This post contains spoilers for the finale of I May Destroy You.
Revenge is a filthy business. It lurches, it bleeds, it makes a mess of the floorboards. Those who seek it must make monsters of themselves—willing hosts, ready to accept the demon. This is not true for all forms of revenge in all circumstances, but it is the truth presented to us in the finale of I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s transcendent, meta BBC/HBO series about a rape survivor sorting through her trauma and searching for a way back to herself. Writing is Arabella’s weapon of reconciliation, and she uses it to imagine a vivid, sometimes violent triptych of fantasies for how to come to terms with her suffering.
“She has to engage with all these different forms of how you enact your grief in order to truly have power over it,” Coel said of her character in an interview last month. The final enactment is a slight twist on one of the simplest and most common adages: “You got to love something to let it go,” she says matter-of-factly.
But how do you arrive at loving something like this? I May Destroy You’s finale, co-directed by Coel and Sam Miller, offers a map. In the episode, Arabella tries to find the right ending for her book and imagines three scenarios. In the first, she finally sees her rapist, David (Lewis Reeves) at the bar where they first met, the aptly named Ego Death (also the name of the episode). With Terry (Weruche Opia) and Theo (Harriet Webb), they inject David with the same drug he used to sedate and rape Arabella. This part of the episode moves swiftly, like a spy thriller, until they leave the bar with David and watch him lurch dazedly up the street. Arabella then decides to strike, molesting him, beating him bloody, then shoving his body under her bed.
It’s a physical and symbolic gesture to a theme she unpacked in previous episodes; this form of revenge will only create a new cycle of psychic suffering. The destruction also offers another interpretation of the show’s layered title. “Who is destroying who?” Coel told Vanity Fair. “Could Arabella’s assault destroy her? Could Kwame’s assault destroy him? Can anything be destroyed? What’s been incredible is the whole new layer that’s has been revealed now that it’s out, with the audience asking, Will this show destroy me? Which is not something that occurred to me at all.”
The second fantasy hinges on Terry’s revenge plan, with Arabella tricking David into thinking he successfully drugged her. He berates her at first, then crumples in her arms, sobbing uncontrollably. The episode then cuts to David in Arabella’s bed as she listens to him speak gently about his troubles. It’s the fantasy of an extreme empath, the victim lending a kind ear to the perpetrator. (“I spent a lot of my life asking, pleading, hoping for empathy,” Coel memorably told Vulture.)
However, this ending isn’t enough to complete Arabella’s journey, which leads to the third fantasy. In it, she meets David at the bar and offers to buy him a drink, which puts Arabella in control. This scenario transforms into a sweeping, romantic overture. Back at Arabella’s place, she tops him, an inversion of cis, hetero norms. The next morning, she tells him to leave, and he does. As he walks out of the bedroom on her command, his former self—the bloody, battered David from the first fantasy—crawls out from under the bed, too, freeing Arabella at last. The episode becomes a living, breathing thing; David’s exodus is the exhale.