The most deeply tragic, gutting thing about Henry to me, besides like, you know, everything, is the fact that Henry never wanted to die. He wanted to live. He wanted to live so much. He wanted to take his girlfriend to prom, he wanted a "normal" life, he wanted to grow up, and he wanted to be free; he wanted a better world -- a kinder world where people like him didn't have to suffer alone their whole existences, as he had.
Henry wasn't born in a lab. He had a life outside of it. He had an identity. He was kidnapped and kept captive for 20 years. They took his name from him, they took his family, they took his personhood, they erased him from the system, they forcefully repurposed him into a thing that they abused and used and violated for 20 years.
They kept him sedated and imprisoned in a laboratory for 20 years. For a good 15 of those years, they were only using him as a biological resource. Betrayed and used and abandoned by everyone for 20 years.
They forced him to work for them, to "take care" of children as if they were his responsibility. They humiliated him and tortured him when he "misbehaved" or "resisted". He didn't grow up the way normal people do; he wasn't allowed to, and yet he was still a person, with thoughts and feelings, who aged, and who went through life knowing he was not living, he was just.... Existing. Existing in an awful, unfair way.
He wanted to live so much, and when it seemed like his nightmare was finally over, he got "killed".
And of course, Henry's consciousness is devastated. It's furious. He wants revenge. He wants justice. He wants to burn the world down and rebuild it because he knows how evil and wicked it truly is in a way that few people could ever completely comprehend, and he wants the life that was stolen from him back. There was so much Henry had never seen or experienced. So much Henry wanted to see and experience. So much life that he wanted to live and never could.
That resolve to live, to create and be part of a life the world continued to cruelly deny him at every turn, literally resurrects him from the dead. He literally presses a cosmic force into a terrifying symbiosis with him instead of allowing himself to be consumed by it.
Henry is alive because of it. Without it, he is dead. We see clearly in season 5 that Henry's body has decayed to a point where he is skeletal in multiple places. Without the will of the mindflayer, he is a corpse.
So when Henry is on his knees, telling William that "It needs me... And I need it. We are One" this has a very tragic, completely literal meaning. Outside of any psychic manipulation or interference from the mindflayer itself, Henry does "need" it.
And all this because he did not want to die. Because he wanted to live. He wanted to live, and he wanted to make a world where he and everyone like him could live because he never, ever once got the chance to live.
And to me, this feels particularly bitter when you consider that his counterparts... His "sisters", wanted death. El was convinced she needed to die to make the world a better place. Kali was convinced she needed to die to make the world a better place.
Kali was shot and accepted death because she believed she needed to. Her death was brought about by the wilful, spiteful neglect of Eleven's father figure, who couldn't give one single fuck about her and expressed wanting to kill her himself.
Henry didn't. Henry wanted life. And, oddly enough, he wanted a life that would be better for "all" of them. And Henry had his head brutally cut off by someone Eleven considered a mother figure, who, if Jamie's acting counts, was apparently trying to plead for his life as they murdered him.
There's something particularly vicious, hateful and cruel about all that, that if you consider he was likely going to die anyway, due to his condition and his wound. (impaled through what was left of his chest + the mindflayer apparently also dying/dead)
And then El, who has seen the sheer contempt her loved ones have for her kin........ Kills herself because she, too, believes she has to die to make everyone safe and happy. What a horrible, horrible, sad ending for the people who were wronged the most. And they couldn't even play it straight as the tragedy it was, instead trying to frame it in a happy, "we can finally move on" way.
prguitarman
gamechangershow
titsay
germansingergirl
