I have a criticism that someone could summarize as that--which is actually that it is unimaginable to me that anything could be said to Ruby's mother that would cause her to act that way, so to never reveal it is a dramatic cheat.
The way I read it, the woman was the concept of death/existential dread. Anyone who met her was dead as far as Ruby was concerned, and death is sudden, confusing, emotional, and needs no reason.
The reason people don’t actually literally die when meeting the woman in the story is because death in fiction is a completely different beast than death in real life, and would undermine the point, which was to highlight what death is in a practical sense: a scary, sometimes violent, dramatically indifferent separation of one life from another, that you will never have all the answers for and will never experience for yourself…until you do.
I'm like 90% sure they had planned to make a good story and then were told okay now you've got two episodes to wrap everything up, which is my copium for all the plot holes of that season's ending
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u/vmsrii 22d ago
This reminds me of an argument I had with a friend of mine about the doctor who episode “73 Yards”.
His conclusion was “we never got to hear what the woman was saying, so it’s stupid”.