Obsession's big death scene left us wanting more
Obsession MAJOR SPOILERS follow.
In a moment Obsession viewers are unlikely to forget, when Anna (Charlie Murphy) and William (Richard Armitage) first met for their wordless liaison in episode one, we knew their madcap affair was going nowhere good.
That proved to be an understatement regarding the calamitous scenes that unfolded in the fourth episode of Netflix's psychosexual drama, which join the ever-flourishing roster of the streaming platform's most hot and heavy moments.
The inevitability of this moment, when Jay (Rish Shah) walked in on his dad and fiancée at it like rabbits and the three points of the love triangle finally confronted one another, had been driving each elicit look and clandestine tryst up to that point. When it finally arrived, it was horrific… but also anticlimactic.
Jay walked into the apartment he had assumed belonged to Anna's friend Peggy and now realised was a convenient love nest. The camera homed in on his face, where everything we expected was horribly written.
William and Anna abruptly curtailed their floor-based fornication and Anna ripped off a silk blindfold just in time to see Jay back away to the staircase railing outside the apartment. He put his hand on the banister – does it slip or does he let it? – and tumbled over the edge.
What ensued was enough to zap Obsession of all its steamy cachet. "Jay!" William shouted as Anna screamed behind him. The camera followed Jay over the banister to reveal his body in a pool of blood on the ground floor. Still naked, William darted down the stairs in pursuit, pausing only for horrified glances to what waited below, while a shellshocked Anna looked around the apartment in despair.
It was harrowing stuff and it initially seemed the dangerously obsessive dynamic between William and Anna could only lead to something this awful. But then, as Obsession tried to find new footing in a world that swung from racy to broken, a sense of disappointment settled around the drama.
Rish Shah, who plays Jay, articulated in part why the scene left us wanting more. He described being "heartbroken" when he read his character's climactic death scene. "For me, I just felt really sorry for the character," he told Digital Spy.
"It's such a horrible thing to lose anyone you love and I know that's what this is touching on so heavily. But for me being the person that is experiencing that and who does die, it's difficult because the character had so much to offer. It just feels like such a shame."
He also described the production's conscious decision to leave Jay's death, and whether he took his own life in that moment, ambiguous through the positioning of the character's hand on the railing.
While this may not have come across in the flurried confusion of the scene, the loss of a doe-eyed soulful character, whose only mistake was to fall in love with Anna and introduce her to his dad, leaves you with the sense that the whole thing could have been avoided.
That feeling takes form in the grief-stricken scene that follows, when Ingrid (Indira Varma), in unimaginable pain, repeatedly thwacks her head against a kitchen counter.
But as well as the loss of Jay as a character, the viewers have experienced a loss too. As the remainder of the Obsession finale slumps from Jay's funeral to Anna's miserable frolic abroad and then back to London, it starts to dawn that we have been left without the showdown the drama seemed to be promising.
Indira Varma noted viewers are denied the "confrontation that you want" between Jay, Anna and William. She told Digital Spy: "You want to see the sparks fly and it's taken from you. I think weirdly that affects you physically, in a strange sort of way, the injustice of that moment."
Jay's mute death seconds after walking in on Anna and William leaves us without that cathartic moment of reckoning. Instead, we're forced to wonder what could have come next. How would William and Anna have tried to excuse themselves to Jay? What would he have said in turn? We never get to find out.
Instead, the wind is taken out of Obsession, because Anna and William never really have to answer for what they have done. When they reunite in warmer climes to take stock of the wreckage behind them, everything about their affair and why it started has been thrown in the shade of Jay's death.
The show that seems to pride itself on not shying away from 'tricky' business, whether it be from Parisian pillow masturbation or broad-brush nods to a dominant-submissive relationship. Yet, in that final moment where everything comes to a head, Obsession cops out and in doing so leaves us feeling like both the audience and Jay deserve more.
Obsession is available to stream on Netflix.
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