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"It's even more powerful than her giving up the late-night show for Ava. That was about something she wanted in the past. What she's willing to do now, to spend more time with Ava, is to risk her future. To take that leap is, to us, the ultimate declaration of love."
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I've seen your posts in the tag and would love to take a stab at responding to this SOS!
And I really hope you don't mind a cringe reblog-with-additional-text because I actually have lots of thoughts on this and why Deborah's choice (all of Deborah's choices) in the finale worked beautifully for me and didn't at all detract from how much she loves Ava.
This clip that's been going around on tumblr, from a Vanity Fair interview with Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, really reinforces and puts words to how I felt during the finale:
(The whole interview is fantastic and includes a truly incredible joke about a Hacks reboot that opens with Ava and Deb at Dyke Week in Provincetown. If you need help getting around the paywall, use archive.is or similar 😇)
I fervently believe that Deborah should have the right to go through with assisted suicide. For her, it's about not wanting to go through the undignified and painful and messy experience of harsh cancer treatments and it's about what that would be like from the outside looking in, that whole control thing. She's scarred from losing a friend to AIDS and her memories of his decline, scarred from her own experiences being misunderstood and lied about and even about her own complicity with those lies at certain pre-Ava parts of her career. Her grasp on her own legacy is often tenuous, but it's never been as strong as it is now, coming off the dual triumphs of her Central Park show and opening The Diva. Deborah is a selfish person (notice that nobody brings up DJ or her grandson specifically when appealing for her to reconsider), but this decision is bigger and more complicated than that because she's always been open about how her image as a public figure is incredibly personal for her. Choosing to die is about choosing to have the final say over her troubled relationship with her body, her troubled relationship with her career, and even her troubled relationship to how other people will remember her. It would have been a kind of victory, unleashing that ultimate control over her life and death.
The raw, overwhelming pain of Ava begging Deborah to get treatment and attempt to live longer is 100% meant to make us all feel distraught. We've spent five years watching the love between them grow, watching their creative partnership survive both external and internal threats, watching them develop a shared voice, and knowing that neither of them value ANYTHING more than the creative energy of that relationship. No matter what happens to Ava in the decades ahead, this relationship with Deborah is so much more than the spark that sets her career on fire--it's really a foundational, intimate, essential thing. Deborah is valid for wanting to choose when she goes, and Ava is valid for feeling abandoned and scared, and the show has to walk a really thin, delicate line to honor both perspectives simultaneously.
(Cutting for length, just a few more paragraphs behind the cut)
And I think they pull it off. That moment when Ava begs "Please don't leave me"? Look at Deborah's face! She's less made up than usual, it's early morning after a sublime night out, she's resolute yet vulnerable, and she's confronted with the fact that the person who understands her and loves her more than anyone else in the world cannot fully understand her now because of that love, because of how much she wants to keep feeling it as a living thing. That quiet "I'm sorry" is just gut-wrenching.
It's really important that this moment moves Deborah deeply, but that it isn't the moment when Deborah changes her mind. She believes she is making the right decision, and it would be something worse than a compromise to relent and give Ava what she wants (so badly it's a need) while she is still actually unwilling to go through treatments. But every moment they've spent in Paris is still accumulating within her. The videos she takes on her phone even though she won't be around to rewatch them (Ava will). The utter freedom she felt on that dance floor, eyes blissfully closed to Ava's moment of feeling sick with anticipatory grief. And in that moment in the hotel, she still has plans for her time left on earth, still has new stuff to live for (like the hand-size reveal, which she's played the long game on for five years).
At that moment, I believe she both has and hasn't let it sink in what death really means. It only sinks in fully after Ava (who is also changing and accumulating memories and growing) agrees to accompany her all the way to her death. And when she and Ava start writing jokes about death in earnest. At the train station, Deborah allows herself the pleasure of a second croissant, but the pleasure of riffing on funny things with Ava is so natural and ingrained that it doesn't feel like a conscious choice. Saying yes to Ava's pleas would have been a decision that required some amount of compromise, some amount of disappointing herself. But when she's basking in the joy of creating something new with her person, so much so that she pulls out her notebook? The choice she makes to keep living is still a painful one to make, because she knows her life is going to involve some very painful things, but it's no longer a compromise or a weakness for her to make that choice.
It's not that she didn't value Ava's love for her "enough" to want to stick around. Rather she was still focused on her life's primary value being about a controlled legacy. When she realizes she can't actually imagine herself choosing to quit writing with Ava and laughing with Ava, the things she is aware of valuing about her own life shift to accommodate all the pain and love and uncertainty that go into a real, intimate, public-and-private life as a comedian. Comedy is Deborah-and-Ava; Ava-and-Deborah are comedy. By ceding control one final time within the show, she chooses herself and Ava and the hope of more laughter sourced from the pain and joy she's signing up for. By constructing Deborah's decision in the precise way it did, the finale solidifies that Deborah's generative relationship with Ava is the most valuable aspect of her legacy of all. And she and Ava might be the only two people who fully understand what it is, and that makes it even more beautiful.
You are a legend. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and for easing some of my pain and concerns over the finale. I've had a few people reach out to me tonight and I am starting to see the beauty in the writer's choices. Again, thank you. ❤️
Also, Lucia saying that Deborah had to get sick to realise that she wants to live for comedy and keep writing? Hasn't she been living for that her entire life?
Genuinely so depressed over the fact that we never got to see the moment Ava told Deborah that she had written her version of Who's Making Dinner about their relationship. Even the revelation of Ava working on Late Night jokes throughout season 3 pales in comparison... because that season 3 revelation was Ava telling Deborah that she believes in her future, and the revelation in season 5 would have been Ava saying, 'My future exists because of what we became together'.
Just gonna pretend that Ava saved the surprise for after the pilot dropped so she could watch it with her girl by her side because she's romantic like that. 🤡
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The way this song just randomly popped up on shuffle and perfectly described everything I wanted from the finale (without the threat of impending death hanging over them). 😭
Genuinely so depressed over the fact that we never got to see the moment Ava told Deborah that she had written her version of Who's Making Dinner about their relationship. Even the revelation of Ava working on Late Night jokes throughout season 3 pales in comparison... because that season 3 revelation was Ava telling Deborah that she believes in her future, and the revelation in season 5 would have been Ava saying, 'My future exists because of what we became together'.
One critique that I will give is that I don't believe that Deborah needed such an extreme catalyst to learn to let go of control. She was already on that path. The growth was evident. And I would have preferred her choosing to embrace life in the finale rather than fearing death.
I actually wish that they'd never brought up the abrupt cancer storyline and Deborah just allowed herself to LIVE and savour all that life has to offer outside of work while in Paris with Ava. It just felt very bittersweet and unnecessary to me. Just out of place, I don't know...
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I actually wish that they'd never brought up the abrupt cancer storyline and Deborah just allowed herself to LIVE and savour all that life has to offer outside of work while in Paris with Ava. It just felt very bittersweet and unnecessary to me. Just out of place, I don't know...
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