S02.E01: Can I Live?

[AnimeMania]

After receiving terrible news from a close friend, Jax Stewart returns to work sooner than she expected causing her to feel pressure from work, her friends and Lewis.

Premiere Date: August 22, 2024   Hulu

[Snazzy Daisy]

Jax/Lewis “hurt score” sh!t continues into season 2. It’s exhausting. UGH.

Shanelle is such an unreliable narrator. Her story about what happened with JT is full of inconsistencies. This won’t be an open-and-shut case like Jax wants it to be.

Am not a fan of Morris Chestnut, his smirk and his acting.

I miss Michael Ealy… 😣

 

[tessabq]

On 8/23/2024 at 1:49 AM, Snazzy Daisy said:

Jax/Lewis “hurt score” sh!t continues into season 2. It’s exhausting. UGH.

Shanelle is such an unreliable narrator. Her story about what happened with JT is full of inconsistencies. This won’t be an open-and-shut case like Jax wants it to be.

Am not a fan of Morris Chestnut, his smirk and his acting.

I miss Michael Ealy… 😣

 

Michael Ealy is so damn pretty, I miss him,too.

[possibilities]

I can't stand the relationship between Jax and Lewis. I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with either of them-- but I have seen plenty of relationships that I wouldn't want to be in, and people I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with, and I think it's realistic enough. I liked their therapist. They kind of deserve each other and they both really need to learn some skills. I don't mind seeing people learn how to be a decent partner. The therapist was right about them. He might have been the most likable person this episode.

I can't remember what happened last season except very vaguely. She was kidnapped. They fought a lot. Something about him watching her have sex with someone else, over a camera, with her consent? Her workplace is a toxic hellhole. I don't know. It was so long ago.

I like her assistant-- the male one. The female didn't get enough to do for me to form an opinion.

The DA prosecuting Janelle... I don't know. I can theoretically understand Janelle being terrified and shocky and confused. People who have been battered over a long period of time, or who just escaped an assault, are not always thinking clearly. It makes otherwise competent people somewhat chaotic and they can seem stupid. It's a trauma reaction. It's actually true that PTSD impacts the brain and can make people perceive and behave irrationally, in a variety of ways. And the longer it goes on, or the more often it happens, the worse the impacts.

This is one of the many reasons why you can't stay in those kinds of relationships-- the longer you stay, the more mentally impaired you become, if you aren't very tenancious and well-resourced and flat out LUCKY in maintaining your maturity and comon sense. 

I watched someone who was at the top of her profession marry someone who put her in the hospital multiple times, and she stayed with him for DECADES, over and over again going back to him and doing things to placate him-- like quitting her job and becoming his assistant, and other equally nonsensical things. 

It was inexplicable to me. 

In the beginning, she stood up to him, but over time she became more and more submissive and he never stopped being grossly vioilent and dangerous.

It was so degrading. She had supportive family, she had marketable skills so she wasn't financially stuck, they had no kids... I never understood why she stayed.

But someone explained it to me as: he just eroded her sense of self. She forgot who she was and what her strengths were. And I guess that's the only explanation.

Then, when I studied PTSD, I learned that it's not just an emotional confusion. Serious and/or chronic trauma can actually change how your brain functions. I mean, measurably-- like on brain scans, not only when you look at behavior, it changes you.

So I can buy that Janelle was out of her mind in that way, and that she's not making sense, that she reacted irrationally, genuinely wasn't lucid, and should have but really didn't know better. It's possible that she's lying and calculated, but it's also possible that she's genuinely confused, or making bad decisions based on literally not having an accurate sense of time or procedural common sense.

But we don't know for sure (unless I'm forgetting something) what really happened, and she didn't seem panicky when we saw her watch him die.

She also might have thought that if he survived he would never stop trying to kill her, and she might have been right about that.

She may also have wanted to kill him because of what he did to her, and... it's not great but I get it. If he did it to her, he'd do it to someone else. Hard to feel too bad about that being prevented.

I have no idea what point of view the show will take, but they usually keep things a little ambiguous (reasonable doubt), so maybe we'll never know.