and imo that really hammers in the theme that emma is just a person, like anyone else. like any other person, she is capable of change, both negative and positive. she can be radicalized and deradicalized. emma herself points this out as a teen, mass shooters can look like anybody! theyre not even all men. and charlie echoes her in the present day when he says there could be thousands of people walking the streets who were radicalized like emma and just like her they ultimately didnt go through with it. and when arguing with his friends about it, he accidentally stumbled upon the really great point that this is a very american problem produced by american gun culture. the individual of course bears responsibility for their actions and their growth, but if we want to understand and solve this problem on a broader scale, we have to understand it is bigger than any one person. it cant be boiled down to a few bad actors and divorced from the material conditions from which gun violence emerges

in contrast, multiple other characters in the drama independently use a very interesting choice of word to describe emma: "psychopath." they all, in different settings and conversations, use a term which carries an incredible amount of baggage in pop psychology and bourgeois psychiatry. their language indicates they see emma as an aberration, fundamentally broken and incapable of change. because that's the safe way of looking at it. it's easy to exceptionalize mass shootings and hard to look at the rot at the heart of the america, the massive amounts of violence we inflict which we take for granted as part of the status quo. because that's their normal and emma, to these characters, is intrinsically abnormal and therefore irredeemable

*determine how much or how little counts as Remembering by whatever feels right. you do not need to remember every waking second of the year or have it completely wiped from your mind to say you do or dont remember respectively

Have you found yourself?