Whomst Rambles, KinnPorsche edition: A Bittersweet Farewell in Episode 10
I haven’t uploaded my KinnPorsche memes in two weeks due to reasons but can I just say that the turnaround on Big has been *chefs kiss* and I wanted to give him a send off to show my appreciation for this incredibly clever and painful redemption plot twist.
So. Was he an asshole sometimes? Yep, most of the people on this show kinda are since it’s, you know, the mafia. But the thing is—and it’s something this show does well—we only have snippets of Big, incomplete knowledge. It’s impossible to put him on a pedestal or trash him, no matter how you slice it, and we the audience only experience the change of heart at the same pace as Porsche does, which makes it all the more shocking. The show and the actor successfully set Big up for the audience to initially judge and dislike him, just as Porsche does, to be such a flat character that we can project blame onto, as someone who did in fact do some shitty stuff in the short time/moments we encountered him, absolutely fulfilling our expectations of him for much of the time. But his character is complicated at the eleventh hour by the nature of his sudden death, which indirectly changes everything and speaks to the show’s deeper messages.
As a bodyguard, Big is undoubtedly accustomed to making split-second decisions—but the major choices we see him make, the two times he decides to put his life on the line, are both informed by something no mafia enemy would have been able to anticipate: devoted love, unrequited but powerful. In his last scene, he dies to save Porsche. And importantly, it’s not because he thinks it’s the best thing to do morally or strategically but because it’s the best thing to do for Kinn. For the man he loves.
I tip my cap to KinnPorsche—because in the time Porsche (and the audience) knows Big, he’s not actually nice, he’s suspicious and jealous of Porsche, and he can be a total ass sometimes, but in his last moments we also see that at his core, he’s just a guy who’s in love with someone he knows doesn’t love him back, who is guided by love to do something that is good and noble.
Porsche is as surprised as we are, and in his response we see this confused grief, because maybe this guy would never have been his friend, maybe the two of them would never have gotten along, but maybe this guy was, despite or in addition to all of that, a better man than he thought, and in one very specific regard they are exactly alike. Porsche is the only person in the world who can fully appreciate Big’s desire to protect Kinn’s heart (pls let him not just fully forget about this).
That is the tragedy of Big’s character—imagine the shock of recognizing your own feelings and instincts in the same guy who beat the shit out of you, and realizing at the same time that you will never know or understand more about him beyond this. It’s the lost potential, the important conversations that will never happen, a young man dying bravely at the hands of people who killed him during the breakdown of some stupid, spiteful, senseless scheme against Kinn. It’s almost poetic that in his last moments, Big faces off against Tawan, because the sacrifice he makes for love is something Tawan wouldn’t be able to anticipate or understand. Neither of them are Kinn’s true love, but one of their fundamental differences is that Big acts out of love while Tawan acts out of hate. And this show was already a love story, but thanks to this we see other different forms love can take, as something that has the potential to be bitter, pained, warped, destroyed, or—here—something noble and selfless.
Amid all of the chaos, this show is about trust, communication, and learning to see people for who they really are, and in a period of a few seconds, Porsche and the audience finally see past Big’s mistrust of Porsche and all their arguments to Big’s best, truest self. It’s a strange irony that he is such a sidelined character who incidentally is at the center of KinnPorsche: the reason Porsche meets Kinn is because Big sacrifices himself to give Kinn the chance to get away and run down that alley, and his very last act is to do his best to save his boss’s boyfriend, preserving the couple’s future. For whatever else he did in his life, we know that at two key moments where other characters showed duplicity and hate, he chose love and devotion, and changed the narrative fundamentally. Pour one out for Big.
