I May Destroy You: Ego Death

 "The alliance is spicy, blud..."

This final episode, even in the context of the eleven episodes that precede it, is extraordinary. We are presented, in a bravely non-linear finale, with three alternate endings before the simple ending is revealed.

The first ending, while chaotic, consists of simple, violent revenge... and goes too far, because anger and hate are dangerous. Then we have a more nuanced revenge ending in arrest and justice, yet the rapist here (David) turns out to have been an abused child, still traumatised. And this is the problem with crime, punishment and revenge: there are cycles of abuse. People are not born evil; they become so through suffering. An eye for an eye makes us all blind, prison brutalises, and judicial punishment just outsources violence to the state. It's progress from vendettas, as per the Oresteia, but society needs to move beyond such things. The answer lies in rehabilitation and understanding, not in "punishment".

The third narrative has Arabella consensually seduce and shag David, which is deliberately awkward and provocative in context. On the surface, Bella is taking control, but there are all sorts of problems here, not least that men like David would never be capable of such bedroom etiquette. 

The ending, finally, shows true wisdom, as Bella decides not to go to Ego Death. After all, the rapist doesn't matter. He is nothing. Far more important to live her life, publish her novel, be awesome. And, yes, to recognise that flsatmate Ben is lovely and give him a hug.

This is beautiful, understated, complex drama.

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: The Cause the Cure

 "You lot getting your Brady Bunch on?"

Like every other episode of I May Destroy You, this is devastatingly incredible telly. The sexual assault is not absent, of course; Bella finally tells her mum, and decides to discreetly forgive Terri after Simon lets slip what she did on that night.

But this episode, like all the others, ois really about memory, and how memory isn't necessarily the truth. There are many little flashbacks of Bella's childhood between two houses and two parents as the family, including her studious brother Nick, visit her mum for her birthday, Yet Bella's adolescent memories trn out to be a sanitised version of the truth. Her "auntie" was in fact her father's lover. And a terrible burglary, in which her hard-working father lost everything, was the result of teenage Arabella using the window to get in and out. Once again the past hurts Arabella.

And yet, for Kwame, there's hope.A man he meets on Grindr turns out to want something more meaningful than a quick shag. It's a contrastingly pleasant part of another episode of harsh truth and compromise.

I May Destroy You: Social Media Is a Great Way to Connect

 “You kind of had penetrative sex with someone under false pretences, Kwams.”

Yet again we get a multifaceted and fascinating episode. It’s partly about how Arabella is continuing to bury her feelings about the rape- the fact her bags haven’t been looked at and have stayed under the bed since the police returned them speaks volumes and is a blatant metaphor for repression.

Then there’s Bella’s anger, her desire to carry the world in her shoulders. Anger against white men, straight men, men in general. And the injustice she rails against is literally real.

Yet anger is not a healthy or a nuanced emotion where taken too far, and neither is social media. Bella has to step back from anger and realise that, while structural injustice and make violence aren’t going away, not everyone is evil- like her seemingly decent white and male flatmate.

Yet, at the same time, we mustn’t minimise the existence of bad things. Bella is right to be appalled that Kwame should have had sexual with a Roman before telling her he was gay. Yet it takes time- and sight of a foetus she (legitimately; it’s her body) aborted, to realise that her locking him in a room with that bloke at the party was wrong too.

And then, at the end, she returns to Ego Death. This seems to be an important moment. Either way, it’s phenomenal telly.

I May Destroy You: Line Spectrum Border

 "It's no longer an active investigation."

Yet again we have a fascinating episode, full of all sorts of moral ambiguities. We begin with Bella's extraordinary speech at the support group about men who knowingly push boundaries, wanting to be on the border of sexual and other abuse without quite getting to the point of unambiguously crossing it. This is then juxtaposed in the next scene with Kwame discussing the fluidity of sexuality and how, having been sexually abused by a man, he's now getting a date with a woman.

Bella goes through the wringer here, again. She's broke, and the police investigation has come to a dead end. So she morally blackmails Terri into sending her to Italy, and Biagio, where things go wrong, and complicated. She's there to "apologise", even though he was a judgemental and victim blaming dick to her over the phone about the sexual assault. He's not happy to see her, and locks her out of his room to get ride of her. And yet... she's there without his consent, in his flat.

Then there's Kwame. The date goes ok, and is no more awkward than one might expect, although it's clear she has a thing for black men, fetishising an ethnicity. There's a bit of awkwardness about his (white) female sexual partner being reluctant to sing along to the "n" word in a song, but then she turns out to be casually homophobic and chucks him out, disgusted. But was he not dishonest in pretending to be straight, and was he not using her?

This is clever, thought provoking, first class telly that is careful not to tell you how to think as it explores the issues.

I May Destroy You: Happy Animals

 "It's declined. Can I get a selfie, please?"

As ever, this is a thought-provoking episode with lots to unpick, centred around Terri's birthday party and the fact that Bella, still needing to earn a living despite the rapes, is broke.

Bella's treatment by the publishing boss she'd previously idolised is horribly, patronisingly casual: an advance isn't forthcoming. And she's to fulfil the contract, not write things about rape. All of which follows from humiliation in the supermarket.

