddenly they can’t think of enough story to fill their previous format.

I do sympathise to some degree. Ending a story this massive without finished source material was always going to be difficult. But understanding why something failed does not make it any less frustrating to watch. Benioff and Weiss had spent nearly a decade with these characters. They had written them, studied them, and worked alongside Martin for years. Even without completed novels, surely they should have understood the emotional core of these people by then? Instead, it felt as though every ounce of understanding they had built over six seasons suddenly evaporated the moment they were left without the books.

The clearest example of this is Jaime Lannister. Jaime arguably undergoes the most compelling character development in the entire series. He begins as an arrogant, morally bankrupt man defined almost entirely by his toxic devotion to Cersei. Yet over time, the show painstakingly transforms him. Through Brienne, through humiliation, through guilt, through the revelation about the Mad King, Jaime slowly becomes someone trying to reclaim his humanity. His story is about whether a person can escape the worst version of themselves. Then the finale throws all of that development into a fire.

After seasons of growth, Jaime abruptly returns to Cersei and dies with her beneath the Red Keep. The show turned one of television’s richest redemption arcs into a circle. Viewers spent years watching Jaime evolve, only for the story to effectively shrug and say, “Never mind.” It makes his entire journey feel pointless.

Tyrion suffers from a similar problem, although for different reasons. Early-season Tyrion is one of the sharpest and most politically intelligent characters ever written for television. His wit felt dangerous because it was grounded in genuine strategic understanding from George Martin. But as the series moved beyond the books, it felt as though the writers no longer knew how to write someone smarter than themselves. Tyrion’s decisions become bizarrely incompetent. Varys, a master manipulator who spent decades carefully preserving stability in the realm, like Tyrion suddenly begins making reckless decisions. Their blind faith in Daenerys — and then abrupt betrayal of her — felt less like calculated political strategy and more like the plot forcing them into positions they should not have been in in the first place.

Ironically, Daenerys herself is one of the few controversial endings that actually makes thematic sense to me. A lot of viewers hated the “Mad Queen” turn because Daenerys was positioned for years as a liberator and reformer. But when you really examine her story, the seeds of violence were always there. She constantly justified brutality if she believed the outcome was morally righteous. By the final season, she had lost almost everything: Jorah, Rhaegal, Missandei, her sense of belonging, and the love of the people in Essos. She arrives in the land she believed was her destiny only to find rejection, isolation, and paranoia. Her breakdown was rushed, but the core idea itself is not unbelievable. It reminded me of the same arc Rin from The Poppy War went through. Both fundamentally sympathetic people gradually consumed by grief, power, rage, and the belief that violence is justified if it creates a better world.

What makes far less sense is everything surrounding Jon Snow afterwards.

Jon spent the entire series embodying the qualities of a genuinely good ruler. He is reluctant, self-sacrificing, honourable and most importantly, deeply uncomfortable with power. Unlike Daenerys, he never desired domination. He represented the exact opposite of the corrupt rulers who had destroyed Westeros. So after he kills Daenerys and effectively saves the realm from her tyranny, they decide to… exile him beyond the Wall as punishment? For what? Jaime killed the Mad King and became infamous as the Kingslayer, Jon kills Daenerys for essentially the same reason, except the narrative oddly treats him as though he has committed some unforgivable crime. Meanwhile Bran Stark is crowned king because, according to Tyrion, he never wanted the throne. But neither did Jon. Jon’s reluctance to rule is precisely what would have made him a compelling ruler, and it would have been a hell of a lot more satisfying than “Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?”. Bran’s coronation felt less like the culmination of the years’ worth of storytelling we’d seen, and more like the writers were trying to surprise the audience with unpredictability.

And then there is the Night King. For eight seasons, the series builds toward the confrontation between Jon Snow and the Night King. Jon is resurrected. He unites wildlings and Northerners. He repeatedly witnesses the White Walkers firsthand while the rest of Westeros ignores the threat. The Night King becomes the physical embodiment of death itself, looming over the story from the very first scene of the pilot episode. Then Jon barely participates in the resolution and Arya kills the Night King instead.

Now, I love Arya Stark. Her arc is fantastic. But the decision was so bizarre. Arya’s story has almost nothing to do with the White Walkers. Her journey is about identity, revenge, and survival. Jon’s story, meanwhile, is inseparable from the existential threat beyond the Wall. Having Arya deliver the final blow - again like Bran - felt like the writers just wanted to shock us with a cool scene instead of giving us the fight we’d actually been waiting for.

That is ultimately what makes the ending of Game of Thrones so disappointing. It is not just that plotlines concluded badly, it is that the show abandoned the emotional logic it had spent years constructing. Character arcs stopped feeling like natural consequences of personality and experience and instead began feeling like chess pieces being moved into place because the story needed to end in that way.

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The Umbrella Academy.

The problem with The Umbrella Academy’s finale, contrary to popular belief, is not that all the Hargreeves siblings simply died at the end. Tragic endings can still be satisfying. BoJack Horseman does not receive a perfect redemption, and is left depressed, disliked, and alone at the end. In The Good Place, Eleanor, Chidi and Jason inevitably become a series of sparks in the sky, but it’s satisfying because it was the end of their emotional arc. Immortality was boring. The Umbrella Academy ending dismantled the entire emotional foundation of the series itself, which is why it was so frustrating and downright hurtful for long term fans like myself.

