The finale of Fellow Travelersis now streaming, ahead of its Sunday night airing on Showtime—a conclusion to one of the year’s best series that is gorgeous, devastating, and cathartic in equal measure.
The story of a tortured-yet-beautiful romance between two men over decades, the show waltzed through those emotions throughout the entire season, as Matt Bomer’s Hawk and Jonathan Bailey’s Tim weather the historical circumstances that prevented their deserved happily ever after. Bomer’s nuanced performance as an infatuated, conflicted man is the best work of his career, and, in the emotion-packed finale, Bailey is a revelation. Across multiple timelines, he showcases how intertwined grit, defiance, and joy in spite of darkness are for gay men determined to make their lives mean something in a world that actively works to strip them of dignity.
The series spans Hawk and Tim’s meet-cute during the Lavender Scare and McCarthyism-led panic of the 1950s through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The final scene, set at the unveiling of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the National Mall in D.C. that might as well have been an anvil plummeting straight onto my heart, it shattered me so much.
There are two images in the final episode that have seared into my brain since I first watched, tableaus charting the arc of a doomed, yet life-changing relationship. First is Hawk and Tim slow dancing naked in the privacy of a secret apartment and, later, Tim’s head nestled on Hawk’s chest as they take a post-coital nap—moments of bliss stolen in a society that won’t allow them that pleasure. Then there’s a mirror of that position decades later, when Hawk climbs into Tim’s hospital bed to cradle him, as Tim struggles through a rough night during his last days battling AIDS.
The power of those moments is amplified by Bailey’s performance. In the earlier timeline, his wide, giddy eyes betray a man fully aware of his good fortune to be so madly in love, cognizant of how precarious and fleeting the feeling could be and determined to live in the splendor of it. Later, as he faces death, his resignation to fate is not one of defeat, but a catalyst for clarity.
So much of his life was impacted—some might say ruined—by his inability to move on from his connection to Hawk. But in a sensational monologue delivered after Hawk questions how much pain he’s caused Tim, Tim corrects the narrative: “I spent most of my life waiting for God to love me. And then I realized the only thing that matters is that I loved God. It’s the same with you. I’ve never loved anyone but you. You were my great, consuming love. Most people don’t get one of those. I do. I have no regrets.”
Bailey’s performance of this monologue stunned me. It is spoken with such certainty, an outpouring of a lifetime of emotion funneled into a searing, pointed declaration. He’s speaking to not only a complicated romance with his lover, but also on behalf of generations of gay men whose great loves were colored and, it often seemed, marred by the misfortune of the times in which they were kindled. That’s the revelation that Tim, through Bailey’s delivery, speaks to: There’s no misfortune when it comes to love; we may now be aware of the hideousness with which society treated (and still treats) the gay community, but how dare we assume that the love found was any kind of misfortune.
I’ll be thinking about this episode, that monologue, and Bailey’s performance for a long time. Do yourself a favor and watch it.
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