I enjoy that Emma's conspiracy board surrounding her parents is resolved in the same way as all conspiracies: it wasn't that complicated. Emma dedicated five years of her life to a quest for vengeance, and this entire mission was dependent on the hope that she would one day be able to hold somebody accountable. A killer running free is a killer she can still punish, and her parents being targeted as the center of some grand conspiracy would justify her emotional response to their deaths. Conspiratorial thinking naturally arises around events with huge social impacts (like the JFK assassination) because we want to believe that there's a direct correlation between intent and impact. Something that causes years of upheaval must be the result of years of plotting. While the Carstairs deaths didn't reshape the course of national history, it did completely shatter Emma's personal world. This means that Malcolm was the perfect killer: he didn't give a shit about any of them. He murdered the Carstairs casually, as a side effect of his actual multi-century revenge scheme. Emma finally gets her hands on a real tangible cause to her parents' deaths, she gets the satisfaction of killing their killer; but it's not actually satisfying because she also gets the confirmation that they never needed to die. Emma was never facing off against some epic antagonist who set out to ruin her life, and her parents were never the victims of a carefully cultivated plot. She technically won, but it took away all the catharsis of a good revenge narrative. Instead, she just has to put the photos back into their boxes.