From the beginning, The Umbrella Academy positioned the Hargreeves siblings as deeply broken, damaged people. Raised by the cold and manipulative Sir Reginald Hargreeves, they entered adulthood carrying emotional wounds that shaped every aspect of their lives. Luther desperately sought approval. Diego masked insecurity with aggression. Allison struggled with control and guilt. Klaus hid pain through addiction and avoidance. Viktor lived isolated and emotionally repressed. Five became consumed by survival. Ben died young, lingering as a ghost of unresolved grief. But the story was ultimately about damaged people trying to heal from abuse and generational trauma by choosing each other anyway. They constantly fought, lied, and hurt one another, but underneath all the dysfunction was a desperate desire for connection. The show repeatedly returned to the idea that healing is messy, nonlinear, and difficult, but still possible.

Many viewers saw themselves in the Hargreeves siblings. People connected to the depiction of trauma, sibling conflict, addiction, neurodivergence, depression, and the feeling of being fundamentally “too much” or “broken.” The series suggested that damaged people were still worthy of love and belonging. We rooted for them because they were flawed, not in spite of it. But then, after 4 seasons, the finale suddenly implies that the only way for the universe to heal from the damage they have caused is to cease existing entirely? In sacrificing themselves, they supposedly restore peace and normalcy to reality. The intention may have been noble self-sacrifice, but the thematic implication is so much darker.

Not only that, but the fourth season somehow managed to butcher every single character. Throughout the series, Five’s defining motivation was protecting his family. Season 1 Five destroys himself physically and emotionally trying to prevent the apocalypse because he cannot bear losing his siblings. His love for them was obsessive, even when he struggled to express it properly. The decision to create this romance between Five and Lila, his brother’s wife, just went against everything that our Five stood for. That Lila stood for. Neither of them in any universe, especially not ours, would have done that to Diego. And then this conflict that shouldn’t have existed in the first place was never even resolved. Five and Diego die resenting one another. Instead of ending with reconciliation or understanding, their relationship concluded in bitterness. This is not tragic in a meaningful sense — it simply felt unfinished. We were denied emotional closure for characters whose bond we’d seen built over every season.

Klaus’s entire story is built around grief, death, and his inability to let go of his brother. Ben’s absence shaped the family dynamic from the very beginning of the series. For four seasons, the emotional weight of their relationship remained one of the show’s most important elements. To end the story without giving Klaus the opportunity to have a meaningful final conversation with this person who is not his brother, but is actually sort of his brother, just felt so careless. The finale cared more about solving this timeline problem and taking the easy way out, that it forgot the actual reason why people were so invested in this show.

Rather than showing growth overcoming trauma, The Umbrella Academy suggested that trauma itself makes people irreparable. The siblings do not fully heal. They do not truly reconnect. They do not build healthier versions of themselves. They simply disappear. Their deaths are not framed as bittersweet conclusions to completed emotional journeys, but as necessary corrections to existence itself. For four seasons, The Umbrella Academy told viewers that damaged people could still find love, purpose, and family. Then, in its final moments, it told them to go fuck themselves.

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The Boys

The Boys S4 gets a lot of hate for being ‘set-up’ for S5, but I actually enjoyed S4 much more than the rest of the world precisely because it felt like groundwork. It was slower, darker, and more psychologically focused, clearly positioning itself as a setup season for a massive conclusion that it had gotten me incredibly excited for. Homelander was spiralling. Butcher was dying. Ryan was becoming increasingly unstable. Society itself was collapsing under Vought’s influence. Everything seemed to be building toward one final devastating confrontation between Butcher and Homelander but then S5 did the exact same thing as S4, but for a spin-off that nobody cares about. The season became obsessed with setting up Vought Rising that it forgot that Soldier Boy is not the character that we had waited 5 seasons to see.

Soldier Boy always worked best as a comedic side character, but S5 made him one of the main characters of the show. But the writers failed to make him the slightest bit interesting. Nearly every major decision he makes in the final season revolves around his Nazi girlfriend Stormfront that nobody cares about. He despises Homelander, is disgusted by what he became, and hates him even more after everything involving Stormfront. Homelander quite literally makes him sick. Yet despite all of that, he still gives him the one thing he needs to become effectively immortal simply because he is his son and because Clara supposedly would have wanted it? Hate to break it to you Soldier Boy, but Clara is dead. You are the one who now has to live in a world where the son you can’t stand can never truly be stopped. Does he seriously think leaving the city is enough to escape a man who sees himself as a literal god? I don’t think Soldier Boy is that dumb. The logic behind his decision wasn’t because it was what he would have done, but it’s the result of just bad writing.

It would have made sense if Soldier Boy did give him the V1 for Clara, leave, but then came back at the end realising that he’d let an insane psycho loose, and then had a key role in Homelander’s downfall. He could have been the one to permanently strip Homelander of his powers – that would have carried actual poetic justice: the man Homelander idolised becoming the one to destroy the myth of his invincibility. Instead, the moment goes to Kimiko — who I love — but out of every character in the show, she was one of the least emotionally satisfying choices possible.

Honestly, I hated the idea of passing around Soldier Boy’s abilities in the first place because it felt like a last-minute cop-out because the writers suddenly couldn’t think of a way to end the story. If the show absolutely had to go in that direction, there were so many better choices. Butcher would have made sense, especially if using the powers accelerated his own inevitable death. There is something tragically perfect about Butcher and Homelander destroying each other simultaneously — two men consumed entirely by hatred finally taking one another down together. Even Ryan! Ryan stripping Homelander of his powers would have been far more emotionally devastating because Homelander’s entire identity revolved around seeing Ryan as both his legacy and proof that he was capable of creating something equal to himself, so being rejected and destroyed by the one person he genuinely loved would have forced him to confront the fact that even his own son saw him as a monster.

