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: 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.