Content warning: This article contains discussion of rape and sexual assault.

Michaela Coel wrote almost 200 drafts of what would become I May Destroy You, her landmark HBO series about sexual consent, memory, and trauma, but for many of those drafts, the path to an ending proved elusive. How do you end a sprawling story about a trauma with no cure, a crime with no justice, a tragedy without end?

The series finale born of this impossibility is one of the boldest visions in television history: astonishing and gut-wrenching, deft and dazzling, a narrative high-wire act from the miraculous mind of a true auteur. Auteur is a loaded title, one freighted with bad faith and bad behavior, but with Coel, there’s no cult of personality: just pure generosity and pure brilliance. In I May Destroy You’s twelve breathtaking episodes, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, Coel fictionalizes the harrowing story of her own sexual assault, laying bare the wrenching journey of Arabella, an East London-based writer who must claw her way back to wholeness after she is drugged and assaulted during a night of drinking. The series finale poses a staggering question: if you crossed paths with the stranger who raped you, what would you do? That’s the jaw-dropping thought experiment explored in just thirty-five astounding minutes, which see Arabella move through a thousand and one shades of anger, understanding, and absolution.

Related Stories

Coel, who herself was raped after a stranger spiked her drink, had firsthand experience of the daunting narrative task before her, yet even so, it was no less impossible to end the series. How could she find some measure of closure for Arabella when, so often for survivors of sexual assault, closure is a fiction? Her answer came not from legal justice, nor from revenge against her attacker, but from within.

“When they closed my case, I learned that I would have to find my own closure,” Coel said. “In fact, I was told that. In the very beginning, my therapist said, ‘What we need to do now is bring you closure, irrelevant to what happens with the case, because you carry that thing with you.’ This became my objective with Arabella. I wanted to explore the different ways that a person can engage with a very traumatic situation. Ultimately no one scenario is really the answer. Letting go, for her, is allowing herself to go through all of those emotions and all of those stages of grief, accepting that this happened and that she has survived it.”

In 2016, Coel’s own journey to hell and back began during the making of Chewing Gum, her award-winning comedy series about an ultra-religious twenty-something hellbent on losing her virginity. While pulling an all-nighter on a morning deadline, Coel ducked out to meet a friend at a bar, where a stranger spiked her drink and sexually assaulted her. Hours later, she came to at the production office where she had been writing; in a fugue state, she hammered out the remainder of her draft. In the hours to follow, fragmented memories of the night dribbled back to her, and she grasped that she had been assaulted. After calling the police, she shared her experience with her producers at Retort, the now-defunct production company behind Chewing Gum, who funded her therapy at a private clinic until shooting on Chewing Gum concluded. All the while, as her case cycled fruitlessly through the legal system, she wrestled with what would become I May Destroy You, turning to writing as a means of emotional exorcism.

“As my right hand was experiencing trauma, my left was taking notes,” Coel said. “Writing helped me massively. Finding a safe space to re-engage with very traumatic events is helpful, and for me, because I was making a fictional series, this was a safe space for me to do it.”

Yet as she wrote her way through, no single ending proved a fitting container for Arabella’s trauma—no single sequence of events could reconcile it, heal it, make sense of it. Instead, Coel wrote three endings, each of them spiraling forward from the gutting final moment of the penultimate episode: after months of staking out the bar where she was attacked in an effort to recover her slippery memories of that fateful night, Arabella identifies her attacker across the crowded room. In a blood-chilling flashback sequence, it all rushes back to her with agonizing clarity: the man piling her insensate limbs into a taxi, dragging her semi-conscious through a dodgy nightclub, raping her in a bathroom stall. What follows is a surreal, Groundhog Day-esque journey through three possible outcomes of Arabella colliding face-to-face with her assailant—each one more layered and complex than the last, each wrestling with thorny ideas about revenge, redemption, power, and catharsis.

Early in the process of drafting the series finale, Coel was handed a book of short stories, one of which would become a foundational text: Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress. In the title story, an elderly woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her erstwhile prom date, who raped her fifty-some years before. When her attacker fails to recognize her, Atwood’s heroine takes justice into her own hands, befriending him over the course of the cruise before murdering him on a sightseeing excursion with a fossil to the head.