Or the powers could have gone to Marie Moreau from Gen V, a character whose abilities literally revolve around blood manipulation and healing. Marie spent her entire series learning precision, restraint, and control. She literally brought her sister back to life, healed Polarity, and overpowered multiple supes simultaneously. And she was literally told that she was the only Supe strong enough to rival Homelander, since they were both made out of the same Project Odessa. Yet Gen V didn’t even have any reason to exist. The show introduced these characters, marketed them as essential to the future of the universe, then just reduces them to glorified bus drivers.

And then there is Homelander himself.

This might be the biggest disappointment of the entire season because S4 Homelander was genuinely terrifying when the show finally leaned fully into his psychology. The episode where he returns to the facility he grew up in was so dark and so well written. Watching him confront the people who created him while that distorted violin theme played underneath was so fucking scary. It reminded me that Homelander is not just a meme or a punchline — he is a profoundly damaged human being with godlike power and absolutely no emotional regulation. But instead of becoming more frightening as his power increases, in S5, Homelander just felt like a parody of himself. It is as though the writers became too aware of the internet’s obsession with him as a meme and started writing him accordingly.

Butcher and Homelander were meant to be the defining rivalry of the series. Like Batman and Joker, Superman and Lex, The Doctor and The Master, even Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. They only had 1 interaction before the final fight scene and it was interrupted with a throwaway gag about Homelander’s milk fetish instead of being suffocated with tension after 5 seasons of hatred. That one interaction should have felt mythic. It should have felt like the world was seconds away from collapsing. It should’ve felt like Scorched Earth, but instead, the show didn’t trust in sincerity and made a funny gimmick. Becca was only mentioned once, and she’s the whole fucking reason this show exists. Butcher literally said ‘This is for Frenchie’ while beating up Homelander at the end. What about your wife??

Nowhere is this ‘gimmick’ problem more obvious than in the dialogue. Early seasons of The Boys was always vulgar, violent, and excessive, but the shock value almost always served a purpose. The gore revealed the dehumanising nature of superhero celebrity culture. The profanity reflected the ugliness of power. Even the absurdity often reinforced the satire. For most of the series, Kimiko is arguably one of the most tragic characters in the entire show. She is a victim of trafficking, experimentation, violence, and exploitation. Her silence carried emotional weight because it reflected trauma and alienation. But the final season reduces her to comic relief. Her dialogue and behaviour was so disconnected from the pain that made her so compelling.

The giant testicle scene with Butcher especially felt like the writers tried to recreate the shock value of the infamous MM and giant penis sequences from earlier seasons. But the difference is that the original scene worked because it was unexpected and still grounded in the tone the show had built at that point. Now, it just feels manufactured, as though the writers were chasing another viral reaction. Instead of the absurdity emerging organically from the satire, it just felt like the show was throwing random grotesque imagery at the audience hoping people will tweet about it.

The writers also seemingly forgot how to write the characters who were once the emotional centre of the show. Hughie and Butcher used to have one of the most compelling dynamics in The Boys because they constantly challenged each other morally. Hughie represented empathy and restraint, while Butcher represented vengeance and extremism, and their relationship worked because they had to find a balance between them. But by the final season, every single conversation between them felt identical. Hughie tells Butcher he has gone too far, Butcher insists he is doing what is necessary, Hughie gets angry, and then the cycle repeats again an episode later. Instead of evolving alongside the story, they were just trapped in repetitive arguments that stopped revealing anything new about either of them seasons ago.

Even Annie suffers from this stagnation. The show spends years building Starlight’s powers as something potentially extraordinary, constantly hinting at her growing control over energy and light. Yet by the final season, all she can do is punch (very hard). She has one of the most OP powers and just like Atom Eve, the writers had no idea how to write her. Annie literally tells Marie that she can’t join the fight until she can ‘control her powers’, like she was one to talk – especially after Marie just spent an entire fucking season learning to control her powers.

I know this seems like I would have absolutely hated the season, but I didn’t. It was at least fun, and expected. The first couple episodes hyped me up for the rest of the season. A-Train and The Deep I think were handled perfectly. Homelander’s ending was satisfying and Hughie and Butcher’s ending was expected. I was surprised about how much I loved the decision for MM to adopt Ryan. But I think what makes me so upset is that even though it was good, I know it could have been great.

Underneath all the spectacle, spin-offs, and gimmicks, the show seems to have forgotten the thing that made people emotionally attached in the first place: the relationships. The Boys no longer feel like a found family. MM barely feels important anymore. Frenchie and Kimiko do their own thing. Hughie and Butcher are trapped in repetitive cycles. Everyone feels irritated with one another rather than bonded by shared trauma and survival.

And maybe that is the common problem connecting so many disappointing finales recently. Shows become so focused on expanding universes, subverting expectations, and creating viral moments that they lose sight of the emotional core audiences actually fell in love with. I’ll forgive a messy plot. I’ll forgive bad dialogue. I’ll forgive rushed pacing. But I struggle to forgive when you stop understanding the characters that made me fall in love with the show in the first place.

When I rated it three stars on Letterboxd, my friends reacted as though I’d committed some kind of moral failure. At first, all I could think of to say was that it felt like “Oscar bait,” a criticism I actually really dislike because it reduces ambition into something embarrassing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised my issue wasn’t that Train Dreams was trying too hard to be emotional. It was that it mistook emotional suggestion for emotional depth. So, this essay is me answering the question:

Why didn’t Train Dreams (2025) make me cry?

