[Spoiler Alert!] How "The Dropout" Ends -- Seems It Might Be Worth Watching, Afterall...

I've cross-posted this on a few of my blogs, because Martin Shkreli's appeal of his lifetime ban is now about to flame out, and he may be one of the few stories like hers. . . where the consequences are both completely life-inverting, and permanently. . . immutable.

Linda Holmes, deftly writing for NPR this morning, offers a very cogent take on it all:

. . . .She runs away, literally, through the big glass doors, down the stairs, out the front door of the building, pulling the dog behind her, as Linda [the former GC] calls after her that she hurt people. She runs, and then she spends a moment screaming, just screaming as hard as she can, and then she calmly climbs into an Uber with her bright smile back on, and that's the end. . . .

There's an obvious way to structure a story about a figure like Elizabeth Holmes: she builds herself up, she's on top of the world, and then she has a dramatic downfall. . . .

So The Dropout builds not to Holmes' fall from grace as a CEO or a billionaire, but to a scene in which you watch her flee under pressure. The climax is not the fall; it's the moment when you learn who she is, what her flaw is, why her downfall won't stick. You learn why it won't change this version of Elizabeth Holmes, and why she'll never admit what she did. . . .

She developed the ability to entirely separate the past from the future, to sever any connections between those two things at any time. And without a connection between now and later, there is no connection between actions and consequences, and without that, there is no real room for a conscience to operate. It's incredibly sad, because it starts at the point where she is harmed, and it moves forward to how she harms others. But it doesn't frame that progression as absolution, only as an insight about one of the things, perhaps the many things, that went wrong to allow her to become the person she became. . . .

And, specifically as to Holmes -- much will remain unclear, until we know how long she spends in the can. Her glitterati relationship (and son, perhaps, even). . . may not be there, when she finally returns to breathing free air.

Then, and maybe only then -- will her life no longer be defined by her crimes. [R. West is likely right, that the series probably takes too much air time to get there, but seems worthy, overall. Especially to the extent that asks us all. . . to think of those we've... hurt.]

Harsh? Yes. But it is my honest (and sadly. . . experienced) take.

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