Echoes of this story resound in the first of the three scenarios, which sees Arabella and two accomplices (her best friend Terry and their schoolmate Theo) seize vigilante justice—at a steep moral cost. Playacting drugged, Arabella tricks her attacker into dragging her into the familiar bathroom stall, only to drop the act when he unbuttons his trousers in preparation to rape her. She says gravely, “A criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. But who’s the criminal—you or me?” Soon enough, Arabella becomes the criminal, as she pursues her attacker on foot through the streets of London and beats him to a shocking, brutal death. It’s an ending not unlike Atwood’s, with justice served violent and bloody, gesturing at the towering rage that often rises from sexual violation. Yet as she considered the ending of Atwood’s story, Coel knew that revenge alone couldn’t mend what trauma had broken in Arabella.

Terry, Arabella, and Theo plan to give Arabella’s rapist a taste of his own medicine.

“It was very thrilling, but as I read it, I could see that it was going to end in somebody being killed—that was the revenge,” Coel said. “I understand the appeal, but I didn't want to end that way. I always knew how it would end, which was more to do with the man being in the same space as Arabella, and them seeing each other as human beings. I just needed to figure out how to get there. I had to get to where I knew I was ending, which was the two of them really seeing each other.”

In the final moment of this sequence, Arabella stashes the bloody and brutalized body under her bed, where previous episodes saw her store the ephemera of other traumas she’d prefer not to face: the clothes she wore on the night she was raped, the sonogram from her forgotten abortion, the outfit left behind by Zain, a colleague who assaulted her when he removed his condom mid-intercourse behind her back (a criminal practice known as stealthing). In Stone Mattress, Atwood writes that rape takes a woman apart “layer by torn layer”; in this sequence, we see that principle brought to life, with Arabella hollowed out around a white-hot core of fierce, blinding rage. Yet revenge peeled back only one of Arabella’s ragged layers—it would take something more to cut her to the quick, leading Coel down other narrative paths.

“I had to go through different versions so we could see how each of them served Arabella,” Coel said. “It's great if she can let all of her rage out on this person, but now she’s left with a dead body and with a new identity as a murderer. Is Arabella okay with the new title of murderer and with a dead body under her bed? I wasn't sure. I was tracking these things through.”

Arabella wanders London in the wake of her assault.

In the second ending, Arabella’s quest for justice takes an unexpected turn when her attacker, again tricked into hauling his seemingly-drugged mark into the bathroom while Terry summons the police, reveals a startling brokenness. After Arabella divulges the gambit, he grasps her roughly by the jaw, snarling in her face, “Get over it, princess. There’s wars going on in Iraq, and here you are making a big old drama because some bloke who slipped a pill in your drink wants to fuck your brains out in a nightclub.” His words call to mind Arabella’s own early attempts to make sense of her trauma by downplaying it, as when she compared the seemingly minor significance of her rape to macro-scale global tragedies like war and famine, insisting that what happened to her “wasn’t that bad.”

When the police arrive to raid the bathroom, they find it empty. Arabella has spirited her attacker back to her apartment, where she sits across from him on her bed as he dispassionately lists the many types of rape that landed him in prison: “Date rape. Spousal rape. Prison rape. Payback rape. Rape by deception. Corrective rape.” An open-hearted Arabella recognizes his brokenness and perversion, listening thoughtfully to his experiences of inflicting and receiving abuse. Meanwhile, he marvels at her lack of fear, musing tearfully, “If you’re not scared, I don’t know how to be.” When the police arrive to drag him away, Arabella claps a hand to her mouth, visibly overcome. Coel envisioned the scenario as a reclamation of Arabella’s stolen power, rooted in the life-saving miracle of empathy.

Johan Sandberg

“I think empathy is very powerful,” Coel said. “Arabella understands that her rapist is not more powerful than her, and that she is powerful, because I think empathy and understanding really do empower you. I think her understanding this is what helps her throughout her stages of recovery. I think it's very important for us to engage with this and not think about the attacker. To think about yourself as the victim and survivor—how you engage with the trauma, not the real human.”

