It’s been a long time since you’ve talked about him…
…I know.
You did good.
After watching this scene (which is entirely newly written canon material for the show, not from the original series of books), I couldn’t decide whether after the golden monkey attacked Hester, 1) Lee made a conscious decision to dredge up and “perform” the memories of his abusive father in an attempt to unnerve Marisa and/or reach her as a “mother” (ie, an attempt to discomfit his potential torturer enough that the torture did not occur or occurred at a lower intensity than it would otherwise have), OR 2) his statements started out as his usual old “defuse serious situations with macabre humor” but the attack on Hester had precipitated a kind of PTSD event where he basically couldn’t stop the memories from pouring out of his mouth like poison exiting his body. It really seemed to me that once he started he just had to keep going, as if (like Hester said later) this was the first time in a long long while that he’d let himself think about what happened, much less say it out loud.
Either way, the complete turnaround of his demeanor once Marisa had left the cell and his shuddering breaths as he tried to get himself back under control were heartbreaking to me. Gone was the bravado, the brave face he kept putting forward to show Marisa how it didn’t matter what she did to him. Hit him, tear his nails out, break his bones – all she’d get (and all she got) was defiance. But once she was gone, he nearly collapsed into fetal position, chest heaving, gasping for air as if he’d been drowning. And he had been drowning, in his own memories, reliving them.
Hester recognized the toll it had taken on Lee. “It’s been a long time since you’ve talked about him…” It’d been a long time, because Lee had just kept running instead of facing things. This interrogation was part Lee facing down Marisa and her treatment of Lyra, and part Lee facing down his father and his treatment of Lee.
