Right, @brindlelogs got me onto the subject of Polly Harker, so give me a moment, I have some Things to Talk About. Bear with me, bc this is long as hell and I'm also pretty sick right now so I'm not very good at wording my thoughts.
here's a couple shots of Polly before leaving to kill Esther.
Nothin to see here, just an Evil Lady plotting Evil Deeds. Picking a shawl with which she can best take out an eleven-year-old girl. Filling chocolate with cyanide or some crap. Planning her 'nice old lady hiding in a station from bombs' persona before poisoning an innocent, scared kid.
She's good at it. She's sadistic, isn't she? Planning even her outfit as a means to 'disarm' her victim. But wait, hold up...
That's not the same shawl. That's the one that was least disarming.
Odd. Almost like Polly deeply does not want to do this. Almost like she's trying to sabotage her mission.
Honestly, the images don't convey it well enough. Greta Scacchi made a phenomenal performance here - you can hear the fear in Polly's voice, even though her face is mostly in shadow. She's stammering, she's unhappy. She clearly doesn't want to do this.
She's talking in the same tone she used when trying to calm Karl later on, which makes me think she was reassuring herself about her actions more than she was reassuring Karl.
Elias's justification for this cult is that the pain they cause will build a world without it. Its a brutal foundation for a beautiful future. (I dread to think how many times he told her it was 'just like the war') Polly's justification is similar - its all for the greater good, its just one child, it's no different to our soldiers in battle and everyone praises them for their honor, don't they?
Firstly, whoever put this in the script deserves a raise. And a slap in the face, because this made me sad.
I only realized how distraught she is upon rewatch - look at her, she's on the brink of tears! Her actions were sick and awful but gosh you can see her regretting them before she even kills Esther. The sadder part is that she doesn't really come to Elias, her husband, for comfort here. She's rambling on justifications which are probably parroted from his own words, and she's clearly deeply upset about the fate she must bring upon Esther but all Elias says back is 'the child won't feel a thing.'
Polly really is so brainwashed by Elias and its heartbreaking to watch her go from the sweet little piano player to this wicked old woman killing kids and threatening mothers and organizing evil doomsday cults with her evil doomsday husband. She's lying to herself just as much as Elias is and she knows it.
She makes deliberate choices to Not Kill Esther. Without Karl there, she never would have gotten into the station, and I like to think that was intentional too. Maybe she was stalling, hoping the gates would close without her there and 'oh dear, Elias, darling, I couldn't reach them'.
Of course, she did end up killing our baby, but like....... still. She's bending over backwards here to justify it and in the end she seems to do as many subtle things as she can to avoid doing what 'must be done.'
For all of future Polly's evil, and Alternate-Future-Polly's bitterness, underneath it all I think she's just as scared and sad as she was after learning the truth about her husband all those years ago. And I think even Original-Future-Polly was bitter about the way her life turned. She was just lied to enough that she knew how to do it to herself.
