Emmy Catch-Up: I May Destroy You

Every year, I watch the six submitted episodes of every series I don’t regularly watch that’s up for one of the Emmy series prizes. Last year, I started watching the entire season of each show to get a better idea of the quality I missed, and I’ve decided to continue that this year.

I May Destroy You: Season 1, Episode 8 “Line Spectrum Border” (B+)

This episode featured some unfortunate spiraling on the part of two of its main characters, which was unpleasant to watch, especially after they started off casually joking with Terry in the park about how Kwame was going to try sleeping with a woman. That experience actually went somewhat well at the start, with Kwame hitting it off personality-wise with Nilufer and then going back to her place, where things turned sexual. Even though he didn’t really know what to do and it triggered memories of his own traumatic experience, she seemed happy, until she revealed her prejudices and how she didn’t want to apologize for them. She did not react well at all to his admission that he was gay, and that night ended very poorly. Arabella’s sudden trip to Italy wasn’t much better as she snuck into Biagio’s building and then went looking through his apartment until he arrived, startled to see her. She had no understanding of the fact that he wasn’t happy to have her there and just didn’t get it when he locked her out after she excitedly ran out to get the pizza. She did get pretty angry there, raging and swearing at him in Italian, and it took him pointing a gun at her when she essentially kicked down the door to realize that she had to leave. It was a stark difference in tone from the overly happy visit to the police station where Arabella and Terry were giddily celebrating the two officers’ pregnancies before finding out that Arabella’s case is pretty much closed.