In the Flesh: Dead Ringers Episode 6

“I have to climb inside you now,” Beverly whispers to her twin. It’s a line as chilling as the moment we see Elliot make the decision to become her sister, to accept the gift of exculpation from her own crimes and ethical violations. Weisz’s face changes as immediately and completely as if she’d flayed her skull and put it back on inside out. Her mouth widens, the corners turning down. Her brow furrows. Her cheeks cave in, and Elliot is Beverly, the twins’ folie à deux reaching its culmination in an act of self-destructive rebirth, the line between the symbolic and the actual smeared beyond recognition. Elliot extracts Beverly’s twins in the process of killing her, but the cut umbilical cords we see trailing from the incision might just as easily be her own. In cutting herself free Elliot binds the two of them together forever, their delusions woven into something resembling an individual psyche. It’s an ending worthy of the incredible work showrunner Alice Birch and her crew, cast, and writer’s room have pulled off, a once-in-a-decade bolt from the blue digging deep into selfhood and its connection to childbearing and expanding ambitiously on Cronenberg’s classic film. To come away from riffing on a master looking this good is something very rare indeed.

The journey to that demented, ecstatic moment is every bit as engrossing, too. Beverly, freed of Elliot, clings desperately to Genevieve even as the actress begins to realize that Elliot’s physical absence doesn’t mean she isn’t present. Intrusive thoughts dash like breakers against Beverly’s calm. A miscarried fetus. A cell phone’s low, insistent throb. Baby sister. Baby sister. Come back to me. Elliot slithers through a netherworld of atavistic unpersonhood, fucking the disgusting sex pest from the first episode, crawling through her filthy apartment, staring at her ringing phone, willing Beverly to answer. “Our entire relationship has been about Elliot,” Genevieve shouts at Beverly in the foyer of their shared home. “I wish it wasn’t like that. I wish it was some other way. But it isn’t.” A dead, red thing in the palm of a hand. In a toilet. The water. The boat. “That didn’t happen,” Elliot says to her twin when Beverly asks if she remembers the time they were separated while swimming as children, driven to near madness by even a brief separation. It’s the event Beverly invented for her excursions to a bereavement support group, an imagined exploration of Elliot’s death preparing her for her own, which will be understood by the rest of the world, paradoxically, as Elliot’s.

Directed by Sean Durkin Lauren Wolkstein and written by Birch, the show’s final episode is endlessly self-referential. The young Black girl who asks Genevieve for her autograph is, like Elliot, symbolically taking a name. The twins Elliot grows in secret test tubes are the Mantle sisters themselves are Elliot’s unborn twins are an extension of the series’ sophisticated thoughts on birth, parenting, and the reasons we as a species procreate. The culmination of Greta’s strange running subplot is not nefarious, but an art show in tribute to her mother’s death in childbirth incorporating detritus from the Mantle household and recordings of their mother’s voicemail messages. “Hi girls, this is Mum calling.” “Just wondering how you are. Miss you.” She climbs into her grief to connect with her aging father just as Beverly and Elliot climb into theirs to salvage something of value from the wreck of their shared life. Watching the twins reunite by touching and stroking one another’s faces is an almost sacred moment, imparting a sense that what they share, as diseased and toxic as it may be, is truly an intimacy beyond anything anyone outside their relationship can understand. An intimacy too potent to exist, too corrosive to permit the least shred of separation. If the series is about loneliness, this is its thrust to the heart of that emotion, so definitive of our era. Dead Ringers is a rare and beautiful triumph.