We also see Kwame beginning to process what has happened to him, telling Terri about it. And we get some awkwardly racialised stuff about climate change. The pastor spouts absurd climate sceptic conspiracy theories bases on colonialism and white exploitation of resources which is, on the face of it, absurd and harmful..,. but then Theo confesses she got paid more for introducing Bella as an influencer because she's a "person of colour". Yet Theo is honest, and very frank about the ethical problems. She very much seems a decent person... but, as Terri mentions, the sins of the past have yet to be acknowledged. There are no easy answers here.

Terri and Bella pronounce their undying, and rather drunken, love for each other at the party... but an earlier conversation with an aggrieved Simon indicates that Terri may have more to do with the abandonment of Arabella to her eventual rape that night than previously thought. The plot thickens. Again, this is good, ethically nuanced, uncomfortable yet sublime telly.

I May Destroy You: The Alliance

 "I'm here to learn how to avoid being raped..."

We see yet another angle on rape and sexual assault in tghis clever and subtle episode. Arabella finds a support group run by Theodora, an old friend, who appears to be awesome, and a survivor of sexual abuse. There's no denying that Arabella benefits from being there, even if the words she says are utterly heartbreaking. She's terrified of being raped yet again.

Yet Theo's past, seen in a flashback to 2004 (surely just a couple of years ago...?), is full of ambiguity. On the surface, she falsely accuses a boy, Ryan, of rape- and it is, sadly, not exactly immaterial to how the complaint is treated that she has her "white girl tears" and Ryan is Black. Ryan is exonerated when the phone footage is found, and his friends, including a young Terry and Arabella, help him celebrate as Theo mutters a racist epithet under her breath.

Yet there's more to it; it seems this isn't the first time Theo lied about such things, being coached by her mother to lie about her father sexually abusing her and domestically abusing her mother for reasons of custody. Making a child do that is itself abuse, and Theo's behaviour is part of a cycle of abuse.

And, it must be said, Ryan is a dick. Theo wanted love, but she got a cheap shag for money, with photos taken without her consent in what is arguably a kind of sexual assault. Things are ambiguous, as ever. This is excellent, thought-provoking telly.

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.

I May Destroy You: Don't Forget the Sea

 "The privilege of the underprivileged..."

An unexpected flashback this time, as we go back in time three months to Ostia, one time port of Rome and modern day seaside of Rome. Terry visits Bella and gets to see the relatively luxurious life she's getting to live, on expenses.

And it's an interesting episode, exploring how the millenials live and their sexuality without telling us what to think. We see how Bella first met Biagio, and how he's essentially a decent chap. We see how Terry has a threesome while on lots of drugs (Bella and Terry spend much of the episode out of their heads on stuff that I, my drugs of choice being real ale and red wine, know nothing about. I mean "molly" sounds like a Georgian gay brothel), and we're left to wonder whether she's living the life, being sexually exploited by creepy men, or whether we may perhaps be overthinking this in denying women agency in their own sexuality and falling intothe trap of seeing sex as something men do to women.

A lot of this is the sort of realism you don't usually see in dramas- the artificial awkwardness of sex during a heavy period for example. It's just ordinary blood, exactly like the substance running through my male veins, but there's such cultural awkwardness around it.

This is very good stuff, leisurely and not overwritten.

I May Destroy You: Someone Is Lying

 "I had a threesome once..."

This subtly devastating episode begins with Bella trying to convince people, not least herself, that she's all right. But this narrative slowly collapses as the lies of a defensive Simon and flashes of memory lead to the sense that something definitely happens. And Bella does what sexually assaulted people in TV drama don't do and goes to the police- something far too few women feel able to do. But, with the massive invasion of privacy (they take your phone for months, and a woman's sexual history is for some reason seen as relevant) and the low conviction rate, I can't say I blame them.

Coel is superb with her devastatingly understated performance of a woman in horrified denial, and the reactions of those around her, preoccupied with their own lives, are realistic too. Sadly, this includes Alissa's rant at Bella in a nicely awkward scene.

This is compelling, quietly upsetting, devastatatingly human television.

I May Destroy You: Eyes Eyes Eyes Eyes

 "You know I can't socialise after I ejaculate, so..."

This is, especially at the end, not always a comfortable thing to watch. But Michaela Coel has written an extraordinary chronicle of our #MeToo times centred on a sexual assault which is experienced, as are many sexual assault, through an alconolic and druggy (spiked drink?) haze. The whole thing is written, acted and directed with real brilliant, and the sexual assault happens only towards the end, and through the hazy memories of Arabella herself.

Quite rightly, we get to know and like Arabella first. A successful writer, she happens to live in London where no one who isn't a millionaite can afford decent living conditions. The episode is by no means all about the sexual assault. It's about the agonising pressure, procrastination and adrenaline of being a writer. It's about the uncertainty of whether her Italian boyfriend is going to commit. It's about Black writers negotiating the very white world of publishing. 

Most of all, though, it's devastating and sublime. The final scenes, with Arabella waking up after the night before, not really aware of her own traumatic shock, are wonderfully directed and acted to pack a real punch, and to represent the trths of so many women. This is a very impressive first episode.