Character Highlight: Thena (Eternals)

*Eternals spoilers.*

I wavered over whether to give Thena a Favorite Characters or Character Highlight post, but in the end I went with the latter. Even though I do like her quite a bit, she’s definitely one of the Eternals with less screentime, and for me, she doesn’t make as big an impression as some of her fellow supporting Eternals, like Makkari or Phastos. So it’s a Character Highlight for her, but that shouldn’t take away from her coolness or badassery in the slightest.

Her Earth-mythology equivalent is Athena, and as the goddess of wisdom was named after her, one might assume that Thena fits in more with the “thinkers” of the group. But of course, Athena is classically depicted in armor, and that’s the side Thena aligns more closely with. She’s a warrior through and through, and her powers of cosmic manipulation allow her to conjure weapons out of pure energy. Throughout the millennia, she fights Deviants like nobody’s business.

Thena is a bit of a strong and silent type, slightly aloof. This gives her a calm self-assurance on the battlefield, but as her fellow Eternals get to know humanity, she’s more likely to observe than participate. She hangs back, quiet and watchful, taking in everything around her.

For such a self-possessed warrior, then, it’s a hard blow when Thena begins to experience Mahd Wy’ry, a degenerative condition that affects her memory. Without warning, she turns on her friends in battle as she fights opponents that aren’t really there. Being affected by Mahd Wy’ry is devastating for Thena. It’s so hard for her to lose control of her own mind, and it’s dismaying to realize she’s just attacked her friends, who have to band together to match her fighting prowess and keep her from hurting them (without, in turn, hurting her.)

Thena serves as our window into Mahd Wy’ry, a condition whose source is gradually drawn out over the course of the film. When Thena first starts showing symptoms, Ajak explains that it’s due to an Eternal’s extremely long life, that the mind becomes unable to cope with the accumulation of millennia of memories. However, as the film continues, the Eternals learn the truth: rather than being nigh-immortal aliens, they’re highly advanced AIs developed by the Celestials to do their bidding. Thena and the others have lived thousands of years on Earth, but this isn’t their first life. They’ve done all of this numerous times before on countless worlds, each time getting their memories wiped and their consciousness upload into a new, identical body. In the throes of Mahd Wy’ry, Thena isn’t growing confused at the memories of the last 7,000 years at all. Rather, buried memories of the lives she lived before Earth are reasserting themselves.

Even though developing Mahd Wy’ry takes Thena out of the action to an extent, both physically and narratively, it also helps to expand her character. Again, it connects her condition to the larger reveal of the Eternals’ real existence, which lends more emotional weight to Sersi learning the truth. And it gives us a chance to see a more vulnerable side of Thena, struggling to make sense of her own mind and placing herself in the care of Gilgamesh. As the two of them create a secluded life together in the desert where Thena can’t hurt anyone, it’s lovely to see Gilgamesh look after her, but it’s also kind of beautiful to see how Thena puts her trust in him. She knows that he’ll help her when she doesn’t know what’s real, and during her episodes, he won’t let her hurt anyone but him. There’s a lot of surrender in that, which must be hard for someone who’s spent so much of her very long life very secure in who she is and what she’s doing. I think Thena believes her condition makes her weak, but it takes strength to trust another person like that.