Emmy Catch-Up: I May Destroy You (Penultimate Episode)

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 11 “Would You Like to Know the Sex?” (B+)

This show to me feels a lot like “Normal People,” in that it’s a limited series that was highly acclaimed but that I only ended up watching much after it originally debuted despite generally liking the pilot. They’re both twelve episodes, and while that’s longer than most limited series these days, I’d still love for it to go on for a lot longer. This episode started out in a very lighthearted way, reminiscent of how Arabella and Terry were behaving when they went in to speak to the two pregnant detectives. Arabella was so enamored with Della’s book that she wanted to meet her, and while the energy of her sitting on the toilet expressing how similar they are seemed like it was going to work, it instead ended up getting her promptly blocked. That wasn’t the end of the story, of course, but Arabella first had to experience a serious fall from grace as she got dropped both by her publishers and her lawyers ahead of needing to repay her advance. Running into Zain felt like a strange development, but the fact that he was actually that author who had managed to be successful even after she had publicly called him a rapist was an even more brutal blow. He did manage to help her quite a bit, and they had a positive interaction that in a weird way seemed to remedy their dynamic. Terry and Kwame also had transformative experiences with their dates, pushing the boundaries of what they’ve previously been exposed to and the expectations they have of themselves. Terry also got the job, though much of what happened in this episode overshadowed that, and Kwame’s attempt to apologize to Nilufer went very poorly. The most monumental development was the sudden flashback for Arabella at the end of the episode that seemed to allow her to recall pretty much everything, which is going to set her on a pointed course of vengeance in the final episode.