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: 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.