when sylvia plath wrote 'the applicant' she was actually writing it directly for baran al-hashimi btw.
walk with me. "do you wear / a glass eye, false teeth or a crutch... stitches to show something's missing?"
no!!!111!!!! baran doesnt!! she hides her struggles precisely so she won't be assessed this way. her seizure disorder, her immigrant mother's sacrifice (mentioned in sepi's interviews) her PTSD from war zones, these are all invisible struggles. no one in her life picks up on these beyond the assumption that she's "just thoughtful." she has spent her entire career (lowk her life too according to ep15) ensuring these struggles stay invisible. because she understands intuitively that in a system built by and for a certain kind of person, visible 'deficiency' rarely earns you sympathy and much more often disqualifies you.
and so for the first several episodes, she basically is the applicant. we're in robby's position, assessing whether she's the right fit. she really isn't given any interiority of her own until we get into her backstory several episodes later, so the initial understanding of her character is defined by this sense of encroachment on robby's territory. she is very literally reduced to simply an applicant.
when she finally drops her armor and reveals her seizure disorder to robby in an act of deliberate vulnerability, she is offering her wound in exactly the way plath mocks. she's showing him her "hole" hoping it creates intimacy. this is her 'last resort' in a way and just completely blows up in her face.
