Sometimes Writing That Is Respectful Is Worse
Spoilers for everything in The Haunting of Bly Manor, including major reveals and lengthy discussion of its final episode.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is a ghost story, or perhaps a love story. In the epilogue of its own finale episode, it suggests that the two are one and the same.
Bly Manor sees its protagonist, Dani, fall in love with a gardener at the eponymous manor. Dani and Jamie’s love story is a significant subplot, as it stands alongside the other romances in the show. Most notably, our ghostly antagonists for the most part are two other members of the Bly Manor household staff (dead before the show’s timeline begins), who were involved in a toxic relationship. We’re told in the beginning that the au pair Dani is replacing drowned herself when her boyfriend left. We later discover that isn’t strictly the case: he walked into the lake her while possessing her. Unable to leave the property he was haunting, he couldn’t let her live without him. For lack of summarising the entire plot of the show: the two cause problems.
Dani has also been haunted by the spectre of her ex-fiancé since long before she came to Bly. He died in an accident in the immediate aftermath of her breaking off their engagement, in a conversation that heavily implies she was coming out to him — she still loves him, very much, and she didn’t want to let everyone down, and she hoped that at some point she would feel “the correct way”. It’s painfully familiar as someone who has been in straight relationships, and realised that they were gay in the duration of one (though thankfully to a less tragic end).
It’s meaningful then, the way Dani and Jamie navigate their relationship. They talk about each other’s history, navigate boundaries, and Dani is able to let the ghost of her ex-fiancé go and move forward with a new relationship. Jamie has her own baggage, and repeatedly professes that she prefers plants to people, but they’re two people honestly trying their best at love.
It’s a sensitively and earnestly written lesbian subplot, that felt fitting to the story and meaningful to me personally, which is why it feels weird to come out and say this: It is okay to kill your lesbians sometimes, actually.
The final episode serves almost entirely as an epilogue. Dani accepts a more-or-less malevolent spirit into her in order to save the children, and feels from then on that she is a ticking time bomb. We then see a lengthy segment that fulfills… pretty much everything you could want from a happy ending! The couple go on an adventure together, the children are un-traumatised and don’t remember the event, the surviving side characters are achieving their dreams… and it keeps going. Dani proposes, as much as is meaningful in the 80s. Then with a time skip, we see Jamie coming home with civil union paperwork. They settle into a home, they open a flower shop — Dani is still possessed, but it’s as idyllic a lifestyle as it could be. And it’s incredibly slow paced.
We see over ten years pass before Dani succumbs to having been possessed this whole time — note that willing possession in every other instance of the show had been instantaneous, and resulted the possessed being “tucked in” to past memories. And she nearly harms Jamie, but she doesn’t, and leaves to go be dead in a lake, as is her due.
This is, of course, sad, and it is sad when Jamie goes to the lake to uselessly appeal for Dani’s spirit to join her, but then the epilogue goes on even more in the present day time to reassure you: it’s okay! Everybody is not only super coping, but happy. Even Jamie is handling her grief and is a-okay, and also ghost!Dani is here to put her hand on her shoulder in the final shot which makes no sense whatsoever but just go with it because it’s a sweet moment.
It feels like Bly Manor was terrified of “killing its lesbians”, so it went out of its way to show us that they had a long and fulfilling life together — and honestly, that’s not an instinct I inherently want to discourage. But the finale suffered for its lengthy reassurances. I’d made peace with the fact that Dani was going to die from the moment she invited a ghost into her body. I never expected her to make it off the property, having established that possessed people in Bly can’t. When she did, knowing she eked out even those first few happy months back in America with Jamie felt enough that she’d earned her happy ending.
After that, it was dragging it out. My girlfriend and I were sat on the sofa chatting about how the season had went before it had finished yet, because we knew where it was going. It was just taking a very long time getting there.
“Bury Your Gays” is a trope that is bad because it exists in a context to either narratively punish gay people for being gay, or to dispose of gay characters when writers are unable or unwilling to confront following through with gay relationships. Bly Manor gave us a gay protagonist who risked her life in a way that was consistent with her role in the story, and had consistently explored gay love and what it meant in its narrative. It had put in the work to earn its ending: killing off its lesbian without ten years of epilogue wouldn’t have been Burying Its Gays, it would have saved it from losing its emotional weight over a too-long exit.
