Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Maternity Tests
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 12 | Aired on 11.08.2010
To prove he knows Nancy better than she thinks, Vaughn describes the word clouds that arose when he combined all his transcriptions: Nancy's adjectives are MANIPULATIVE, SEXY, TOUGH, RECKLESS and BITCH. Well. "Bitch is a noun," Nancy says defensively, but I wouldn't really want to hear the next one down anyway. Shane: CREEPY, WEIRD, SCARY, GLOOMY, and VIOLENT. It's the worst possible indictment; she refuses to stick around for Silas's word cloud -- even though it would probably cheer her up at this point -- because the words don't lie and that's ten things that are her own damn fault. Choking back angry tears, she heads for the door for probably the fifth time in this episode alone.
Q: "Fill in the blanks, or I'm going to do it myself."
All those promises about her story, all the possibility of redress and truth and reconciliation, vanished the second she actually had to think. Because her story isn't vindication: The details don't prop up or mend anything. They just make it impossible to run, which makes them unacceptable. Confession was a nice dream, but absolution is an impossibility. She locks herself in the bathroom this time.
A: "Here's your story: Things happened to her, she dealt with them."
Vaughn points out how often she speaks, thinks, lives in the passive voice: Things happened to her, around her, but never inside her: She was not the author of the narrative, just its editor. Judah happened to her. She dealt with it. She's dealing with it now. It happens. It continues to happen.
"You walked down the tunnel: You. With your legs."
Q: What else would you do? Why wouldn't you want to know?
A: A normal woman, he explains, would have pretended to see nothing. This is the story she wanted to tell to begin with, but he caged her in with the truth.
Q: "Why did you run?"
When she tells him it's complicated he says that's not a story. For her, that's the story: Things happened. It was complicated. He doesn't accept that story.
Q: "What did you write on your divorce papers?"
It's another way of answering his question that he can't see yet because she's put him on the defensive: Manipulative. Tough. She knows he's divorced because she went through his wallet: Kid picture, no wife picture. Either he's divorced or she's ugly, Nancy opines, and his face gets sad.
A: "We grew apart."
Exactly. Complicated.
A: No. Simple. Vaughn simplifies, because the truth is less complicated but infinitely more shameful, which again is the answer he's looking for but he can't see it. Sexy. Bitch. The wife slept around on him. He went looking for another vampire, to see just how she did it. How she complicated his story. To untangle it from sex and death, he went looking to see how a braver and infinitely worse woman escaped, and why. Why she ran.