Train Dreams falls into a type of movie that I like to describe as “aesthetically melancholic”. These are films that communicate sadness primarily through atmosphere: cinematography, music, silence, imagery, and emotional implication rather than grounded interpersonal specificity. At its best, this style can make me feel transcendent in films like Aftersun, Sound of Metal, In the Mood for Love, Bones and All. At its worst, it can leave me feeling empty, in films like Lost in Translation, Donnie Darko, Atonement and unfortunately, Train Dreams.

I think the core issue lies in its portrayal of Grainier’s family. The part where people are most likely to cry is arguably when the story begins centring on Grainier’s total devastation after his wife and daughter disappear and are presumed dead, leaving him to live with unshakeable grief. However, we’re told very quickly how much Robert loves his wife, Gladys, without truly letting us experience the love. Their relationship never develops through actual lived-in scenes. For example, at the beginning of the film after Robert and Gladys meet, there’s a three-month time jump where they’re suddenly described as “inseparable”, and then Grainier casually says, “We ought to get married,” to which Gladys replies, “We are married.” This is a cute sentiment and the scene is absolutely beautiful, but the intimacy felt hollow to me. Instead of learning who they are and what they’re like together, we’re simply just informed of the closeness between them. The relationship progresses through implication rather than accumulation. There are brief hints of tension when his work pulls him away from their home life, but these moments are never explored deeply enough to complicate or enrich their dynamic.

The same applies to his daughter, Katie. We’re given more sequences of beautiful and carefully crafted images and shots, I don’t want to take away from that. There are moments in their cabin that feel intimate through the cinematography alone, but these scenes are followed by conversations during the logging sequences that infinitely feel more textured and lived in. The contrast was almost jarring. On their own, the domestic scenes work well enough but next to the dialogue between the workers, they felt thin.

I actually came closer to crying over Arn’s death than I did over Gladys and Katie’s. His death wasn’t objectively sadder, but I connected to him more because the film actually allowed him to exist as a textured person beforehand. Some of the dialogue between Arn and Grainier was just absolutely beautiful while Gladys and Katie both serve primarily as devices through which the film can mediate on grief. When I don’t necessarily care about the people he is grieving, the commentary just felt constructed and unearned. When they do eventually die, it felt like an idea of grief rather than the experience of it. The film asked me to mourn without giving me a chance to know who I was supposed to be mourning, simply because the narrative contained tragedy. But tragedy alone is not enough; emotion has to emerge from attachment, not imagery.

In fact, the film’s imagery surrounding Gladys and Katie was often so overtly idyllic that their deaths began to feel narratively inevitable almost immediately. The soft-focus domesticity, the shots of them running through fields, the near-mythic framing of family life all kind of served the cliché trope in media of ‘beautiful wife and child who eventually die’. Instead of deepening my attachment to them, it instead made me anticipate their narrative function long before the fire. Their deaths also come so soon after Arns’ that neither loss is really given enough time to settle emotionally.

Gail Simone, an American comic book writer, coined the term “women in refrigerators” which basically refers to female characters being harmed or killed primarily to deepen a male protagonist’s emotional journey, rather than existing as fully realised people in their own right. While she used this term to critique action, blockbuster, and superhero films while Train Dreams is much more literary, I think the same applies. Robert’s wife and daughter are never given enough individuality or interiority to feel fully separate from his narrative. While I don’t think the film intentionally reduced Gladys and their daughter to plot devices, they are never invested in enough to feel fully separate from Grainier’s emotional arc. It makes their deaths feel less like the loss of actual people and more like a mechanism for Grainier’s suffering - the tragedy is emotionally important because of what it does to him, not because of what they mean to us. I think Grainier arguably has more meaningful conversations with Claire than he ever did with Gladys. And I think this is because Claire felt like a complete person, with hopes and dreams and opinions, and a life extending beyond the protagonists emotional orbit. Gladys is primarily characterised through absence and longing. The only thing the film lets us know about her is that she misses her husband. Train Dreams often framed absence itself as inherently meaningful without giving the relationships underneath enough development. Long silences and beautiful shots of forests, smoke, and empty space are treated as emotional payoff in and of themselves. I felt like I had been shown a summary of these characters’ lives rather than having actually lived alongside them.

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To some extent, this emotional distance may simply come from the limitations of the source material. The novella is written in third person limited; we follow Grainier specifically and can only be told what is seen by his perspective, which is what the film also does. But I think adaptation can also involve interpretation. Film has the ability to expand outward, to show us moments and people existing beyond the protagonist’s immediate experience. One of my favourite book-to-movie adaptations, The Hunger Games, works so well because it allowed the screenplay to expand beyond Katniss’s limited first-person perspective. We are shown Snow and Seneca Crane scenes from the Capitol (my favourite addition is the conversation about hope and underdogs) that we cannot get in the books, simply because Katniss wasn’t there. Although it was different, it never betrayed the source material but I think actually gave us a perspective that actually enhanced and enriched the story, and deepened the themes of the book. Train Dreams could have used that freedom to give Gladys and Katie more individuality during the long stretches where Grainier is away logging — allowing us to understand who they and what their life was like outside of waiting for him to return home. I think this would’ve helped me see them as actual people, not just narrative functions, which in turn would’ve made me connect so much more to them and their death.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) is the perfect movie to encapsulate what I mean, if you don’t understand what I’m waffling about. Both films centre on men, who are emotionally detached from themselves and people around them, both of whose families die in a fire. We also barely see Lee’s children, except for the scene of them burning in the house near the end. On paper, the tragedies are equally horrific, and equally distant. However, Lee’s children still feel vividly present throughout the film without us ever seeing them because we come to understand Lee as a father long before we fully learn what happened in his past - before we even know he had children. Lee’s persona as a father is communicated almost entirely indirectly through his relationship with his nephew, Patrick, trying and failing to provide stability for him, through tense conversations full of unsaids with his ex-wife, and through other people’s memories of him. Watching him awkwardly care for his nephew allows us to see the stark contrast between the withdrawn man he is now that grief has hollowed him out, and the warmer, more open version that he clearly once was.

