The seemingly-annual Nora episode. It’s a good one, and, as with previous Nora episodes, it’s a compelling look at a damaged character and also gives us further insight into the world post-departures (episode premise spoilers.)
Nora has been busy with an uptick in claims of secondary departures in the run-up to the seventh anniversary, with people claiming signs and miracles around every corner. Then, she gets a mysterious call from someone whose claims of the impossible cut her to the core.
Nora carries herself with the air of a characters who’s been through all kinds of hell. The loss of her husband and children during the departures is of course the biggest one, and its effects cling to her the hardest, but it’s not all she’s suffered – this episode goes into another major loss she was hit with between seasons. As a result of everything she’s been through, she’s pretty much lost her faith in humanity and has an incredibly well-honed bullshit-meter ready for everything.
And so, she’s forever on the lookout for scams and lies, even the lies people tell themselves. She doesn’t believe in miracles (but then why was she so desperate to move to Miracle last season?), and she’s not prepared to let anyone else believe in a comforting fiction that can’t be real. She doesn’t want to read any grand meaning into what she’s endured. She just wants it to be random and awful and over, a part of her story that she continually tries to tell herself doesn’t have to affect who she is now, but of course it does.
Which is why the too-good-to-be-true claim she hears in this episode is such a body blow. It’s audacious and almost surely impossible, belying belief for people far less skeptical than her. When she sets out to expose it as an opportunistic fraud preying on the grief-stricken, it’s personal. It’s a crusade to burn this lie out of the world where it can never again hurt those who are desperate to believe in it. But at the same time, there’s this small part of her that’s longing for it, the part that’s daring it to be fake because she’s really dying for it to be real. This is likely to be her main storyline this season, and I’m really interested to see where it goes.
Matt’s scenes, no surprise, are pretty much all interacting with Nora. He gets a bit more to do than he has in previous Nora episodes, though it’s still not a ton. Nora spends much of the episode with various people in her crosshairs, and Matt is one of them. For multiple reasons – he’s been nurturing a particular belief that positions him not so far off some of the deluded folks Nora has been working to disabuse, but she also has reason to believe he might have assisted in a fraud, if only by not intervening in it. Matt is looking to be pretty messy this season, and I’m curious to see just how far they take it; Christopher Eccleston is good at just skirting the line of “unhinged.”
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