my skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel.

Okay so I was a masochist and I decided to watch 2.05 again for kicks and I don’t know why I had never caught it before, but suddenly these two scenes became the greatest bookends of each other. Robert & Mary’s relationship is secretly one of my favorites—I think it’s complicated, but very oddly loving. These two scenes, the former from the pilot 1.01 and the latter from 2.05 are the same in many ways—both concern conversations about men in peril that Mary has been/is in some way romantically linked to. In the former, Mary expresses it coldly to be a “relief” to not have to mourn her fiance, and Robert gives her a look as if to express a shock at how unfeeling one person can be. Yet, it’s not just shock, but also a kind of disappointed hurt. In the latter, as Mary speaks so gently about her plans to stay with Matthew, her careful attentions to keep his fiancee comfortable in this horrible time, Robert looks at her as if she’s a new person, as if her morality has grown. What I love about it is that we the audience know that Mary has always been a loving person in some regard—it has not grown, but merely unfolded. It’s the perfect realization of Mary’s character that she needs to love in order to be the best of herself. It’s Robert’s moment of realizing that his daughter has become the most utterly selfless person, but in our regard, it’s our realization that Mary has merely been allowed to reach her full potential. For me, this is the writer’s God’s view eye of her overall arc, as if to say not just ‘look at how far she’s come’ but ‘look at what she could have always been.’

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