‘Beside the one you have waited for to be mated with…’.
I’m a huge champion of Stede and the power of his emotions. With that in mind, I feel it’s Stede’s emotional state and gender-nonconforming reactions which partly save his life in 109.
He tells Ed initially he will accept the firing squad, that the ‘bill has come due’. It’s a strange declaration because Stede certainly doesn’t deserve such punishment for leaving his family, and Stede also knows he didn’t mean to kill Nigel. But this is Stede’s self-loathing talking rather than a belief in natural justice.
It might also be an attempt at ‘correct’ masculinity. Stede’s initial speech contains overused tropes, things he believes he should say as a man waiting to die. After all, he doesn’t want to appear ‘weak-hearted’ or ‘lily-livered.’ We get noble platitudes of deserving this fate and facing the music: ‘It’s time, Ed.’ Never mind this is what a man’s work looks like; rather, this is what a man’s death looks like: silent, stoic, accepting. Plus big boys don’t cry.
And if Stede had stood silently and taken his execution, I’m not always sure Ed would’ve intervened despite his own heartbreak. I don’t think Ed (or Izzy) would’ve seen another sunrise, but I don’t feel Ed would’ve taken away Stede’s agency.
But then Stede declares he wants to live after all. This is major character growth. There is a ‘Do you want to live?’ through-line from the Pilot’s passively suicidal that’s-a-tough-question Stede, to 103 gut-stabbed Stede, appearing rather resigned to his fate whilst standing on the barrel, to this Stede whose position is very different and very clear.
We cut to Stede in a blindfold. He’s crying ‘I don’t wanna die’; and if you listen carefully, when it cuts to Ed, Stede cries out, ‘The bill hasn’t come due.’* Within minutes he is reneging on his previous words. Faced with death now, Stede’s instincts tell him he has something to stay alive for. And big boys do, in fact, cry - which might prove very powerful.
Meanwhile, other than the deserved punch, Ed seems oblivious to Izzy’s presence. Ed’s psychology is entirely tuned to Stede’s. And I feel it’s Stede’s uninhibited, emotional state, which pierces the workings of Ed’s mind in a way it’s never been before; and that causes Ed to find the answer, to shout, ‘Act of Grace.’
It’s a reciprocity, the neurology between lifemates. It’s primal, you can see it in Ed’s face: Stede lives in his synapses. Stede cries out; Ed finds a way to save him.
And it works both ways. When Ed is the one who needs saving, banging his hand like an SOS, Stede finds the words instinctively, nurtures Ed back from the brink. There’s a synchronicity in how they hold each other’s lives in their hands.
These events are even more compelling between men who were never loved properly by the people who should have done so in their childhoods. They cried out to indifference or worse then, and learned to be silent. They cry out now, and the other half of their soul finds a way to rearrange the stars.
It’s nature’s law. Connections between people who love are powerful.
*stede also says something else afterwards I can never make out - ‘I…?’
Edit - ‘I unconfess’
