So then she calls the police up and says, “He’s on the way! I’ve got him in an Uber!” Then I was imagining the police officer receiving this call, thinking, Arabella’s crazy! Arabella really went to some measures for justice, maybe at the cost of her sanity. I had another version where she drugs him and took him home and was trying to wake him up and then - while he was under this drug - convinced him to go to the police station and admit to the rape. I have versions where her and Terry and Theo carry his dead body into a dumpster and burn the dumpster, and there’s a big bonfire, and Arabella’s at the bonfire, and Terry’s like, “You’re a murderer! Get away!” And then I realized that Arabella has to live with the murder … so then she just lives as a murderer? This feels stressful! In my original version, Arabella and David sat on a park bench about to communicate. I realized what I thought was much more interesting was exploring every single one of these scenarios. “Sally, how about this? Here’s a way where no one has to die but there’s still justice.” And I would see her reaction.
I was thinking about these scenarios where I could get justice, and I would put them forward to Sally when I saw her. I had told the couple that lived in the big house that I was writing a story on sexual assault. I was in Michigan, and I remember writing the final episode, and I had an ending. Okay, so let’s talk about the ending! How did you start writing it? I could let go of the trauma and I would still be here.” “I had to let it go, and realize that I was still alive if I let it go, and the trauma did not need to define me. “I, Michaela, have had to let it go,” she said. She wanted the viewer to feel how she felt when she finished writing the piece, and in some ways, how she had brought peace to her own life. (I had only watched six episodes at that point.) We couldn’t really talk about the show yet, she said, because the entire thing had to be seen in the aggregate - all of the journey, its pitfalls, joys, and tribulations. She chooses, instead, to spend time with her friend and housemate Ben.ĭuring the first of seven interviews I did with Coel about I May Destroy You in May, she wanted to know whether I had watched the finale. In the final beat, Arabella decides not to return to the bar.
The third detaches further from reality Arabella buys him a drink, and they make love, with her penetrating him in her bed. He becomes more metaphorical, a manifestation of her trauma rather than a real person. The second is another twist: David has a breakdown in the bathroom stall. The first scene is pure revenge fantasy: three women doling out justice like vigilante crime fighters. After all this time, all this waiting, what does she do? The finale answers that question again and again and again, in various scenarios that grow more surreal and challenging with each iteration. The finale picks up right where the penultimate episode leaves off: Arabella and Terry (Weruche Opia) are at the bar, Ego Death, and Arabella sees her assailant, David, back at the scene of the crime. (Another title possibility was This Story is Not Based on True Events.) The beauty of the ending is in how it contains shards of reality, but expands them into strange, surprising shapes, like blowing hot glass. (That was the date when she was drugged and assaulted while working on her previous show, Chewing Gum.) Still, the title eventually makes its way into the show in the finale as the title of her character Arabella’s long-gestating book. Michaela Coel eventually scrapped it, in part, because she felt it would invite too many questions about how her own experience with sexual assault informed the series. The original working title for I May Destroy You was January 22.
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