Big Little Lies - The Bad Mother **

Bonnie’s guilty conscience is just wearing away at her much like her mother’s declining health condition—despite a moment of awake just to ask to die, she’s in a coma—and with the burden of both, she just needs freedom from the shackles of all that weight. The magnificent episode, The Bad Mother, focuses on Bonnie’s release of her actions in pushing Perry down off the ledge and down the steps. It is the first time she just says it. But this after Bonnie gets a lot off her chest regarding her mother. It was the release of all of it…her abuse, the mistreatment, the difficult childhood. Perry was similar to her, a monster of abuse who left her damage. Bonnie got to vent, as it was written down, these feelings and thoughts that left her emotionally wrought and hurt so often. And finally Bonnie could jus speak her peace. Too bad it was to a mother, an abuser, who was comatose and not awake to truly see what her actions did to Bonnie. Perhaps she did know, but Bonnie deserved to have the final say. So in a way she did. It was such a knockout scene for Zoë Kravitz, but all her scenes in the episode are first rate. 

The way she imagines just admitting to pushing Perry when Celeste gets quite a pummeling on the stand with Mary Louise’s attorney showing clips of all the male one-night-stands and the animated depiction of how Perry died. Crouched in a chair in the hospital while clearly going over it repeatedly in her head. Just the physical toll that the emotional wreckage leaves on Bonnie is quite present. The season has been quite a beast and Bonnie deserves to be relieved of its gradual enveloping. I can’t imagine she’d want to put up with it any longer. Nor should she.