Spoilers

Cora has been captured by Ridgway and forced to cross the barren wasteland of Tennessee

The opening shot could be a scene straight out of hell. Cora in chains against a background of fire and ash, her small frame pushing ahead, anger and fear and agony on her face and her body reeking of suffering.

Thuso Mbedu brings a physicality to this role that is remarkable. Here she is given space to tell her story through nothing more than her body and I could watch her all day.

Throughout the story she has conveyed so much with the way she holds herself, the way she moves and looks at the world.

Captured by Ridgeway in a moment of (mis)fortune the two are building a bond of sorts. He still refers to both his captives as ‘it’, a delicate phrasing which hides the basic dehumanisation of being a slave. Ridgeway’s insistence on denying them a gender, a basic recognition of being human, is deliberate and renders them as nothing more than a stone or a tree, a cabinet being returned to its owner.

Except he knows as well as Cora that upon her return she will be murdered and in a slow, appalling way. He tells her a story about suffering, about how her friend Lovey was murdered by the slave owner to whom she’s being returned. Ridgeway knows full well the future in store for Cora and it does not move him at all even if he’s aware of its full horror – enough to try to frighten Cora with it.

In a strange moment full of the contradictions that define us as people, we learn that he bought the young Black boy, Homer (played with silent movie power by Chase Dillon), who travels with him in near silence from a butcher. Yet, Ridgeway couldn’t bring himself to be a slave owner so emancipated Homer almost immediately – while still hunting other slaves to return them for execution.

He sees, or admits, no contradiction in this attitude. I’m loving hating this man and Joel Edgerton has done a superb job of bringing this hateful murderer to the screen.

Cora is travelling with another captured slave, Jasper. Jasper does little more than sing old spirituals but this defiance is enough to enrage Ridgeway because within the songs are truths he’d rather not face.

The ethos of the episode appears to be saying that humanity is grim and stupid and what else could you expect? It suggests that those in power, who could do something, look at it and shrug, saying they can’t change the way the world is, only roll with it and make the best out of it for themselves.

If there is a show which is grimdark then this is it – because, per Mark Lawrence’s thesis about the heart of grimdark storytelling, against the lack of all hope, Cora continues to fight. Running away at every opportunity, looking to remind Jasper of his humanity, to make him talk like a normal man.

Cora is determined to have some control over her life. This is a different Cora to the one who left the plantation. One who sees the world now but more importantly, sees herself and knows she wants to be something more than a body owned by others.

Thing is, she’s also seen the terror of injustice. When she finally gets Jasper to talk we see just how horrifying injustice can be – because it sits on those who know the world could, should, be different and yet it falls on them to suffer the fact others distort it for their own gain. For Cora and Jasper, the road through injustice doesn’t even lead to justice. Their suffering simply is – it leads nowhere but to more of the same and serves no purpose except to highlight how unfair it is. So much of the preaching and messaging of the world around them (and us) suggests suffering is character building, suggests it moves us to be more, but this always assumes that somehow we might be at fault and have a lesson to learn or that the suffering will end and we will take these ‘lessons’ into a new life.

Cora and Jasper show the hollow and callous nature of such arguments. Injustice and the suffering it creates are to be resisted – even if that is to take enough control of oneself to end that suffering as Cora tries to do.

In an incredible scene which evokes the idea of baptism, Cora walks into a body of water in chains – to die.

Ridgeway rescues her in a perverted sense of being brought back to life, to new life. For Cora it’s the bitterest of pills because this new life is only the old one after yet another failure to have agency for herself.

Verdict: In the slow grind of this episode we see the road of injustice, the path walked by those who suffer because of others and it is unrelenting, grim and dark. Jenkins makes it clear people would rather the world burn if it offered them even the smallest chance of granting them some small selfish recompense. They are quite prepared to destroy what beauty they find for their own gain.

In among all this horror stands Cora, beaten and enslaved. Hers is not a noble resistance but one determined to live for as long as possible regardless of the indignity or the suffering so that one day she might have enough control to choose the life she wants (even if that choice is to end her life). 8/10

Stewart Hotston