By the time Lee quietly admits, “I can’t beat it,” the line lands with devastating force because the shape of his absence has haunted the entire film from the beginning. His children already feel real because we understand the life surrounding their loss. The tragedy does not feel inserted for emotional effect; it feels like the devastating explanation for a man we have already spent the whole film trying to understand.

Train Dreams attempts something similar, but what makes Manchester by the Sea work for me is that the grief visibly fractures Lee into a different version of himself. We understand the dissonance between who he was before and who he became after, which is the depressing part. Grainier, meanwhile, remained emotionally restrained throughout almost the entire film. That is not necessarily a flaw in the character itself — in fact, I actually think Grainier is very well-crafted. Some of the film’s strongest moments come from his quiet guilt and superstition after witnessing the death of the young worker early on, convinced that his failure to save him somehow cursed the rest of his life. His loneliness, emotional distance, and tendency to internalise suffering feel painfully believable. I just do not think the film gives his family the same level of psychological texture that it gives him, which ultimately weakens the emotional impact of their loss.

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What makes this more frustrating is that Train Dreams gestures toward something far more compelling. The sequences of Grainier working on the railroad —his encounters with other labourers, the fleeting conversations with strangers, the sense of a life constantly in motion—felt far more textured. In these moments, the film let the people around him exist beyond mere symbolism. These interactions, brief as they were, felt more real than the relationships the film positioned as central. They were far more vivid and made me feel so much more than anything I felt with his family. The conversations felt textured and grounded, and they were specific glimpses into the fully realised lives of the different people he would meet on these different jobs.

I think if the film chose one of these narratives to lean into, it could’ve done so much better. Either as a film that was a portrait of transient labour and fleeting human connections, of a man shaped as much by strangers as he was by family and friends, or as a film that stays rooted in the domestic narrative and chose to fully commit to the intimacy of his home life so we felt the pain when he had to leave them to work, and we felt the pain when they die and leave him with nothing – because that was all he had. Instead, the film sat uneasily between the two resulting in a shadow of both while fully committing to neither.

None of this is to say the film is without merit. It’s undeniably beautiful, often hypnotic in its pacing and imagery. And for some viewers, that impressionistic approach is precisely what makes it so affecting. But I need more than aesthetics to feel moved by a movie and unfortunately, the emotion never arrived with this one. Rewatching it, I do think three stars may have been slightly harsh. I am stingy with my ratings anyway, and Train Dreams is not a bad film. In many ways, it is an admirable one. I just wish it had given me something more concrete to hold onto emotionally beneath all the atmosphere and visual poetry. Maybe that is unfair. Maybe I am difficult to please. But if a film is going to ask me to mourn, I need to feel like I truly knew what I was losing first.

So, is Train Dreams overrated? I think the answer is: not entirely. But it is, perhaps, over-assumed. It assumes the suggestion of something deeper is enough to generate that something deeper - that aesthetic can substitute for emotional depth. For many, it clearly works, but for me, it didn’t.

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Beef is a show about messy humans making messy human decisions, which explains why I connected to it so much when I first saw it. I love character, and the characters in the first season of Beef were so well crafted which turned the silly, wacky, ‘road rage’ show into something much deeper, and much more real. Into a mirror for whomever is watching it. It is a bizarre show, but as the episodes go on you realise that we’ve all probably been in similar situations, just not as extreme. Because at its core, Beef is just about humans. On the surface, Beef S2 still has the same concept; 4 characters who lie and steal and cheat because of all their intersecting motivations. So why didn’t they make me feel as much as Danny and Amy did?

Beef Season 1: Danny and Amy

Let’s talk about Amy. In the first season of the Beef, Amy seems to have this picture-perfect life. She has this mega company, she has money, she has the house, the husband, the perfect daughter, but despite all this she is still deeply unhappy. She was unhappy and unfaithful in her marriage, she tried to sell her company because it didn’t feel like she belonged in this place that she had created. And I think the reason for that was because she was constantly putting on this front because she didn’t feel like she could be herself with the people that she was surrounded by. She was constantly chasing this feeling of accomplishment even though she already “had it all” because she felt like an outsider in her own life. She thinks that if she finally becomes the person that everybody already thinks she is, she’ll finally feel fulfilled, finally feel like she meets their conditions for love.

“You know, there must be some point where we all fall outside the reach of love. Like, the mistake is so big and the love has to stop.”

- Ali Wong, (Episode 7, “I am a Cage”)

But surprisingly, the first time she truly lets go and feels like she can be her true self, is in the inciting incident of the first episode during the road rage incident. But contrary to popular belief, I don’t think this was the ‘start’ of the beef. I think the true beginning was at the end of that episode, when Danny pees all over her bathroom, runs away, and then she chases him shouting obscenities at him. But in the last second, so easy to miss, as she’s memorising his license plate, Amy smiles. I think this was the moment that she realised that this person who was so completely different to her, who made her feel something, some intimacy in fighting and anger, was the only person who she could be herself around, and for the first time in her long life, she felt relieved, and she felt seen.

