[in the voice of someone who hasn’t even seen the movie] imagine if Grace came back. Imagine if through some loophole in science, Eridians and humans were able to make contact and regularly interact with each other.
Imagine Eva seeing Grace again.
Oh no no no don’t look at me like that. He’s not mad at her. He understands that she did her best in a horrible situation with no good answer. So no he’s not mad at her.
It’s so, so much worse than that.
Eva didn’t even realize the difference between Grace’s friendly and Grace’s politely cordial until suddenly she had experienced ‘friendly’ and sent him away, okay with never experiencing it again.
But then he comes back. And he IS friendly, downright loving towards the rock people following him around. But he’s politely cordial to Eva. He answers her questions when she asks them but doesn’t ask any of his own. He turns to the big brown rock when it chimes and tells it in that tone of affectionate disbelief, “Rocky, you can’t say that to her!” But then only tells Eva when she asks, “you don’t need to worry about what he said; he didn’t mean it, he’s just mad.”
Imagine Eva attempting to go for a hug when she first sees him again, and he either just tolerates it, or even worse, he politely tells her “not yet,” “not now,” or even just “no.”
It was easy to pull the lever when you thought you’d hear the trolley roll over one person you loved, and they’d scream and train wheels would roar and with a splat, that would be it. But no; the one life she threw under the trolley, even though it was someone close to her, closer than she ever let anyone else, did not die. He managed to escape and survive the trolley and even managed to make the universe a bigger, better place.
But now he’ll never forget the look on her face when she pulled the lever. And things will never, ever be how they were because even though it was justified and he understands and doesn’t blame her, it hurt, even though the trolley never touched him.
It was better when she thought she was killing her friend, because she wouldn’t experience his friendship again, and neither would anyone else.
Now, everyone gets to experience his friendship.
Except for her.