Like Coel, Arabella works tirelessly to engage with her trauma through art, papering her bedroom walls with scrawled-on notecards in an effort to wrap her arms around the inscrutable, forever out-of-reach ending to her autofictional novel. In the final beats of the first and second scenarios, she turns inward, poring over the walls as she adds and subtracts notecards. I May Destroy You is deeply invested in this fraught but fruitful relationship between trauma and creation, asking how we might heal through transforming an experience of unthinkable suffering into something beautiful and true.

“I am never going to find the person that sexually assaulted me,” Coel said. “Arabella's never going to find this person, but something lingers. What is she going to do with that, which is not a human being? It's the trauma. It's a memory.”

The third and final iteration of Arabella’s run-in with her attacker is the most mystifying, and perhaps the most richly freighted with symbolism. The needle skips again, replaying the familiar scenario, but with different, gender-reversed details: by daylight, Arabella enters the bar, drenched in sunlight and devoid of patrons—save for her attacker, who stands alone at the counter. She sidles up to him with flirtatious confidence, offering to buy him a drink, while he sweetly disbelieves her romantic interest in him. They return to the bathroom stall, this time a place of passion rather than violation, then head to Arabella’s apartment, where they fall into bed together. In one of the series’ scant few scenes of consensual sex, Arabella assumes the dominant, traditionally male role, thrusting atop her partner to a breathless, mutually satisfying climax.

Arabella returns to Ego Death Bar by daylight.

The following morning, in the hazy afterglow, he murmurs, “I’m not going to go unless you tell me to.” After a long, lingering look, one that conveys volumes, Arabella commands him to go. He walks naked out of her bedroom, while his bloody and broken doppelgänger crawls out from beneath the bed to follow in silence, Arabella’s forgotten sonogram in hand. It’s a staggering, cleansing, epiphanic moment—one of newfound agency and dominance, with Arabella at long last able to assert power over her trauma, to release herself from the unbearable weight of what happened to her.

“In the final scenario, it’s definitely not me saying, ‘Go back and have sex with your attacker,’” Coel said. “It's about the memory of trauma. What does Arabella do with the traumatic memory inside of her? I think she has to go through all these things in order to let it go. That's the only way for her to exorcise the overwhelming power of trauma.”

Each scenario returns us to Arabella’s bed, the series’ most powerful symbol of compartmentalized trauma. In the penultimate episode, Arabella reunites with Zain, who fell out of the public eye after she exposed him as a rapist at a high-profile literary gathering. Her poignant warning to Zain, invoking the resonant metaphor of the unaddressed traumas beneath her bed, is at once a threat and a triumph. As Robert Frost’s adage goes, “the only way out is through,” and Arabella has at last grappled her way through, refusing to let the trauma annihilate her.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Arabella says. “You’re not under my bed; you’re here, with me. I’ve gone underneath. Underneath, into the darkness, and that darkness is now in me, looking at you.”

“What Arabella understands is that this is all in her head,” Coel said. “How is she going to have power over this situation? How is she going to have power over her trauma? She already understands the trauma of this, that she can't keep pushing it away. It's almost too active. The pushing is making her tired. Now it's something in her mind. The trauma is psychological, so she lets it in and she penetrates it.”

A happier, healthier Arabella gathers with her loved ones.

Arabella’s ultimate conquest over her trauma recalls Coel’s early realization: that closure would have to come from within, not from without. But closure, transformative and liberating as it is, can’t solve Arabella’s material circumstances—it can’t pay her rent or meet her deadlines. I May Destroy You is always concerned with the incompatibility of trauma and capitalism—the impossible reality of making a living when you can’t get out of bed in the morning. Perhaps this is why, in a dazzling narrative sleight of hand, I May Destroy You’s three imagined endings yield to a fourth—the real, tangible, flesh and blood ending. In the fourth sequence, Arabella never leaves for her regular stakeout at the bar on that fateful night; she never spots her rapist across the crowded room, never murders him, never listens to him, never releases him from beneath her bed. Instead, she stays home to watch cartoons with her well-meaning and guileless roommate, sweeping him into a grateful, affectionate embrace as she chooses to root herself in the promise of the present, banishing the pain of the past.