Danny, on the other hand, seems to be the complete opposite of Amy (which we come to learn is not true in the slightest). He struggles with money and jobs, struggles to provide for his family, has criminal associations and a very run-down apartment which he can barely afford. The reason that Danny hates Amy so much is because she is exactly who he wants to be, and he can’t stand the fact that she has it and not him, because he deserves it.

“I just want to know if I need to get to where you are.”
— Danny Cho (Episode 9, “The Rapture of Being Alive”)

Amy feels threatened by Danny. She’s confused that this person who is so beneath the standards she’s trying to reach makes her feel so comfortable in her own skin, who seems to fully understand her. And like most humans when they don’t understand something, she tried to destroy it. Danny threatens everything that makes her feel stable: her family, her company, her marriage, the person she needs to become to feel fulfilled - so the next logical step is ruining his life so she feels more secure. But we can see that she feels undeniably connected to him in one scene in particular. Amy hugs Danny while he is in a hospital bed in the season finale (Episode 10, “Figures of Light”), after the car crash. Danny is hospitalized, and Amy lies beside him, leading to an embrace that signifies a moment of connection while he is unconscious at the very end of the show. This shows how she feels seen by him compared to how she feels with George. She tells her therapist that she feels “broken” while George is “good and wholesome,” explaining her need to “bathe in that wholesomeness”. She confesses to a desire to share her true feelings with her husband but hides her “darkness” because she is afraid he won’t understand.

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Beef Season 2: Ashley, Austin, Josh and Lindsay

The beef in Season 1 revolved around loneliness, and a search for meaning. The beef in Season 2 I think is more centred around hypocrisy. Both however I think have an underlying theme of classism. In the first episode (Episode 1, “All the Things We’re Never Going to Have”), I thought the inciting incident was amazing. Ashley and Austin, a newly engaged couple who are struggling to make ends meet (remind you of anyone?) who believe they have a ‘perfect’ relationship because they don’t fight, witness and record a very career-ending intense fight between the older couple, Josh and Lindsay, who seemed to have the perfect life on the surface. It felt very beefy, a very similar premise to its predecessor, albeit less intense.

The whole of Season 1, every single decision made, every single wacky thing that happened was just moves and countermoves. Every petty reaction, every escalation felt earned because Danny and Amy were built up so well and with so much detail. Nothing was rushed, and it gave us time to understand them through their behaviours. But Season 2 didn’t have that same liberty. Their first mistake was expanding the cast of characters to 4, which in hindsight wouldn’t have been a problem if they hadn’t also reduced the number of episodes to 8. By splitting focus across four characters and introducing a detached subplot, the show undercuts its own strength: sustained psychological buildup.

While I think the core of Danny and Amy’s relationship was that they envied each other, I think the relationship between the two couples is more sinister – they both look down on each other. Ashley and Austin believe they are better than Josh and Lindsay because they don’t fight, they talk things through, and they’re not scheming slimy bosses laundering money. Josh and Lindsay look down on Ashley and Austin because they are not as educated as them, because they are young and naïve. But they also envied each other for the exact same reasons why they hated each other. Ashley craved Josh’s power and stability while Lindsay wanted Ashley’s youth.

Ashley was by far the most interesting character for me. Her fear of abandonment rooted in her parents divorce influenced every single decision she made. She’s very much insecure-resistant; she forges the physical therapy licence, hides the USB, lies and cheats constantly because she’d rather become a toxic person than to be alone. But ironically, she becomes the very person she belittles Josh for being but in her mind, because she’s doing it to try and save a failing relationship, it’s not as “bad” as him. Never mind the fact he was in debt because he needed to pay for his mother’s medical bills and funeral. She can’t see the mechanisms that caused him to do all those bad things but fell right into the same whole. She also I think never actually showed her true personality in her relationship with Austin because she was scared that if he saw the real her, just like Amy and George, then he would leave and she would be alone again. This is such a good character. But, instead of the show building her motivations over time like it would have done in the first season, we only learn about her parents divorce in the last episode when Austin quite literally mansplains her trauma to her, and in turn to the audience because we didn’t know any of this beforehand. All of the character building is done in retrospect instead of throughout the course of the show. Season 1 would show you this through her choices and not just spell it out in an info dumpy dialogue at the end.

Now Austin, on the other hand, I think was insecure-avoidant. But he isn’t the standard avoidant: being uncomfortable with intimacy or being hyper-independent, I think his avoidance was much more subtle. Although they prided themselves on communication, Austin could never actually share his true feelings with Ashley when it mattered the most, and his resistance to vulnerability was one of the causes of the downfall of their relationship. He disliked confrontation because that meant being honest with himself for once – being honest with the fact that he never actually truly loved Ashley, he just loved the stability any relationship gives him. That’s why when he meets Eunice, he instantly thinks he’s fallen in love with her and tries to cling to her; because it’s an opportunity to get out of his relationship with Ashley. I also think his infatuation with Eunice was a deeper insecurity to do with his cultural dissonance with Korea. The thing is, I don’t think literally any of this was explored nearly enough. Him wanting Ashley over Eunice at the end was him realising that Eunice didn’t love him and being scared of being alone just like he always feels with his own sense of self – caught between two cultures that he never truly feels part of. But we barely know him. We barely got any of that throughout the show so his big choice at the end didn’t feel inevitable, just lacklustre and a bit unsatisfying.

