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 5 “…It Just Came Up” (B+)

This episode featured a truly unexpected moment, one that changed the course of how everything works by showing Arabella using the platform she had to make it clear that what I thought she had written off as something that didn’t bother her was instead an incident she wasn’t going to tolerate. Seeing her Google on her phone whether throwing away a condom during sex is rape while Kwame was looking up a similar thing based on his own experience indicated how she was having trouble moving on from what seemed to be an overall positive interaction, but one that she realized was all too similar to what happened to her in the bathroom. She did enjoy messing with Zain a few times by saying the wrong thing so that his ears would perk up when he heard her calling him the rapist, but it didn’t prepare him at all for the public outing she performed which Terry helped to record after he attempted to sneak out and run away from it all. Biagio was much less sympathetic when he spoke with her, arguing that it was her own fault that she was raped, and while she isn’t necessarily close to discovering who her other assaulter was, there’s no turning back now. Her new haircut was a bold change, one that underlines a demand to be seen. Kwame’s time at the police station was considerably different from Arabella’s since the officer he was speaking to didn’t seem to believe his claim, and I’m not sure whether her going public with what happened to her will encourage him to pursue it or to try to hide it from anyone else.