Soon enough, months pass—spring arrives, Arabella’s fledgling garden blooms, and her completed book hits shelves. The cover is emblazoned with an illustration sketched earlier in the series by Arabella’s therapist, meant to reify Arabella’s need to penetrate her trauma in order to move beyond it. At a packed bookstore event, Arabella is introduced by a moderator, who compares her new book to her previous book, noting, “It could be the work of an entirely different writer.” Indeed it is the work of a different writer. Arabella has traversed the darkness and come out the other side; while she cannot change what happened, a part of her has healed. Asked by the moderator to read aloud from the novel’s foreword, Arabella inhales, and—

Arabella on the beach.

We cut suddenly to Arabella on the beach in Italy, the locus of her happier and more carefree past—before the assault, before trauma gashed her open, before her life changed irrevocably. Gazing directly into the camera in tight close-up, Arabella exhales, letting out the breath she’s been holding throughout the entire series, then breaks into a slow, wide smile. In the fleeting final shot, she crashes joyfully through the surf, bathed in the golden light of dawn. Arabella is forever changed, but free.

When Arabella reaches deep within herself to move through and beyond her trauma, it calls to mind the early instruction of Coel’s therapist: that she would have to find her own closure, irrelevant to the outcome of her legal case. It’s a powerful statement about the strength of the human spirit, to be certain, but also a dispiriting nod at the abysmal state of the criminal justice system. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), out of every 1000 sexual assaults, 995 perpetrators will walk free, making Arabella’s unsolved case a statistically overwhelming probability. That Arabella must find a hard-fought path to health, wholeness, and professional success while her rapist remains at large is an infuriating pill to swallow; it’s also the only realistic conclusion. But I May Destroy You was never about justice, legal or otherwise—in fact, the procedural whodunit baked into the narrative is arguably the least interesting thing about the show. From a legal perspective, Arabella’s assault is a cold case; from a human perspective, it’s a kaleidoscope of conflicting feelings and impulses, where Coel charts the contradictions and complexities of trauma. In her multi-pronged approach to the conclusion of the series, Coel suggests that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to be a survivor, no one-size-fits-all approach to trauma, no single silver bullet that can take a survivor from agonized to healed. As Arabella’s therapist aptly puts it, “Everything and nothing is normal.” In just twelve sensational episodes, Coel breaks Arabella apart, “layer by torn layer,” then knits her back together, illuminating how a person can become whole again after surviving the unimaginable.

As I May Destroy You comes to an end, Coel’s visionary achievement has not gone unnoticed. Critics have heralded I May Destroy You as a spectacular accomplishment, while reactions to the series have lit up social media, with thousands of viewers tweeting about how I May Destroy You makes them feel seen, understood, validated, not alone. This was among Coel’s objectives—to create a rallying cry for survivors everywhere, “so that somebody may find that on screen and identify with it, and therefore know that they're not alone.”

Though the show is resonating with audiences as she intended, Coel isn’t tuned into this avalanche of tweets. Like Arabella, who erases her digital footprint after a grueling stint as a social media spokesperson for survivors of sexual assault, Coel has largely sworn off social media. Even in the age of a racial reckoning and the #MeToo movement, she remains skeptical of social media’s efficacy as an agent of activism.

“You can call out a rapist on Twitter, but in real life, does anything affect that person?” Coel said. “Have they gone to their jobs? Have the police come around to their house? We're trying to change things through Twitter, and I don't know how much it's actually working. I'd love to see data as to how much our efforts are yielding actual, real change.”

Coel’s skepticism of social media activism bears out in the arc she wrote for Zain, who, after a public “cancellation” at Arabella’s hands, publishes his novel under a female pseudonym. Zain can no longer hold his head high in public, but as Coel notes, his ability to make a living in his profession, much less walk free without legal consequences, remains untarnished. Yet where social media fails to produce legal punishment or effect systemic change, Coel feels that it succeeds in one arena: altering our psychological state, and not for the better.

“I think we're really traumatized, and what's beautiful is that we can find each other and we can connect,” Coel said. “It's one of the things I love and miss very much about being on social media. However, at the same time, life is traumatic. Life can feel as though you have enough on your chest, and Twitter seems to only twist the knife even deeper. Then it breaks the handle, so you can't even find the handle to take the knife out. We're trapped in this echo chamber—sending rage, receiving rage, being attracted to rage. Are we eroticizing our anger right now? Is it helping us sleep at night?”

