Two years ago, when Dickinson launched on Apple TV+ as the newly-minted streamer’s flagship comedy, I spared no ink panning it, calling it “a clashing din of dissonant elements, a show that belittles the real Emily Dickinson by forcing the fictional Dickinson to drag herself screaming across the floor upon getting her period.” A year later, I returned to this here website to reflect on how the show matured in its second season. And now, as the show comes to a close with its third and final run of episodes, I’m reflecting on the journey it took me on. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Dickinson has changed, but here at the end of its run, I’m realizing it's me who's different.

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When Dickinson debuted, I tried to give it a fair shake—or so I thought. “I tried not to be a stodgy literary purist,” I wrote back during Season One. Reader, I confess: I was a stodgy literary purist. When I first encountered Dickinson, I was intrigued by the challenge the series set for itself: to shade in the relatively blank canvas of one historic life, marked by the enduring mystery of a nearly three-decade seclusion. Though the show aspired to span only Dickinson’s teenhood, long before she withdrew from the outside world, I felt there was a tantalizing character journey to be had: just how did a spirited girl grow to become a cloistered woman who spoke to visitors through a closed door? In the beginning, I felt that Dickinson’s peevish teen poetess wasn’t a convincing antecedent to the sharp and strange adult we knew she would become. But now that the show has ended, with its ending moments hinting at the beginnings of Dickinson’s fateful seclusion, I see what Dickinson was up to all along.

At the close of its poignant series finale, Dickinson at last takes us inside the room that would contain so much of Dickinson’s adult life. In a serene and stunning montage, a year (maybe more) passes, all viewed from the inside of Dickinson’s bedroom. As the seasons change outside her windows, we see her labor over poems at her writing desk, knit by the fireside, water an ever-growing indoor garden, and even kit herself out in a fetching outfit fit for the streets of her native Amherst, only to stay indoors. But ultimately, this room doesn’t contain Dickinson’s life, because no four walls possibly could.

Gazing at a painting of a ship hanging on her bedroom wall, as lines of poetry whizz-bang through her head, Dickinson murmurs, “I started early, took my dog and visited the sea”—a snatch of her real poetry. We then cut to an idyllic fantasy, where Dickinson romps on the beach with her dog, dressed in her plain writer’s smock. Then, someone calls her name in the distance: it’s a group of mermaids, lounging on an outcropping of rocks, beckoning her out to sea. “The mermaids in the basement came out to look at me,” the poem continues. Clambering into a rowboat, Dickinson paddles out to meet these beautiful figments of her own genius; then, we fade to black, and the credits roll.

Dickinson’s legacy has always been complicated by the same inscrutable puzzle: how could a sheltered hermit write such visionary poems? How did someone who saw so little of the world manage to bring the world to her? For three seasons, Dickinson has sought to solve the mystery. But it was never more clear-eyed or self-assured than in this brilliant ending, a paean to the inimitable power of the writer’s imagination. It’s a fitting send-off for a show that always refused to be contained by the drab limitations of reality.

There's something I've started to say: “I want more aliens in my literary fiction.” Traditional literary realism is all well and good, but I want to live in a freer world—one where “literary” and “genre” aren’t antonyms, where the unreal can coexist with the real. It took me awhile to cotton on, but ultimately, Dickinson has taught me that what I want from novels, I should want from television, too. What I missed about Dickinson from the get-go was the show’s purest truth: that it should be as imaginative and unfettered as Dickinson herself was.

Emily Dickinson and Lavinia Dickinson, time travelers, meet Sylvia Plath.

At the beginning of Dickinson, I was appalled when the fictional Dickinson threw an opium party while her parents were away for the weekend, where she danced with a giant hallucinatory bee played by the deranged-as-ever Jason Mantzoukas. But why shouldn’t Emily Dickinson dance with a giant bee? Seems like the kind of thing she would dream up, doesn’t it? In one standout episode from Season Three, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia ride a time-traveling gazebo to the mid-1960s, where they meet fellow poet Sylvia Plath. Chatting together in her lifelong bedroom, now a museum exhibit staffed by undergraduates like Plath, Dickinson is dismayed to learn that history remembers her as a sad spinster who never left that room. Why shouldn’t Emily Dickinson be a time traveler? No room could confine her, so why should a show about her be confined? We could use more shows with this bravery of vision.

Dickinson has never been a runaway success; it’s always been more of a sleeper hit, popular with literary dorks like me, and with writers and lovers who saw their struggles and passions reflected in this radical reimagining of one legendary life. In the years to come, I suspect Dickinson will age into a cult classic, showing up time and time again on “Best Shows You Might Have Missed” lists. So whether you stream it today, tomorrow, or years from now, don’t be deterred if you don’t jive with it right away. Give it a chance, give it some time, and for God’s sake, don’t be a stodgy literary purist. If you unchain your mind, Emily Dickinson-style, you might just be surprised by how far you can travel, all in one room.

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