Oh, how
I love the Mills sisters. The
Crane-Abbie partnership is probably the show’s best-known quality, and
rightfully so, but there’s so much great material to dig into where Abbie and
Jenny are concerned. It’s been fantastic
to watch how their relationship has grown and deepened over the series, and I’m
eager to see where they go in the future.
Any
discussion of Abbie and Jenny has to start with their childhoods. The fissure that’s colored their relationship
formed on the day the two girls saw a demon in the woods. When the missing sisters were brought to the
police and asked to explain their unaccounted hours, Abbie was adamant that
they keep mum. Separated from their
mother, bounced around the system, and finally in a decent foster home, she was
afraid that two disadvantaged black girls spouting stories about demons would
be wanted even less than they currently were, and she didn’t want them to lose
their living situation or, worse yet, get split up. Jenny, however, couldn’t tell anything but
the truth, and her bid for Abbie to back up her claims went unanswered.
This is
the moment they veered off. While Abbie
has some reckless years before being taken under the wing of a caring mentor
and getting her act together, Jenny has a much harder time coming back from
their experiences. She presses against
the bounds of the law, the bounds the society’s definition of sanity, the
bounds of what most people would call reality. Her time between incarcerations (criminal,
mental health, or both) is spent dangerously while Abbie slowly gains respect
as a police lieutenant.
Even
though the actions of both sisters in that moment were understandable –
impulsive, earnest Jenny doesn’t want to lie, and shrewd, protective Abbie is
looking at the big-picture implications – it leads to such a divide, such hurt,
between them. Jenny blames Abbie for
leaving her to be branded a liar and lunatic, for turning her back as Jenny
gets lost in her precarious life.
Meanwhile, there’s a part of Abbie that wants to reach out to her
sister, but she feels so responsible for the way Jenny’s life has turned out
that her guilt overwhelms her. Of
course, any attempts to help on her part are met by Jenny’s resistance anyway,
a square-shouldered dismissal that Abbie’s never cared about Jenny’s well-being
before, so why should she start now?
No comments:
Post a Comment