Josh and Lindsay I do think were the weakest part of the season, despite being very Danny and Amy coded. Josh had this constant insecurity and need to prove himself, so he would cling to anything that would give him a sense of worth. He had a very kind of chaotic reactionary personality that was similar to Danny’s, while Lindsay had this kind of controlled sense of self but was emotionally shut down and distant to others, like Amy. But when we saw Amy crack during her therapy session (Episode 7, “I am a Cage”), it actually felt emotional and real because we’d spent the whole show seeing little cracks in her façade before it finally came crashing down. When we saw Danny break down in the church scene (Episode 3, “I am Inhabited by a Cry”), we feel for him because this is the first instance we see him being real for once. Even their episode titles mirror each other. But the key thing is we were never told any of this beforehand, we saw it in the way Amy lies for no reason and in the way Danny eventually self-sabotages every opportunity he got. It was built slowly over time so by the time they completely unravel in the finale, it felt inevitable. So much of Josh and Lindsay’s characterisation was shadowed by the random Korean plastic surgery plot, which I feel was there to make the show more ‘entertaining’ without actually giving any substance to the characters that we were supposed to care about. Their lore with each other is never given the grace it deserved because they were always so worried about other things happening outside of their control. Even Lindsay’s jealousy of youth and Ashley’s beauty didn’t even seem that important for the finale, it just seemed so out of place. Compare that to the season 1 finale where every decision made caused the butterfly effect for that insane ending, whereas season 2 they were just plopped into this situation that none of them had caused. Josh and Lindsay don’t fail because they’re uninteresting—they fail because the show never chooses what to prioritise about them.

I do like the ending of Season 2 a lot, but I daresay I would have much preferred it without any of the Korean stuff. I think Beef 2 falls into the trap that a lot of second seasons of a popular show do, when they forget that the characters are what made everybody fall in love with the show in the first place and just decide to go bigger, because bigger must also equal better, right? (cough, cough, Arcane.) Austin choosing familiarity and Ashley over vulnerability; Ashley becoming Josh, the person she hated the most; Josh and Lindsay feeling the spark of their relationship once again just for it to inevitably fizzle out a couple months later; these were all great endings for the characters that got lost in the bizarre, action-packed ending sequences.

Both Beef seasons work when it lets the characters be messy in real time. When we’re forced to sit in their bad decisions and understand them before they understand themselves. Season 1 trusted that process, but Season 2 rushes to explain it after the fact. And in a show whose biggest strength was character, that’s a pretty big loss. What were your thoughts on this season?

Most of the discourse around The Drama keeps circling the same question: was what Emma did as a child actually “deep” enough to justify everyone’s reaction? But I think that’s the wrong question. I don’t think The Drama was ever about ranking sins, or making a moral scoreboard of who did the worst thing. The Drama is simply just a character study, asking the questions, “How well do you truly know anybody?” and “Does anybody ever, truly, change?”

From Mike to Misha, every single one of them kept repeating the same patterns and behaviours that they sworn they had grown out of. But I don’t think they ever grew out of their worst selves. Each character in the present day had the same flaws and were making the exact same mistakes despite them insisting that their worst self was in the past. All except Emma. Because I think the real plot twist wasn’t what she did as a teenager, but the fact that she was the only one who wasn’t still doing it.

Emma: the ‘radicalised’ victim

Let’s start with the one everyone’s debating: Emma Harwood.

There’s a phenomenon in Psychology known as the availability heuristic. Let’s say you ran out of toothpaste, and you need to buy more. Yesterday, you saw adverts for two brands: Colgate, and Oral B. For Colgate, you saw one 60 second advert but for Oral B you saw five 10 second adverts. Which one do you think your brain will think of first? Colgate, right? You saw 60 seconds of their content, compared to only 50 seconds of Oral B’s, so surely that’ll come to you first. You’ve probably guessed that it’s not Colgate, but Oral B. The key is how often you see the thing. Every time you saw another Oral B ad, your brain was literally building a schema only for toothpaste. Toothpaste? Oral B! It doesn’t matter that you saw more of Colgate; you only saw it once so your brain has already forgotten about it. This doesn’t just happen in advertising, but in everyday life as well. If you get on a plane after watching loads of TV shows about plane crashes, you’re going to be more worried about the plane crashing than the person to your left, who hasn’t seen any of those shows. Why? Because it’s the most available information to you, so you grasp onto it.

Emma’s dad was a cop. She lived in a society where gun violence was constant – she literally said there was a shooting every other week. She was also constantly bullied in her childhood. All she could understand was violence, that was the language that everyone else around her spoke. All the violence and aggression she experienced, she internalised. And when she had had enough and wanted to externalise that pain, that anger, in their own violent way, what was the most available form of violence to her? Guns and shootings.

That doesn’t make it okay, but it does explain it. We need to stop pretending that intrusive thoughts don’t exist. Have you never hated someone so much that for a brief moment, you wished they were dead? I’m not using this to excuse Emma in any way, and the extent she went to was most definitely too far. But she responded to her pain in the only way she knew with everything that was around her. It’s not excusable, but it’s definitely explainable. All the aggression she experienced, she absorbed, and when it finally came out, it did so in the most extreme, most available way. But you can literally see how much her environment shapes her because the instant she’s around kind people, people who listen and who care about her, she immediately changes and becomes extremely ANTI-guns. She literally was just a manifestation of what was being directed at her. And she was the only one capable of change because (as I’ll come to later) Emma’s worst thing was the only one that wasn’t a representation of who she was as a person. During the dinner scene, she was the only one who felt uncomfortable, who didn’t laugh off every “worst” moment because she understood what it was to be on the receiving end of the cruelty that her friends were displaying.

