I May Destroy You finally gives drugging victims some long overdue compassion

Variety

"Getting roofied — an annoyingly passive phrase for someone committing an inherently violent act against an unsuspecting person— makes for a dizzying, infuriatingly opaque experience," says Caroline Framke. "Trusting yourself, your body, and the intentions of everyone around you afterwards is a suddenly unimaginable hardship." Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You offers a rare accurate view of what it's like to be drugged. "What I wasn’t expecting from watching Arabella retrace her steps, though, was relief," says Framke. "For as common as people drugging others is, television has vanishingly few thoughtful depictions of what it and the aftermath are actually like. For every I May Destroy You or Veronica Mars, there are easily ten screwball punchlines that undercut the severity of the crime. Characters accidentally drink the wrong soda, render rivals unconscious, spike an annoying aunt’s tea. The bodily experience and emotional wreckage of being drugged — of having someone secretly hijack the controls to your own body — isn’t one that any single episode can realistically convey without, I guess, resorting to jokes or rushing to neat conclusions. But a drug’s deliberate scrambling of your brain renders absolute closure impossible. There will always be questions, loose ends, and fevered flashbacks to worst-case scenarios that may or may not be true. It will always require some level of weeding through the wilds of your memory and trauma to adjust to a new normal of latent distrust. It’s an experience that deserves more time and consideration than a throwaway plot or joke can ever afford it. For those of us who recognize this on a visceral level, I May Destroy You is an astonishing work of patience, empathy and, finally, understanding." ALSO: It’s a crime that it took this long (after Veronica Mars) to get a show delving into being roofied commissioned at all.