Arabella becomes a social media spokesperson for survivors of sexual assault.

In I May Destroy You’s ninth episode, titled “Social Media Is a Great Way to Connect,” Arabella spins out under the all-consuming pressure of serving as both avenging angel and quasi-therapist for her legion of online followers, resulting in fractured friendships and dangerously high blood pressure. When her therapist encourages her to leave social media for her own good, Arabella replies, “It’s important that we speak. I have to speak.” Her therapist calmly lays out how social media networks commodify political speech, incentivizing users to speak “at the cost of listening.” Like Arabella’s therapist, Coel is wary of allowing social media too much power in mediating our political life, though she's adamant that we each have a human responsibility to uphold.

“Videos of police brutality went viral before Twitter existed,” Coel said. “We need to remember that protests were arranged before Twitter. Long before Twitter, we managed to get out there and protest. We're quite dependent on Twitter, but we're forgetting other ways that we can unite. I think we need diversity in how we address the problems in the world today—diversity in how we communicate and share, how we remain active as humans in the world.”

Though I May Destroy You is often described as a drama about sexual consent, Coel has said that it is more accurately described as a show about everything. In just six hours of television, seemingly every aspect of contemporary life comes under her microscope, from party culture to homophobia to hierarchies of privilege. I May Destroy You is interested in discrimination in all its gruesome, intersectional forms: race and racism are woven seamlessly into much of the drama, with one episode excavating how white tears can be weaponized against Black men, while another spotlights the dangers of casual racism in healthcare. So too does I May Destroy You highlight how male survivors of sexual assault are uniquely disbelieved and discredited, boxed into a culture of silence and shame every bit as insidious as the culture stifling women, if not more so. The show confronts its spellbound audience, demanding that we ask challenging questions of ourselves and of the warped, imperfect world we live in—questions about things we’ve said and done, to be certain, but also questions about what we’ve failed to say and do, the moral stands we’ve failed to take. Coel invites us to sit with these dualities, with the uncomfortable and indicting truths of rape culture, and our complicity in it.

Subscribe to Esquire Magazine

The full scope of I May Destroy You’s impact isn’t clear just yet, but its influence will be felt for decades to come. It will be studied in classrooms, recommended by therapists, clung to like a validating lifeline by survivors. Coel hopes fervently that the show will open doors for friends, families, and communities alike, fostering challenging conversations about consent, sexual violence, and rape culture. That process is already underway—in fact, Coel designed the show’s rollout with that goal in mind, requesting that HBO and BBC (where episodes can be found in the United Kingdom) air each installment week to week, hewing to a traditional episodic structure.

“I know that when all the episodes have aired, people will binge, because that's what we do, but I think it's quite important to sit with this in bite-sized pieces,” Coel said. “To sit and have time to think about it, to maybe talk about it, and then move on to the next one, so that you're really processing the episodes. This is what I love about TV: that for one time in the day, all groups of people are all watching one thing. It gives me a feeling of community in a world where we're very isolated.”

Yet Coel’s closest viewer may be Coel herself. Every week, Coel has tuned in to watch the show live from home, along with the millions of viewers watching around the globe. If you watched the show week to week in real time, chances are, you watched alongside Coel. Despite having seen each episode “hundreds and hundreds” of times, she enjoys feeling like a member of the global community that has sprung forth around this, her most personal and singular work of art, forged in the fires of pain and progress. Hundreds and hundreds of viewings in, somehow the show still holds surprises, thrills, visceral newness. Somehow it still shocks her, unnerves her, moves her. Each week she soars along with us to show’s dizzying peaks; each week, she plunges to its desperate valleys. She, like us, feels destroyed, rebuilt, born anew.

“I watch and I just feel gratitude,” Coel said. “I feel the shock as the plot twists unfold, as if I don't know them. Sometimes I literally put my hands over my face. I've seen this! What am I doing? Still—I cry, I laugh, I feel it all. I'm totally with it, the whole way.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xKernqqklravucSnq2ispmSudH%2BVa29pb2Nkuqqvx5qcpZldmLymuIyiZKaZqWKxpr%2FTq6ayZamkwm6%2FxJqqqKZdZnqmusOipaBllp67orjEZpyxqJyWtq%2Bxw2g%3D