Rachel: the ‘impulsive’ hypocrite

I think Rachel’s “worst moment” reveals who she is fundamentally as a person so much more than Emma’s ever does, and the reason is because Rachel’s actions weren’t caused by anybody else. In her own words, it was an “impulse”. An impulse is something fundamental, something biological. Your first instinct. Rachel’s first instinct was to lock a disabled child in a closet in the woods and leave him there. And this reveals her character, how she thrives on inflicting hate and harm on people who can’t or won’t defend themselves. She does this throughout the whole film, but instead of her disabled neighbour, she did it to Emma.

Yes, Rachel has every right to be angry considering what happened with her cousin. But Rachel’s problem is that she takes her anger too far. She lets it sit, and fester, and grow into hate rather than just anger. Her impulse with the kid was to lock him in the closet; her impulse with Emma was to be angry and shout. But she had every opportunity to go back and get the kid out, to tell his father where he was, and she didn’t. She stubbornly sat with her first impulse, like going back on her decision was a matter of pride. She never even considered hearing Emma out, never listened when Mike or Charlie tried to explain it to her. She sat in her anger, and let it turn into hate, because that was who she was as a person.

Charlie: the ‘harmless’ bully

Charlie? A bully? But he’s so nice and charming and funny! There’s a lot of debate about whether Charlie was lying about the cyberbullying or not, but I don’t think he was. People couldn’t grasp that this happy, joyful, loving man with the face of Robert Pattison could be a bully. But when Emma confides in him about being bullied, this is his response to her telling him that she was pushed around, called named, and told she stinks constantly. “Is that it?” That was when it clicked in my brain that Charlie had been a bully, and he still was.

It’s important that it was cyberbullying specifically. He bullied someone so badly that they had to leave the town, but he did it all behind a screen. He never actually inflicted or saw the damage in person, so to him it never felt real. That’s why he downplayed Emma’s bullying; he genuinely didn’t understand it. He wasn’t intentionally being cruel to Emma, he just had no concept of the impact of his actions.

In the present, he hid behind humour, behind jokes and laughter, behind his personality when he was being cruel to Emma. But it was just a different kind of screen.

Mike: the ‘passive’ bystander

Mike’s “worst thing” was purposefully letting his girlfriend get the brunt of an attack during a violent situation, which is what he does the entire film. He hides behind Rachel and avoids the conflict by never actually taking a stance. He never actually forms any opinions about the situation himself, whether he’s for Emma, or for Rachel, because he decides to remain neutral.

In the words of my very close friend, Alexander Hamilton, “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”

Mike’s neutrality makes his morals questionable. His inability to mediate or get involved or challenge Rachel’s hate just enables her behaviour. He lets her be aggressive, lets her be cruel. By doing nothing, he enabled everything. It’s the reason he could be with someone like her in the first place. He needs someone who’d fight the dog while he stayed safely behind them, so he wouldn’t feel guilty for putting them into the line of fire like he once did, because they put themselves there.

Even at the beginning, when Charlie is telling him how he and Emma met, he thought it was stranger that Charlie decided to be honest with Emma about not reading the book, than reading the entire book just for the first date (which is 100% weirder). He hates conflict, and he can’t fathom being forthright and honest than appeasing everybody by not actually having any personality.

Pauline, the DJ, and Misha, the cheater

The DJ plot is one of the most underrated, under-talked-about subplots of the entire movie. If the main cast of characters don’t make the theme clear enough, the film literally spells it out for you here.

Charlie and Emma see Pauline snorting heroin on a sidewalk. When they tell the others, Charlie, Mike and Rachel immediately use this as grounds to fire her. They use that one moment to define her. They don’t try and understand or ask any questions, see if she was okay and if this just happened to be the worst day of her life. They judged her entire character on this one singular moment, just like they did with Emma. Emma was the only person who knew that one instance in someone’s life does not define who they are as a person. She knew that there could have been so many factors that led to Pauline smoking that specific heroin at that specific point in time on that specific sidewalk. Only Emma understood that people aren’t black and white.

That was until, Misha. When Charlie makes a mistake and nearly cheats on Emma, only then does he understand that people’s mistakes don’t define them. The first time Emma tries to ‘start over’ on the couch, he’s not having any of it because he’s fixated on that one moment of her life. Her worst mistake. But when she wants to start again in the restaurant at the end, he’s relieved. Now he understands why she’s so forgiving, because she knows that that one moment doesn’t define him. And he accepts and finally understands what it felt like to be reduced to one moment.

Finally — if you’ve made it this far — I do have one real criticism: the tone of the flashbacks. They leant too heavily on humour, and in doing so, they undercut Emma’s childhood experiences in a way that didn’t sit right with me. Lines like “Shout out to Sarah, you’re first” did make me laugh. But that’s kind of the problem. The joke landed, and in landing, it flattened something that should not have felt light. It turned a genuinely uncomfortable, very real experience that a lot of children go through into something that felt almost throwaway.

And I think that tonal choice is a big part of why the film has rubbed so many people the wrong way. It’s not that humour doesn’t belong in stories like this — it absolutely does. But it has to be placed carefully. In the flashbacks, it just felt like it was doing the wrong job. Instead of adding complexity or contrast in a story as rich as this, it just added humour to the moments that should have felt uncomfortable. By avoiding the discomfort, The Drama just undermined the weight of what it was trying to say.

Thanks for reading my ramblings (if you even made it this far). Please, please, please comment your own opinions especially if you disagree with anything I’ve said! I love to get other people’s perspectives x

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