My fucking queen of everything.
Quick takes: Oh, I just can’t tonight. The last two minutes of that show ruined me forever and I may never get better. I may just run around tomorrow randomly yelling GET IT BACK at people, which will be weird during a morning meeting at a supermarket.
LEONA. Let’s be shallow first. I don’t know who that woman made a deal with to get the body she has, but I want his phone number. If it involves a portrait in an attic somewhere, so fucking BE IT. That dress was goddamn and she is astonishing.
I could tell you what it feels like to hold something as it comes apart under your hands, but you’re reading this, I don’t think I have to tell you. I could tell you how it feels to pound on it trying to staunch the bleeding, how it feels to listen to the sirens as it dies, but you’ve all been here with me a really long time. You know. Charlie, pacing in his office after the story aired, he felt the weight of it. That drink wasn’t a celebration. He was bracing himself. He knew what could be coming, and maybe he heard it, miles offshore, but he hoped and he hoped and he hoped he was wrong.
Mack was making it all about her and Will was making it all about something that was inevitable, something small, something that would make it like every other disaster on earth, like the O-rings and the attempted assassination of Roosevelt and all the other accidents of history. And Charlie was a player in a revenge fantasy he didn’t even know his old friend had, because he didn’t know the man’s child had died, and he didn’t know it was his fault. Or that the guy thought so, anyway.
Why would you hold something like that up to the light? Why would you try to see through it? A piece of paper is only important for what’s written on it. They all three of them, Mack and Charlie and Will, made it about what they didn’t know they were supposed to prevent.
And in swept Leona, maybe drunk or maybe high or maybe just amazing, and put it squarely back on the one man who DID SOMETHING ON PURPOSE. She came in wild and mad and clear: “He came into my HOUSE.” I feel for Jerry, I really do, the smarmy little prick, because he was trying to stop what was happening, but he was the one who deliberately did something wrong. That nobody stopped him, that’s on them, but by the end of the episode it had all gotten lost, and she found it.
(The catch in Charlie’s throat when she refused his resignation just fucking finished me, I’ll have you know. Remember the first season, when Charlie said to her, “You’re one of us?” She said that back to him just now. Your best friend, he’s the person who reminds you who you are when you’ve forgotten.)
You don’t, quoth Leona Lansing, fix your mistakes by walking away from them. You don’t run off to New Hampshire and you don’t cut your hair off and you don’t move in with a girl you don’t really like all that much and you don’t go to Islamabad and get a knife wound covering a protest. You fix your mistakes by fixing them. Cutting your losses is for pussies. Quitting is for suckers. It solves nothing. Face your disasters, head on, and take that hard step forward into the gale because hiding in your house won’t make the wind stop blowing.
Because here’s the thing: Every story is a risk. Every story is a reach. Every story you tell, you assemble it as best you can and you send it out into the world, and you love it and you hope it holds together. When it doesn’t, the answer isn’t to stop telling stories. It’s to find another one, and tell it better.
Or as Leona Lansing would say, and I may get tattooed on me somewhere, GET IT BACK.
A.