Nora Durst likes to hurt herself.

On a beautiful day, after a luxurious stay in St. Louis, Nora drives to Kentucky. There, she parks the car outside of a playground and watches children play, particularly Lily, the child she gave up years ago and thinks about often. Nora eventually meets eyes with Lily but young Lily doesn’t recognize her, instead asking “Who are you?” Nora leaves devastated, broken from the reality she’s part of. It’s nothing new from what Nora experiences day-to-day. It’s like she’s not even there, she barely exists.

In St. Louis, Nora meets Perfect Strangers alumni Mark Linn-Baker, a man who has a lot in common with Nora. On October 14th, Mark was the only cast member of Perfect Strangers to not lift. The odds of that are 1 in 128,000, almost impossible. Unfair. The same arbitrary circumstances happened to Nora too, but with her husband and two children. She was, like Mark, left alone to suffer.

Mark tells Nora about something ridiculous. In Switzerland, the best physicists in the world have constructed a radiation-based phaser that mimics the same scientific phenomenon of the Sudden Departure. According to Mark, the very level-headed, educated people who volunteered themselves to the experiment have “gone through” to meet their loved ones who departed nearly seven years ago. This is the only way for Nora to see her children again. He believes it, she does not.

“The people are vaporized,” she tells him. It’s completely logical. The mere idea of a human being blasted with radiation enough so they could meet people who aren’t here on Earth anymore is ridiculous. What it really means, what these physicists in Switzerland are truly doing, is suicide. Nora observes this and diagnoses Mark as suicidal. He disagrees; he just wants to take back some fucking control. Suddenly, it begins to click for Nora. In order to see your loved ones again, you have to die. This is the control she’s been seeking.

Nora considers the end

Back in Jarden, Nora was busy trying to prove the death of a man who recently “departed.” The man’s wife says she saw him disappear into the air, as do some other witnesses, yet Nora believes otherwise. She knows otherwise because she’s seen his dead body in a secret grave. But a lot of residents in Jarden are taking this man’s departure to mean something toward his legacy. He was devoted to God, he gave his last years to a higher power, and up he went. Nora knows it’s bullshit but it means something to people, even her brother Matt. The man took control of his death and therefore his life. Nora could do the same, too.

Nora sees the opportunity of being vaporized as a way to end her suffering in an act of seeing her children again. It would give her the control she’s craved for seven years. It would allow her to finally exist in a legacy rather than her current life. She considers the decision while she drives to see Lily, who doesn’t recognize her. And she considers her decision when she tries to enter GPS coordinates only for the computer to ignore her commands — the same thing happens with a parking ticket machine, and the airport passenger registration. Consistently, she’s being given more and more reasons to go through with it.

When she returns home, Nora finds Kevin with a bag over his head ready to die, ready to live, ready to feel something. She sits down and assures him that it’s okay. She, too, seeks out thrills to feel something in order not to die, a lie she knows is weak. Kevin responds by suggesting the two have a baby together. Nora laughs hysterically at Kevin’s idea of coping through the future. A baby, to Nora, would be the last thing she’d want to bring into this miserable world, and she knows it’d only further her sadness and her guilt. A follow-up phone call from Mark Linn-Baker’s people offers a different kind of solution for Nora’s existence. But first, she has to fly to Australia.

Loose Ends:

For someone as critical as Nora Durst is about how a person copes through the misery that is life, she’s practically a walking coping mechanism herself. In Jarden, she struggles to be polite around those who believe that the man in the tower departed. At her brother’s, she refuses to believe the bullshit of religion and Jesus Christ. Yet when she looks inward and examines her own coping mechanism, she finds that it too is just as flawed as Jesus or God. Matt believes in his faith and he lost Mary and Noah. Nora believes in the truth, and she lost Lily. Truth is just a brutal as faith, it seems.

The only place Nora can find solace is in Erika Murphy’s new home with a trampoline in the backyard. Erika says that the trampoline is her way of coping with Evie’s death — it helps her forget. Nora jumps into the air and feels something she hasn’t felt in way too long.

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