Sense8 Review: Death Doesn’t Let You Say Goodbye (Season 1 Episode 9)

Another week, another painfully emotional and yet frustratingly stagnant episode of Sense8.

The way this show focuses so intensely on its characters and their connections to one another creates such beautiful content that you have to sit there sort of stunned after each episode. “Death Doesn’t Let You Say Goodbye” in particular hosted three separate monologues that could move anyone to tears about death, life, love, and loss.

And that is what Sense8 is truly about, when it comes right down to it; the human experience and how deeply it affects us as individuals and as a whole.

That’s all well and good and tragically beautiful, but it also means that sometimes you sit through an entire hour of monologuing with nothing to show for it but a slight existential crisis of your own. This week provides one such episode, and aside from a very small bit of exposition and sensate mythology, we don’t see any forward motion on BPO or their search for our main characters.

With nothing very plot oriented to focus on, we’ve got to jump right into those intense character interactions.

The first of which also happens to be the most bizarre.

For the first time, we see Riley and Will visit one another while also visiting with sensates outside of the cluster. Jonas, whom we’re familiar with, and Yrsa, an Icelandic sensate Riley met when she was a child. The quick camera cuts and four separate locations make the entire affair a bit confusing but no less engaging.

Jonas and Yrsa’s views on Riley and Will’s burgeoning love create an interesting contrast.

Yrsa: This is very dangerous. Love inside a cluster is pathological…. Love inside a cluster is the worst kind of narcissism.
Jonas: Angelica believed a sensate experiences love in its purest form.

Yrsa seems to be under the impression that loving one of your cluster members is almost abominable. And frankly… I can see her point. These people share their every thought and emotion with each other. They refer to their cluster as their ‘other selves.’ If that’s not the most twisted and unhealthy kind of love, then I’m not sure what is.

Jonas, on the other hand, speaks from experience, having loved his cluster member, Angelica. His point also makes sense. Knowing someone from the inside out — their every thought, whim, memory, etc. — means you truly know them as they really are. How many people can say that about their significant other?

In some ways, it really is love in its truest form.

The second conversation that really blows the lid off of this episode is the one between Nomi and Lito.

I’ve given Lito’s storyline a hard time for being too self-contained and not involved enough in the over-arching story. I still think it’s a major problem for his character, but I also think it provides for really poignant moments like the one we got tonight.

Nomi: Their violence was petty and ignorant but ultimately it was true to who they were. The real violence, the violence that I realized was unforgivable, is the violence that we do to ourselves when we’re too afraid to be who we really are.

Sense8 has done a seriously impressive job of highlighting the struggles of homosexual and transgender people in an overwhelmingly gender normative society. Both Lito and Nomi’s personal testimonies about finding themselves and being free from the burden of fitting in were incredibly moving.

The fact that Lito’s biggest dilemma this season will be coming out of the closet when other sensates are running for their lives and investigating conspiracy murders does seem a little unweighted though.

Finally, we get to Riley and her mysterious past.

Previously, we had only seen hints and small peeks at her mother’s death. Tonight, we learned that she has suffered so much more loss than that, with the discovery of not only a dead husband, but also a child. A daughter named Luna, whose headstone bears the same birth date and death date.

Capheus: Life and death are always so mixed up together. In the same way some beginnings are endings, and some endings become beginnings.

The whole truth of Riley’s story remains a bit murky, but I have faith that we’ll know all the horrifying details by the time the season comes to a close. Here’s hoping that we’re all emotionally stable enough to make it through these revelations by then.

Other Thoughts:

• What the heck happened to Will when he was a kid?
• I’m still 100% sure Sun’s father is a dick, no matter how repentant he seems.
• Lito’s drunken voicemails were both hilarious and depressing. Was anyone else terrified for a minute before that gun turned out to be a lighter? Yikes…

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Sense8 is available for streaming on Netflix.