I really love the way they did this scene. His black suit, her white dress, how the lighting outlines both of them, way all the dialogue echoed through the building…
Why does Misty hate Mariah more than Shades though? Even before the flip.
1. Because, as much as I love (or want to love) her, Misty’s almost always wrong.
2. Internalized misogyny. She was extremely hostile to Claire in season one when her real “issue” was with Luke and a huge asshole to Priscilla for…reasons? And, if I recall correctly, this season, she let Luke blame Mariah and took partial blame herself for HIS punching a hole in Claire’s wall.
3. Because according to everyone this season, everything is Mariah’s fault, always.
I thought she was bitter towards Priscilla because Priscilla was Mariah’s sorority sister/had clouded judgment about Mariah. Just like Mariah was Ridenhour’s high school sweetheart.
John had every right to be upset, but all Mariah did in that feud was order him to get her a drink when she was a teen. And I think her bossiness/brattiness came in part from her deep trauma, like Trish’s had. She wasn’t looking at the deal with any delight, she was just curious.
I feel like Mariah definitely is responsible for a lot of the evil shit in season 2, but Shades is her Lady MacBeth figure. He’s constantly by the side of her. She has an easier time humanizing or seeing the potential in him, though she can’t fathom Mariah having anything in her. I wonder if she had known about Mariah’s trauma, about her tormented upbringing, would she have been able to see another side.
As for the Candace death, that was all Shades. So I really don’t know why Mariah was the sole blame.
I thought it weird that Misty didn’t/doesn’t buy that Mariah is capable of love. Mariah has a love for Cornell. She has some kind of love deep down for Tilda. She has a love for Shades.
I don’t know why she thought it would be a good idea to reconnect with Tilda, even if just to use her for political photo-ops (which in and of itself is a shitty move). She gambled with her own mental stability and lost.
She uses people and hurts and destroys them, but she has some capacity to love still inside her.
Mariah is such an interesting character. Complex, more so than people think. She does some gruesome shit. She gradually loses her grip on stability and plummets head first into darkness. I think it’s both what was inside her all along AND what past memories and new arrivals brought out.
Why does Misty hate Mariah more than Shades?
1. The writing has been misogynistic from Day 1, so it’s not surprising at all.
2. Misty probably thinks Shades is the accomplice and Mariah is the mastermind.
3. I love Misty, but she’s so hardcore about justice, that it’s a tad uncomfortable. You know how people point out that Brooklyn 99 is technically police propaganda? Yeah, B99 has nothing on Misty.
Misty’s arc this season reminded me of the post that goes around about how illegal activity by cops is more likely to look like the “good cops” on TV instead of the bad.
I got the impression Misty wasn’t sympathetic toward Shades as much as acting nice to try to get him to flip. Also misogyny.
I think Shades figured out Tilda’s parentage the night he met her. That’s probably why he never asked Mariah why she never told him. After they were introduced and Shades went downstairs with Che, he was staring hard at Tilda. It wasn’t jealousy. I think he was trying to figure out why Mariah never told him. And then he probably realized that Tilda looked a lot like Uncle Pete.
He’s very observant and good and putting two and two together.
I don’t think he did.
(I really hope he didn’t.) All that stuff happened before he knew anything about anything and it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge in the community/streets. If he did, I’d imagine he’d have been way more cautious with and sensitive to Mariah. I feel like he would have then understood her mistrust of and failure to fully love him, why she was drinking so much. I think he would have stopped romanticizing the night she killed Cornell in, unbeknownst to him, a straight up PSTD episode.
And frankly, if he knew and still went on to choke her out and call her a crazy bitch, then throw the whole Shades away.
100% agreed, no way did Shades knew about anything related to Mariah’s rape. He came in at the tail-end of her murder of Cornell, and likely assumed that “I didn’t want it!” was in reference to his criminal behavior on her behalf. That was, after all, why he was planning to kill Cornell.
It’s very obvious that Ma Mabel kept that secret close in the family. Cornell must’ve known (and I will never get the whole “he’s so sympathetic!” fan reaction when his final words were slut-shaming a rape victim), Pete and Mabel knew, but otherwise? The Johnsons most likely thought that Tilda was regular born out of wedlock, Shades would’ve been about 8 or 9 when this happened and utterly clueless, and Tilda didn’t look that much like Pete; in the lie that she believed, she assumed that she took after her mother rather than her lighter-skinned “dad.”
I’m pretty sure Ridenhour was the only outsider that Mariah confided in because as her first boyfriend and amicable ex she trusted him at the time. Nobody else knew. Shades’ concerns about Tilda came more from an unknown player coming into the business as well as how Mariah’s behavior changed once Tilda came around. Could Tilda, as a new age doctor, really be trusted with their secrets? (no) Would trying to reconnect with her distract Mariah from running the business properly? (yes) Was trying to reconnect with Tilda making Mariah distance herself from him to be more “presentable” to her daughter? (yes) All of that is more than enough to explain Shades’ behavior towards Tilda.
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