SPOILER ALERT: This post comprises spoilers from the limited series “Eric,” now streaming on Netflix.
Abi Morgan wants the sting of her recent Netflix limited series “Eric” to linger with the audience long after it’s over.
Sure, there’s plenty to be blissful about in the ultimate moments. Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) returns home to his parents. Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) seeks rehabilitative help for his addiction and behavior issues in an try and be a greater father and human being. Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) leaves Vincent to prioritize herself, Edgar and a brand new baby on the best way. Detective Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) gets some semblance of justice within the tragic murder of Marlon Rochelle.
But as Morgan tells Variety, the enjoyment of 1 child coming house is a reminder that so many others, like Marlon, never do.
“I didn’t want the audience to say that was a blissful ending,” says the series creator and author. “That was an uncomfortable ending. There’s relief, because everyone wants a toddler to search out their way home to their parents. But for me, there’s also an ache at the tip of the show, and it’s a really deliberate and intentional ache that we should always all feel. It’s palpable and essential that it’s present. If it isn’t, then that is just one other TV show that used the trope of a child disappearing as entertainment. I would like it to be greater than that.”
Gaby Hoffman as Cassie
Courtesy of Ludovic Robert / Netflix
Over six episodes, Vincent loses the whole lot, because the fear over his culpability within the disappearance of his son compounds his already fragile state of being. The egotistical puppeteer and creator of the “Sesame Street”-esque kids program “Good Morning Sunshine,” Vincent sinks into the depths of his drug addiction and mental illness until he believes the one approach to bring his son house is to bring to life his hand-drawn creation –– a furry gentle giant named Eric. In doing so, Vincent’s mind also manifests a way more unyielding version of Eric that serves as his walking-talking subconscious.
What Vincent doesn’t know, in fact, is that his volatility at house is what drove his son to run away to start with and find yourself down a manhole, where he’s held captive by members of the homeless community living within the abandoned subway tunnels under Latest York City. By the finale, Vincent has used his artistically gifted son’s own map of town to trace him to this same subterranean community Edgar had already been watching from afar.
But as town government ruthlessly begins clearing the tunnels of the homeless, Edgar is kind of nearly sold to a human trafficker, while his dad succumbs to the temptation of medicine mere feet from his son. Only after Vincent beats the bad habits out of himself through his imaginary Eric is he capable of call out to his son through the character on the news and encourage him to come back back home, which he does.
Following a stay in rehab –– and an overdue cutting of ties along with his own estranged father –– Vincent is capable of reclaim his job at “Good Morning Sunshine,” where he now plays the fan-favorite character of Eric every day.
“He’s in a really fragile state still, and a really vulnerable state, which to me speaks to profound change,” Cumberbatch says of where Vincent finally ends up. “He’s undergone this dark night of the soul to succeed in a quantum of solace, if you happen to will. I believe it’s a starting. It’s the start of hope.”
The ultimate scene finds Cassie and Edgar attending a taping of the show, where Vincent is worked up and nervous for them to see how far he has come. Cassie has had her own revelations throughout the investigation.
“I do think she finds peace,” Hoffmann says. “On some deep level, even from the start, she knew her fear was keeping Edgar in a situation that shouldn’t be best for him. Not to say herself and Vincent, who she has plenty of love for. But I believe by facing not only that fear, but the larger and way more troubling considered one of her son going missing, she discovers that she is able to providing Edgar and beyond the whole lot that she must.”
After the taping, Edgar slips into the Eric suit and mimics his croaky, yet cuddly voice to reconnect along with his father, a bridge even Vincent remains to be apprehensive about crossing.
“It’s a very beautiful scene,” Cumberbatch says. “He’s scared about where he’s at with the love he has for his child, where his behavior has left his child and whether there’s anything to salvage. He has come to a spot of really truly being present for his child, and witnessing him. It’s deeply moving for him to see the connection Edgar has with Eric, the voice he puts on to approach him as this creation. It’s the medium that begins to bring them back together on this relationship. It’s caring, it’s engaged and loving.”
While Vincent’s story has a hopeful ending, there isn’t any denying that not everyone who alienated everyone in his life with their behavior can be so lucky. Morgan says she made careful considerations within the finale to acknowledge that Vincent’s swift recovery (described as a “few weeks”) and opportunity to reclaim his life and job, not to say the prospect to prove to Edgar that he’s modified, is considered one of his privileges as an white man with access to money.
“I believe if this was a drama that didn’t have the secondary storyline with Marlon, then I’d feel very uncomfortable with that ending,” Morgan says. “However it is a really deliberate decision to indicate the power that Vincent has due to his privilege and his career and his intellect and his education and his family support, and since he’s a white man with status. There are the tools there for him to rehabilitate himself, and discover a type of redemption.”
Certainly one of the ways Morgan selected to acknowledge those privileges will be seen within the long-awaited reunion between Edgar and his parents, which cuts away to the lobby of the NYPD station where Cecile (Adepero Oduye), the mother of Marlon, still sits every day to remind detectives that her son never got here home.
“That may be very powerfully conscious there,” Morgan says. “We worked lots on that cut. You chop from Cassie as she is nearly to cross the road and be with Edgar, and we stopped them from actually having the ability to reunite.”
She adds: “I assume I’m trying to indicate that in an unfair world, there’s a reason why some children don’t come home. And we’ve an ethical, social and cultural responsibility to be held to account for that.”
McKinley Belcher III as Detective Ledroit
Courtesy of Ludovic Robert/Netflix
It’s Ledroit who shoulders that responsibility within the series, as he’s dogged in his pursuit of determining what happened to Marlon. Ultimately, he uncovers video evidence that the 14-year-old was killed by members of the NYPD after he was found to be engaging in a sexual act outside the Lux nightclub with now-mayoral candidate, Costello (Jeff Hephner).
Ledroit doesn’t bend to pressure from inside the department to maneuver on from Marlon’s case, and openly defies his superiors in calling for the arrest of the officers involved in his death. Ledriot’s story isn’t without struggle though, as he silently mourns the death of his partner Michael to AIDS and grapples with how he identifies with the very things that made Marlon a goal.
But neither Belcher nor Morgan wanted Ledroit to apologize for who he’s.
“I didn’t need to portray a person who’s being shut down or who’s becoming smaller over the course of the show,” Belcher says. “I got to portray someone who’s coping with the real-life stuff that a person doing his job, who’s Black and queer, would have been managing. But I get to navigate an area during which he blossoms. He marches toward what it’s to just accept himself, to like himself and to type of operate at his full potential and step into what it’s prefer to be the change he desires to see on this planet.”
Ultimately, changing the world is what Hoffmann says is the message of the series. Not within the macro sense, but slightly in a single’s own corner of a broken world.
“It is simple to point fingers at Vincent and his mental illness, nevertheless it is basically a bigger crisis,” she says. “Vincent, himself, is the victim of a bigger crisis of improper parenting, of not being properly loved. That to me is what this show is about. It’s about our inability to properly love one another and our youngsters and ourselves in a society that isn’t taking good care of us and loving us.”
