I May Destroy You: Would You Like to Know the Sex?

 "And now I have the outward appearance of a man, but there within my pants lies a vagina."

This is a bloody clever penultimate episode. Obviously it relates to the ending where Bella has flashbacks of the assault, and also to Terri (yay for her job!) and her new "boyfriend", whose gender is not as it may appear. It also, of course, refers to the author who has inspiured Bella to finish her novel, yet she turns out to be... Zain.

Yet there's so much going on here, from Bella losing the contract with her publisher and suddenly being in debt to them to Kwame's nice relationship going slow with his nice boyfriend, contrasting with the unpleasant result of this attempted apology to the woman he slept with. We also see that poor Ben feels lonely. And that the publisher whom Bella so admired, and once compared to Obama, turns out to be shallow and ruthless. Hopefully she'll show them all.

In confronting Zain, and letting her help her, Bella is dealing with one of her demons. The perpetrator is not being punished judicially but, as dialogue elsewhere says, that often doesn't happen. Will she now confront and control the original assault itself? This is deep, powerful, extraordinary stuff.

I May Destroy You: It Just Came Up

 "Rapebusters!"

This is an incredible bit of telly, genuinely groundbreaking and meaningful. It's taken a few episodes for I Will Destroy You to introduce and flesh out its characters and themes, but now we are properly into a sublimely constructed dramatic exploration of sex, consent, and all those nuances of behaviour, orf attitudes to sexual assault, of what we may or may not define as rape.

Bella goes through the wringer here. Still under pressure to write her new novel- life, and work, must go on- Bella soon learns that a DNA sample has been taken and a suspect arrested, which seems wonderful. Yet it also means the DNA of consensual partners must be taken, which means Biagio. Ad this seemingly caring and decent man starts to blame her for not being careful about her drinking rather than blaming, you know, the rapist that actually raped her. Wanker. It's a powerfully written and devastating scene.

Yet she gets a triumph, of sorts. Learning that what zain did- craftily removing the condom during sex- is rape both morally and legally, Bella plays on his mind for a bit before dramatically, and publically, outing him at the ens, in a victorious moment.

For Kwame, though, there are no such mixed experiences as his reporting of his own sexual assault to the police turns out, despite good intentions on behalf of the somewhat inarticulate policeman he speaks to, to be a humiliating embarrassment.The law seems not to be well-aligned with casual gay sex.

There's a lot to think about here. This is superb, serious drama.

I May Destroy You: That Was Fun

 “I'm not drinking anything."

This episode shows a real deepening of the themes, the arcs and the characters as it carries on exploring the more distressing side of sex and consent. We see Bella struggling to adjust to therapy, to flashbacks, to being alone with her thoughts. We see society's uncaring side: the publisher still demands a first draft and, without it, she has no income.

Yet there are more things going on too. Unexpectedly, Bella has sex with the posh and entitled Zain who himself commits a massive consent violation by sneakily switching to doggy and removing the condom, which is an utterly contemptible thing to do even if he does 

We also see Kwame and one of his sexual encounters, too, also addressing the additional diffuculties of being a gay man from a culture  (Ghanaian) that doesn't accept such things. He ends up alone, and sexually assaulted, by the deeply uncomfortable Malik, who plays musuic with deeply homophobic lyrics as a power play. And he's deeply, deeply affected.

This is not exactly pleasantviewing. But my God, it's powerful.