ZENDAYA as TASHI DUNCAN
CHALLENGERS (2024) dir. Luca Guadagnino

“The key thing was of course, the fact that Rick has PTSD and that’s very much what’s driving a lot of his behavior and being in a place of that level of vulnerability, back with the love of his life in that way.

It’s also the thing he fears, the loss of her. It manifests itself in a way that is visceral and leads to the lovemaking not just being about love, but the revealing of pain and trauma and fear. That informs Michonne, that she can’t just blast him into making sense. There’s something deeper going on here that he can’t verbalize. She has to help him get through in a different way. So she gets to see him, as well, as he reveals what’s really in there, the wound. That’s going to happen most likely in that most vulnerable space.” — Danai Gurira

“Yeah, I think it is about pain. As Danai just said, it’s about him wanting her and then fearing what he’s about to unlock again. He gets to sort of articulate it in the scene further in the episode, when he gets to say that, ‘I can’t do this again. I haven’t got the capacity to do this again. I’ve worked out how to die and live again.’ So it is an absolutely necessary scene that allows Michonne to realize that there’s something really broken here, more broken than she’s ever anticipated. […]

So the scene was about a real intimacy, a sort of frightening intimacy. This is a part of his personality he has shut down. It’s almost like he’s trying to stop himself from feeling this love again. She sees that and she just says, ’Just trust. We’re back. We’re the same…’ I find it very moving. I think it’s a very, very moving scene, because it’s about them connecting in a way that he’s had to deny for seven years. He’s denied that connection for the sake of living on in this half life for the CRM” — Andrew Lincoln

Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira Discuss Episode 4 of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

requested by anonymous

A Moment Of Beauty

I know there’s been a lot of discussion about superstore and the pregnancy plot line etc, which I’m not going to touch, Bc i have too many thoughts, but I did want to comment on one thing.

I don’t agree with jonah’s treatment of Kelly, sure, but I understand it. Especially in the last episode. All that overt physical affection, the trying so. hard. to feel what he thinks he should feel. Because in this moment he doesn’t want the feelings he has for Amy. They don’t feel fair, they never have, but particularly not in this moment. He wants to love Kelly, hence the hand holding and the talk about meeting parents etc. He’s not leading her on, he really does want this thing to work with her because God would it be so much easier to just love her and be happy, but it’s only in that moment when she looks up at him softly and sweetly and says “I love you” does he realize he can’t love her, and so he breaks things off, because when faced with the bald truth he knows it’s cruel to continue trying to make himself feel something when she so clearly already does.

Jonah doesn’t stay with Kelly all that time because he can’t figure out how to break it off, or because he’s too weak or cowardly. He stays with her because theoretically she should be easy to love. She’s nice and enthusiastic and has no visible baggage. She seems like the most obvious route out of the painful unrequited feelings he has and has always had for Amy. Feelings that he 100% did not believe could even possibly be returned until she confessed to having a crush on him, and so he felt like those feelings were his problem to solve, something he needed to deal with and move on. The look on his face in that scene is that of a man whose brain is short circuiting. He stumbles over his words, forgets to be calm and collected in front of all those people… because the very premise that he’s based his entire emotional life on is false. Amy does like him, she does have feelings. But then the rug is pulled out from under him again when Amy says “but not anymore ha ha.” So he starts trying too hard again to convince himself that loving Kelly will make his feelings for Amy go away, which is not fair to Kelly, but it is human.

Then the whole “I waited two years for you” thing is basically just an indictment against himself. “I waited two years for a woman I was hopelessly in love with to leave her husband and realize she loves me because to do otherwise would have been messy and hurtful to so many people, and yet here we are, and things are messy and hurt even more than they would have before.” Also he probably doesn’t know the extent of what she feels for him. The kiss felt like a “oh Jonah, I had a little crush on you and I wanted to kiss you before I dug back into my real (more mature and adult) life which someone like you has no part in.”

I mean, that’s NOT what she feels, but he doesn’t know that, and it really doesn’t help his understanding of the situation when they begin to argue and she sort of belittles his problems, the things keeping him here at a shitty job with no real future. I mean, I get where Amy is coming from. Jonah has so many opportunities spread out before him. He’s a young intelligent guy with few responsibilities to hinder him. He’s free to take chances and live literally any kind of life he wants. She looks at him and she doesn’t understand how she can feel so trapped here (doubly now) in a place that he seems to willingly stay in (of course she’s not privy to whatever neuroses he deals with, and doesn’t know much of his past).

Jonah and Amy are a god damned mess, and it’s exactly the way it should be. People keep saying “oh my god the writers don’t have to write all this shitty behavior and poor life choices and blah blah blah, didn’t they watch Parks and Rec? What about B99?” Like… you cannot begin to understand how hopeless it feels to be a smart adult who was always told you could be anything you wanted to be STUCK working in a place like Cloud9. It is soul crushing to feel like you don’t have a way out (FOR WHATEVER REASON). Ben and Leslie were privileged professionals working in fields they were god damned passionate about. And Amy and Jake are New York City detectives who don’t feel like their life circumstances have chained them to working for a pittance at a job where there is no path forward (I mean AMY is a seargent now and Jake LOVES being a detective). The desperation and sadness that Amy and Jonah have inside of them is not comparable to any couple on any show you refer to. It’s a workplace comedy, yes, but it’s not like any workplace comedy you’re talking about. They do not like where their lives are, they’re bitter to some degree, and they’re really really trying to be happy. That’s why their entire arc started off with “a moment of beauty” because it’s all either of them feel like they can hope for from day to day, tiny moments of beauty now and then. Ben and Leslie? Jake and Amy? They’re so free that they’re allowed to hope for a lifetime of beauty. If Amy and Jonah ever get to that point where their lives are somewhat on track, then you can say “gosh why all this drama? Just let them be happy!”