Thinking about how Season 4 has the opportunity to mirror the moment Natalie finally snaps and pulls the trigger on her father, bringing her arc full circle by forcing her to confront the rage she has spent her entire life internalizing and fearing within herself.
The script’s description of Nat’s emotions in this scene really stands out to me. A lifetime’s worth of humiliation and rage…
In this moment, after years of swallowing her rage, shrinking herself to survive, and living under the suffocating control of her father, something finally ruptures. For perhaps the first time in her life, Natalie allows her anger to move outward instead of inward. She is willing and intending to kill her father in this scene. We are shown without a shadow of a doubt in this scene that beneath Natalie’s restraint exists a capacity for direct, lethal violence that emerges when enough fear, humiliation, and fury have been forced to accumulate past the point of containment.
However, there are immediate consequences for Natalie’s first true outward expression of rage. Although she doesn’t kill her father directly, he still dies as an indirect result of her actions. Nat immediately freezes and withdraws back into herself, carrying the guilt and shame of the one moment where she lost control of her anger, and it’s disastrous consequences.
From that point forward, Natalie internalizes the belief that some part of her is fundamentally monstrous, violent, and dangerous in the same way her father was. Much of her life becomes an attempt to outrun and disprove that possibility. She clings desperately to compassion, gentleness, and morality, trying to become the kind of person her father never could be. Because she associates direct expressions of anger with harm, her violence and self-preservation find other ways to appear. They take form through passivity, manipulation, displacement, and/or self-destruction rather than open aggression. She has brief moments of conflict (with Jackie and Lottie especially), but even in these scenes you can feel the tension of her holding herself back.
But by the end of Season 3, I think we can see the tide beginning to shift for Nat. Under Shauna’s reign, she is once again placed in an environment defined by coercive control, silencing, and repeated humiliation. These dynamics echo the psychological captivity she experienced under her father growing up. In scene after scene, you can see Nat’s anger straining beneath the surface. She’s practically vibrating with restrained rage, as though the effort of keeping it buried is becoming physically unbearable.
I think all of these scenes are showing us that Nat is a ticking time bomb, and with each of Shauna’s actions that further strip her of her autonomy, she gets closer and closer to snapping. I think it’s only a matter of time before Nat’s resolve snaps again and she lashes out, and I think she will have one final moment of direct violence that she will once again carry the guilt of for the rest of her life.
And that is the cycle at the center of Natalie’s character. She internalizes her anger for as long as possible because she is terrified of what will happen if she lets it out and believes she deserves that anger being directed at herself instead. But the repression only causes that anger to intensify until it eventually erupts in one catastrophic, impulsive moment. The consequences of that explosion then fill her with guilt and self-loathing, convincing her that her anger is inherently monstrous and dangerous, which causes her to internalize it even more afterward, building to the point that it will inevitably explode again one day. And in doing so, she unknowingly begins the cycle all over again.
It’s no coincidence that these are the very first words we hear Nat speak in the entire series:
She’s likely referring to Shauna, yes, but I think she’s also referring to herself; and the more dangerous, volatile parts of herself and Shauna (and all of survivors) that she has learned need to be kept under control.
I sincerely hope we get to see Nat let the tiger out of the cage in Season 4 (just once!).
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