elan

Contingency Planning by @oodlyenough murdered me and i liked it so much its concerning.

Chrysalis and Window of Opportunity by @oodlyenough

A New Promise by @dis-embarks did the same, thank you 🥲

A lesson in rigor mortis by @orangechickenpillow still missing my heart after this one.

Here At The End Of All Things by queercatfan

I've Been Thinking of All the Little Things That You've Been Missing by @fouroddapples <3

Pygmalion by @twenty-qs 🩵

here is a map (with your name for a capital) by moonliving just 🥲

Run it back by spqr

be, be as you've always been by enbymegumi

Reflection and refraction series by @tryfero

Tastes like resurrection by @sulkybender 😭

disjunction by @nanashi-07

erosion by @nanashi-07

The Dead of Night by @bringthekaos

White lilies by whiskeyuncle ohmygod😭 destroyed in under 1k words

High Hawk Season by JeanLuciferGohard

Bitter practicality by Kaeviat

Cradle to grave by @weatheredlaw

But the montage wasn't just Mark's recollections. It was her perspective too. He's her dead husband. He's her Eurydice as much as he's his own Orpheus.

This isn't humanizing Gemma for Mark's sake. This is humanizing Gemma for Gemma's sake and it's there not for us to root for Mark, it's there for us to realize we're rooting for Gemma. Every moment Mark reaches out for her, she's reaching back.

The dead wife montage normally deprives a woman her agency, making her a tool for a man's arc, but this episode fully restored Gemma's agency. She's fighting back, she's yearning too. She hurts, she aches, she angers. She fights, she bleeds, she gets frustrated too. And has been before she was ever Ms Casey,

I've never seen a show restore a character's humanity as fully as this single episode did for Gemma. She went from an abstract concept--a wife, a severed employee, a ghost--to a tangible person.

And this was realized so literally as well. We literally see her bleed, we literally watch her eat, her hands cramp up, her teeth ache. It's like watching a hologram become flesh muscle by muscle, bone by bone.

gemma the whole time:

but you were never broken, viktor. 💔 🩹

More modern au... I might end up putting together a jayvik digital zine as soon as I figure out how to like, actually put it together.