I don’t want to talk about how this relationship is so cyclical. About how Helena’s path of healing resembles a circle. I don’t want to discuss how Helena’s biggest demon — the loss of her daughter — will always, always come back around like this. She’ll remember what she became in the process of trying to save her. She’ll feel worthless, and damaged, and filled with such poison that she can’t even touch the people she cares about for fear of infecting them with her darkness. I don’t want to dwell on the similarity between those two moments where Myka caught her drowning in the mists of her past and named the very name of that devil that always chased her. And maybe the verbalization of that name — so beloved, so cherished — in the context becomes unbearable, because when Myka invokes it or her daughter’s memory she is forced to look at what it’s become. Helena is forced to see it for the twisted and ugly thing her grief and madness shaped it into. She’s not a stupid person — it gives her pause, and it’s enough to set the cycle of self-loathing off again. Until Myka — always Myka — drags her back to herself at gunpoint.
I don’t want to contemplate the differences between these scenes, how the first ended in Helena’s tears and the second ended in Myka’s. I don’t want to consider that it’s the ending that is the growth of Helena’s character, because the progress was the same — the invocation of Christina, Helena’s immediate denial, Myka’s earnest and blunt accusation, Helena’s distance, guns — but the conclusion of the second act has Helena thinking — maybe for the first time — about what she really needs to do to put the Christina-demon away.
I don’t want to contemplate any of these things. But I just did.