![]() Not only is Delaney unrelenting in his violence, but he’s seemingly unaware of just how low he can go. It’s not what Delaney wants to hear, or believe, but as his flashbacks increase in frequency and intensity over the duration of the episode, the images of the past are impossible for him to shake. “She wanted you dead James.” Delaney has been searching his mind, and his father’s basement, for answers about Salish for weeks now, and all along Brace has been withholding the truth: his mother was sent to Bedlam for trying to drown Delaney as a baby. “Always cow-eyed about your sainted mother,” Brace taunts him. But Delaney’s memories of his parents are as suspect as the rumors flying around Covent garden regarding his cannibalism. “My father cast my mother into madness, then jumped in straight after, he’s scarcely a man to follow,” Delaney tells Brace at the start of the episode. And Delaney’s mind, racked with fragmented visions of his menacing dead mother, is pushed to the breaking point. The chlorate-infused gunpowder that Cholmondeley has rushed to completion by scaring his motley crew of lab assistants into stirring non-stop with a story about how terrible babies are for marriage is a five-alarm fire waiting to happen. The East India Company declares war on Delaney for setting the train in motion on an investigation into their illicit slave trade, and sets his boat ablaze. The chlorate-infused gunpowder that Cholmondeley has rushed to completion by scaring his motley crew of lab assistants into stirring non-stop with a story about how terrible babies are for marriage is a five-alarm fire waiting to happen.Įpisode six packs an explosive punch-literally. But while Zilpha is thoroughly enjoying this moment she’s waited so long for, their love making jolts Delaney into a repressed memory of his mother’s attempt to drown him as an infant, and he begins to choke his sister mid-copulation. (If this is starting to sound like a better written version of Fifty Shades of Grey, I’m just trying to recreate the atmosphere I witnessed on screen as faithfully as possible.) Cut to Zilpha and Delaney rolling around the bed in ecstasy. At the funeral, he shoves the grave diggers aside and jumps in to finish the job himself, and ensure that Thorne rests two feet past the regular depth-not so much for the grave robbers, but so that he stays good and buried. The service wrapped, Delaney stomps upstairs to Zilpha’s bedroom and demands she “take that fucking dress off now,” riding crop still in hand. As expected, Delaney approaches their reunion with brooding apathy. We see a different side of her this week, almost high off the murder of her husband, and reflexively returning to Delaney’s arms. On the day of the funeral, clad in her black mourning dress, Zilpha triumphantly sticks the blood-crusted pin she used to kill her husband into her hat. ![]() And how polite of Delaney and Zilpha to wait until Thorne is no longer breathing to resume their affair. This means the other event we’ve slogged through six episodes waiting in hot anticipation for is finally upon us: sibling sex. They are the real big bad that we should all be very, very afraid of.įinally the time has come: Zilpha is free of Thorne. Perhaps it’s just a way of reminding us, the audience, that petty squabbles mean little when compared to the unrelenting force of East India Company, which bears down hard on Delaney this week. For all the suspense Taboo has built up between Delaney and Thorne, rivals for both Zilpha’s affection and the inheritance rights to the Nootka Sound, Thorne’s death winds up being so anticlimactic it almost feels incomplete. While it was satisfying to see Zilpha enact justice against her terrible husband, he died with barely a whimper, which is a stark contrast with the guttural noises Delaney’s victims tend to emit when he slashes them open. ![]() But I will admit that I was both elated and slightly disappointed at the way he went out: skewered like a shish kebob in his sleep by Zilpha with a giant hat pin. Nevertheless, he is super dead now and I, like Zilpha, will not mourn him for long. In this case, however, Thorne’s fear wasn’t unfounded. Good riddance to yet another horrible male character who does nothing but commit violence toward women because he’s threatened by the prospect of emasculation by way of his wife’s blood relatives. ![]() Somewhere out there the Gods heard me complaining about characters I wouldn’t mind seeing dead on Taboo, because hallelujah! Thorne is dead. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |