Sauntering Vaguely Downward

More stuff about It's A Sin

I have so many incoherent feels about this Channel 4 miniseries and they are all full of spoilers so they go behind a cut. It's beautiful and devastating and if you have the emotional stamina, I urge you to watch it.

Positives

• The brown people! They live! There are lots of pathetic scenes of white boys dying in beds. But all the brown people live, and live well. Especially Jill, who becomes a key member of a highly effective group of activists (and...is she ace? It’s implied but it would have been nice for this to be stated explicitly). 

• Not only do they live, they have a tremendous amount of agency. Jill has the most delightfully supportive loving parents. Roscoe doesn't need his glucose guardian. He can get along financially and emotionally just fine off his own graft tyvm. Ash...well, Ash has a squishy puppy dog lingering affection for Ritchie, but it doesn't spoil his entire future when it isn't properly reciprocated.

• Roscoe is reunited with his evangelical dad, who asks for Roscoe's forgiveness.

Big Sads

• Omg Colin. I couldn't sleep properly for two nights because of Colin. Roscoe's eulogy summed it up perfectly. Colin never did anything wrong, and he died at 24. He's just so naively sweet and too good for this world and the others treasure him for it, and he's the first of the Pink Palace family to go. It's utterly devastating.

• Ritchie is more complicated. But his horrifically stifling parents.

Amazing moments

• Roscoe asking for his old job back and his manager's truculent refusal before breaking down and both of them confessing how much they missed each other.

• Colin's excitement at getting extra responsibility at work and it only being mildly dented by the incredulity of his flatmates at this not being accompanied by a job title change or a pay rise. (Oh, Colin, I relate so much.)

• Jill getting the lawyer who busts Colin out of hospital-prison to go back to London and be looked after properly with his mum there.

• Lucy, Ritchie's sister, chosing to be with Roscoe and Jill after Ritchie's death. Fly, Lucy, fly. Let go of that toxic house with your remaining birth family in it and go adopt the one your brother found. Don't resent him. Just take that gift he's left you and run. (If I had any spare time I would be writing a Lucy spinoff series right now)

• Jill delivering that eviscerating speech to Ritchie's mum. That's right, lady, you didn't want to know anything about your son that wasn't carefully edited when he was alive. You don't get to put his friends through telling you about it now that he's dead.

• Jill.