MsNYC

What are your thoughts on why Elliot decided to give Liv the letter after Kathy died?

I just wonder because the letter is confusing for her.

Its like ‘we were never real’ but then ‘parallel universe, you and I’

I love it because I’ve shipped E/O from the beginning but can’t quite understand the motive if that makes sense xxx

don’t worry it makes perfect sense!! also i think a lot of people are confused re: motive. people have said maybe it was something they just overlooked since we were never meant to know what was in it and ilene only wrote it as A Thing(TM) bc people kept asking what it said, and i get that and agree with it but i do think there are canon motives for elliot giving it to her

it could just be that he’s a dumbass but also at the point in time where he gave it to liv, all he knew was that she had a son and a couple solid relationships in his absence. it could be that he thought she had moved on and giving her the letter was an attempt at closure, if that makes sense? like a way to free her from their past. i’ve seen some people say elliot does it cause he feels undeserving of her, which i can see as a reason why he wrote the letter, but not why he gave it to her after kathy died.

tbh when i was first trying to process it i assumed he gave it to her because he wanted her to see the parallel universe line. the other contents of the letter are hurtful and contradictory but i think that line negates the other things written. like, “in a parallel universe, it will always be you and i” is just very telling. it doesn’t go with what we were was never real — either they were nothing and there’s no you and i, in any universe, or they were something and somewhere they got it right (and imo the use of always suggests that it’s not just one other universe, it’s every number of them where he doesn’t have a wife or where the divorce worked out or where he met her first). it’s a very specific confirmation of feelings but also something he wrote when his wife was still alive (behind her back, no less!) and i can see elliot wanting liv to read and know that because like.. she’s not a consolation prize or a second choice or whatever else - she would always be his pick, it just didn’t work out in their universe (or what was their universe, at the time of writing). we don’t know if he would have told her the truth of who wrote what if he weren’t drugged, but the way he ran there and blurted it out kinda suggests that he wanted to, and idk. i’m partial to this reading because i struggle to make sense of the others. i can see the take that he did it to ~set her free being true if the parallel universe line wasn’t in there, but because it is it’s like.. my brain doesn’t compute. i can only assume that he wanted her to read it and trusted that she’d see the lie in “what we were was never real”