Jobu rises out of the rock universe and back into the Bagel Temple, and finally says the thing the whole movie has been building toward: she didn’t build the bagel to destroy everything. She built it to destroy herself — to see if going in meant she could finally escape and actually die. She holds out her hand, Evelyn takes it, and Jobu says at least this way she doesn’t have to do it alone. Then static cuts in, and Evelyn wakes up handcuffed in the laundromat while Deirdre tells Waymond that everyone she knows is going through a hard time.
This is the minute where the Trojan horse opens. Underneath the hot dog hands and the raccoon voiced by Randy Newman, this has been a mother-daughter drama about a daughter contemplating suicide the entire time. We spend most of the episode there, and with Camus — Kynan reads from The Myth of Sisyphus, which opens by declaring suicide the only truly serious philosophical question, and uses Galileo as its central example: a man who chose to keep living over an argument about whether the Earth orbits the sun. It takes Camus 180 pages to conclude that suicide is the wrong answer, which is exactly why so many people stop halfway and take away the opposite. Same warning applies here: don’t stop at this minute.
We also track the creation metaphor carrying over from the rock scene, why the shot of their two hands forms a yin-yang without ever saying so, and what got cut from the scripted version of this conversation — including a line about Evelyn forgetting her silly husband’s name.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text in the US.
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