I May Destroy You
Slate's Spoiler Specials
Slate Podcasts
3.6 • 724 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2020
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the Spoiler Special podcast, Slate critics discuss movies, the occasional TV show, and, once in a blue moon, another podcast, in full spoiler-filled detail. This week, Slate’s Television Critic Willa Paskin is joined by Vulture Staff Writer Angelica Jade Bastién to spoil I May Destroy You. Michaela Coel is at the heart of this series. Besides writing and producing the show, she directed many episodes and plays the main character, Arabella Essiedu. Coel covers consent, rape, friendship, and empathy, in a complex, yet compelling, way that really humanizes Arabella.
Arabella is a young writer and influencer working on her second book when her drink was drugged and raped while at a bar in London. The series follows her as she works through the aftermath of her assault. Does Arabella regain her full memories of her sexual assault? Will she be able to finish her book? Will she accept the help from another acquaintance who she believes to have raped her? How does she use fantasy to imagine a better resolution for herself than reality can give her?
You can read Willa’s review here.
You can read Angelica’s review here.
Note: As the title indicates, this podcast contains spoilers galore.
Email us at spoilers@slate.com.
Podcast production by Rosemary Belson.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.0 | The following podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:07.3 | I want to tell you my secret now. |
| 0:10.0 | I see dead people. |
| 0:13.2 | Silent green is people. |
| 0:16.9 | No, I am the father. |
| 0:20.3 | Oh, Rushberg. |
| 0:24.9 | What's in the box? |
| 0:28.6 | You maniac! |
| 0:30.6 | You blew it up! |
| 0:32.3 | Damn you all the hell! |
| 0:36.3 | Hi, and welcome to Slate's spoiler specials. Today, we're going to be spoiling. I may destroy you. Michaela Kohl's incredible, phenomenal, like there are not enough good words or things to say about it, drama about rape, consent, friendship, empathy, and so much more. I'm Willa Paskin, Slate's TV critic, and I'm joined today by Angelica Bastien, a staff writer at Vulture who has written about the show, and I think we'll get into some of what she wrote as we discuss it. Hi, Angelica. Welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really excited to talk about the show because there's actually so much to talk about. It just feels really dense. I'm sure we |
| 1:11.6 | could talk for a really long time. We will talk for the time allotted. So, Michaela Cole produced |
| 1:17.7 | this show. She wrote every single episode. She directed most of them. It's based on her own |
| 1:22.5 | experience. And she stars in it, too, as Arabella S.E.A. do a young writer and Twitter |
| 1:26.9 | sensation who is working on her second book and who at the end of the very first episode is drugged and raped at a bar. Her memory of the incident is only hazy. And the whole series is concerned with the fallout of this event, but not in any narrow sense. It's set in a vibrant social world, a black British world populated by Arabella's friends, |
| 1:44.7 | who over the course of the series also deal with issues of assault and consent. |
| 1:48.6 | It's very dense, very intense, very carefully constructed, every detail signifies, |
| 1:53.4 | and it's also sometimes very funny. |
| 1:56.0 | There's so much to talk about that I thought that what we could do is to talk really |
| 2:00.2 | specifically about |
| 2:01.3 | the finale, which needs like even more unpacking, I think, than the episodes that preceded it |
... |
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