User Reviews

The leads do a good job, as did the author with his novel-and of course the story is heartbreaking and challenging. But the television series itself is so relentlessly dark and horrifying that it overwhelms the story Whitehead wrote.

And so, it has come to an end. Barry Jenkins took us on a visual journey through the pages of Colson Whitehead's novel and delivered an emotional and powerful depiction of hatred and resilience in the face of such hatred. These characters went through hell to get to a finale that gives them a moment. In "Chapter 10," the final chapter of this journey, we get a look into the past and get told the fabled story of how Cora's mom managed to escape captivity. And the episode managed to deliver the shocks and the intensity, and still delivered a satisfying closure to this story.

The first half of the episode is really dedicated to telling the story of Cora's mother, while the second half gives the characters of Cora and Molly closure after escaping the massacre at Valentine Farm. The first half of the episode forced the audience back to the beginning, placing right in the middle of that horrible plantation where we were introduced to everything. And once again, Barry Jenkins does not hold back at showing the atrocities of these places. The violence and the graphic nature of these acts is a part of what makes this show so powerful. With someone like Jenkins at the helm, who is not afraid to show these sides of history, the show goes places that many won't like, but many will find honest and truthful. The question of the show has often been how Mabel managed to escape the plantation and the answer provided in the episode is everything but predictable. There's a lot of layers to her "escape" and it's both a devastating reveal, but also satisfying due to its unpredictability. All of that makes this episode a powerful close to the show, with the Cora and Molly stuff simply being icing on the cake. And I'm still not completely sure that it was icing I needed. I liked the uncertainty of their future in the last episode, so I'm a little conflicted about this ending. However, after having seen Cora go through all these hardships to get here, it was nice to see it all end on a simple act of decent kindness.

With "Chapter 10" the show has come to a close and it works as a satisfying ending, despite its general irrelevancy to the overall show. It provides closure to questions that we wanted to know, and also adds a dose to the experience, showing a bright future ahead for these characters, which they definitely deserve.