It's that tiny, baby goat named Bruce being brown and furry, like the pelt Shauna Shipman wrapped her dead baby in.
It's the fact that it's a boy goat too.
It's her immediate and irrational fear—upon even hearing the word sacrifice—that she's going to have to kill the kid. The goat. The baby. This precious, innocent life in her care. Because everything she loves gets taken away from her, doesn't it?
She can't have anything that she doesn't eventually hurt.
(And yes, it's about Jackie. It's always about Jackie, even when she swears that it's not. Jackie, her first victim. Jackie, her first love.)
(She's wearing her shirt in this episode. She's wearing her life in this whole damn series.)
It's her sitting alone in the woods, disassociating, triggered by a goddamn goat, and it's her utter panic when she realizes that he's missing.
It's Misty telling her, “Well, you’re not that innocent either.”
And it's her so bitterly replying, “Do you think I don’t know that?” as she frantically searches for Bruce, yet another living creature that she thinks she’s failed.
It's the tenderness with which she holds him when she finds him again, mothering him so gently. She tells him—this goat—that he's delusional and dumb if he thinks she's gonna hold him all day, but then she fucking does it! She holds him! She cradles him to her chest like a baby, and it's so lovely.
Because it's her pleading with the barn worker to make sure that the goat is okay; she doesn't trust her ability to take care of him; she'll fucking lose it if he gets hurt in her care.
And it's this guy robotically replying, "The kid’s care is entwined with your own." And it’s the way that Shauna's pupils immediately blow, and we intimately understand—well before she tells Lottie—that she's thinking about that baby in the woods.
And she's thinking about Callie.
And she's thinking that if this much is true—if her ability to care for herself is the metric by which she can care for a kid—then, of course, her children are so totally fucked.
With her as a mother, they were doomed from the very start.
(Relatedly, it’s Melanie Lynskey saying in an interview: “I don’t think Shauna’s really disappointed in people. I think she’s disappointed in herself. She takes things out on herself, and she just feels kind of fundamentally unlovable.”)
It’s her confrontation with Lottie, which is charged with their fraught and bloody past, by Lottie's obsession with the wilderness baby, by the dream where the baby is cannibalized, by Lottie's willingness to become both Shauna's punching bag and martyr.
It's the tears that run down her face as she says, as she confesses:
"I’m not crying about the goat. I don’t really know, um, what’s happening right now. Um, I think it’s just that I’ve always kept my daughter, you know, Callie, like, at arm’s length. I think just out of fear that she would… die, I guess. Or maybe that she was never even real to begin with. I don’t know. I try to tell myself it’s okay. That I’m safe to… to think of her as-as mine, you know, and to just be her mom. But I think something is broken, Lottie. I just can’t do it.
God, it’s how every line of this monologue is so fucking broken and raw. She told that bastard cop that she's just not very good at loving her daughter, and here is both the reason why and the brutal extent. In the woods, her baby died, but for just a brief moment, in the tantalizing spaces of that dream turned hellish nightmare, he lived. But then he died again; he was consumed; or was he?
Abso-fucking-lutely-yes, but not in the way that Shauna could have ever conceived.
Because this is the idea that she can't think of Callie as her own when that first baby was never hers either.
Our baby, Lottie had called him. He was their communal savior, their shining hope, their personal Jesus who didn’t live.
And Shauna's singular moment alone with him had been a cruel fantasy too.
It's her murderous rage at his death, the violence that such grief engenders in her, which in and of itself is an echo of Misty's Steel Magnolias monologue—the way she wants to hit someone until they feel as bad as they do.
It’s how she can't allow herself to love Callie completely because of her fundamental incapacity to discern reality from the nightmare. In the cabin, she accuses them all of killing her baby. Every goddamn day she fears that her daughter will die, if she even exists at all.
It's the panic in her eyes when she clutches the phone and asks Jeff if Callie is okay all the same.
Because that's her first instinct, her immediate assumption.
That something with her daughter is horribly wrong.
And that's the crux in the end, the horrible conclusion to all these frayed and tangled threads.
Something going wrong is the only reality that Shauna Shipman can ever reliably count upon. The entirety of her life is an open, gushing wound.
