It doesn’t take long to realise that Dead Ringers is one of the best self-contained seasons of television in a long time. It is, even in its hardest to watch moments, and there are many (it is very much a show about the body horror of pregnancy, for one, regardless of how many times one of its main characters insists that pregnancy itself is not a disease), impossible to look away from. Rachel Weisz gives a stunning performance in two roles: she plays twins Beverly and Elliot Mantel, both gynaecologists, but she manages the magic (it is fair to call it a Tatiana Maslany-esque magic, after the tour de force of Orphan Black) of playing both characters as clearly delineated individuals, so that there isn’t much question about which twin is currently on screen, even when the two themselves are deliberately switching roles. It’s not just the hair-up hair-down clarity perhaps chosen for the audience’s sake, but the way in which they are clearly very different women – there is barely a scene in which Elliot isn’t digging into something with enormous gusto, be it food or drugs or men, while Beverly attempts to disappear into the background.
Beverly and Elliot are attempting to solve the horrors they see every day in their jobs at a New York hospital – Beverly focusing on the women she treats, who she sees again and again failed by a system that has yet to find a better way to make pregnancy and birth more bearable and less terrifying. On the first day we follow them, there are dead babies and dying mothers, and her plight to improve things is clear. Elliot is a scientist, approaching the idea of improving things with less of a focus on patients, but with a frustration about the legal limits to what she can do in the lab – a legal framework that her imagination and ability surpasses. It’s clear that they are fundamentally different in how they view ethics, and it is that difference they carry into a pitch to a billionaire investor, who could make their dream of a birthing centre with an attached lab a reality.
One of the amazing things that Dead Ringers accomplishes is that in spite of the overwhelmingly amazing performance of Rachel Weisz, the secondary female characters manage to shine in every scene. Jennifer Ehle’s billionaire Rebecca (Ehle based her performance on Ayn Rand) is breathtakingly immoral, something the story desperately needs to propel itself forward and yet utterly captivating in its eloquence. The second episode of the show is mainly set in the twins’ pitch meeting, which takes place in Rebecca’s mansion – it’s one of several painful dinner parties, in which discussions and fight tease out moral alignments and force characters to confront how far they’d be willing to go to achieve their goals. The people assembled at that dinner party are universally awful (once again, the William Gibson quote about the rich comes to mind), and even before entering the lion’s den, Beverly knows what kind of people she is asking for money. It’s hard to believe that after the unflinching portrait of the Sackler family that Dopesick provided two years ago, Dead Ringers would manage to portray a family built on the devastating fall-out of the opiate crisis as even worse, but it does so without a doubt. These people aren’t just rich, they are perversely removed from the rest of civilisation by their wealth, and utterly bored as a result, to the extent that only the potential for thwarting morality gives them a kick. Rebecca has no interest in Beverly’s pitch to improve women’s health – if anything, she regards her morality as pedestrian. Elliot is the one who is both personally interested in running a lab removed from the law and knows it is the only way to get her beloved sister what she dreams of, and so adjusts the pitch to give these hyenas exactly what they are asking for. There’s a woman who has built a wellness empire and dreams of never aging (and, by extension, never dying – the new frontier for the rich, who can escape humanity in every other regard except the reality of death). There’s a cousin, who has directly profited the most from the opiates her family has manufactured and is now interested in biohacking, even though her examples of it are almost ridiculous in their mundanity. Later on, when the twins have secured funding and their futuristic centre (Handmaid’s Tale red everywhere the eye can see) is built, their rich audience’s reaction to what they show makes it clear what’s in their future: they’ll be providing the kind of life-extending, aging-defying technologies that the rich so desire, likely at the cost of their patients (because even before that, one of their most shocking encounter is a woman who uses a surrogate like an artificial womb, asking for baby after baby, insisting that she is the patient being treated, that her demands are paramount over that of the pregnant surrogate).
Later in the season, they’ll be invited to Rebecca’s wife’s family in Alabama to open a second centre, and for me, it’s when Dead Ringers eloquence truly becomes apparent. Susan (Emily Meade, who was also memorable in the few episodes of Leftovers she was in) comes from old Southern stock: her father is a gynaecologist himself, descended from a long line of doctors. He presides over his colonial mansion with pride, and tells a story about how his forefather, the so-called founder of gynaecology, helped a young woman who suffered the ravages of a medical system disinterested in her plight. Later that night, Beverly wanders the mansion like a Victorian ghost, following the moans and cries she hears with a lantern down the corridors. It’s as if Dead Ringer has suddenly turned into an entirely different kind of horror story. She discovers all the parts of the story that the patriarch has conveniently left out: the woman was enslaved and experimented on without anaesthesia, suffering unimaginably. Her ghost furiously indicts, performing something that has the metre of a poem, making it clear to Beverly what she has condoned in accepting the blood money to fund her dream. She will never be able to own this woman’s story or pain, but she is now complicit in it.
It's an incredibly haunting break in the rhythm of the show, a performance that breaks the story, almost: later it will be mirrored by another one, set more than a century later. Poppy Liu’s Greta cooks the twins’ food and cleans up their messes (other characters appear perpetually confused as to her role, her title). She also appears to obsessively collect whatever the twins discard, including answering machine messages from their mother. Her motives appear nefarious, especially in the context of Elliot’s illegal research: is she spying on them, collecting evidence? What is she doing with all these bits of minutia that contain their DNA, in a show where embryos are grown in tubes? In the end, it turns out that Greta is an immensely talented artist, working on a show about her own trauma, and in portraying that show, taking the viewer into it along another character who discovers it, Dead Ringers once again breaks a wall of sorts. The experience of grief is immersive. Greta narrates the tale of her mother dying giving birth to her, using all those bits she collected from the twins’ life to construct a tale about her own absent mother. It’s stunning compared to how the Mantel centre operates, where all the patients sit and are treated behind glass windows, always available for an audience to observe, never private in their most private moments, as if they themselves had consented to being part of a performance.
And then there is Genevieve, played by Britne Oldford (back when she played Cadie in that unfortunate US remake of Skins, it was clear how great she would be one day, and it’s fantastic that she gets to be just that in Dead Ringers). She is a young actress who comes to the Mantels for an examination, because she has been having recurring dreams about motherhood. Beverly treats her first, but immediately becomes so smitten with her that she cannot continue (it’s electric), asking Elliot to switch with her. It’s a deceit that will have grave consequences, and it is very much hinted that the twins often do this – switch roles when they feel the other would be better equipped to handle a situation, blurring the lines between their identities. Later, to cheer her sister up, Elliot “gets” Genevieve for her – she seduces her, only for Beverly to pick up where Elliot left of. It is meant to be a fling, but it’s clear from the start that Beverly is in love and now haunted by the deception, a dark secret that hangs over the ensuing relationship like an anvil. The relationship is a deal-breaker for Elliot – the twins ridicule a stranger who has sexual fantasies about twincest in the first scene of the show, and yet their relationship is deeply intimate, and, at least to Elliot, meant to be exclusive of others. The biggest betrayal comes when Beverly, who has been unsuccessfully trying to have a baby with Elliot’s help, decides to get pregnant with Genevieve. Elliot feels Beverly slipping away, prioritising Genevieve over her, and worse, keeping this part of her life separate, something that they have never done before. What ensues is a self-destructive, very hard to watch spiral: at one stage, Elliot has an encounter with a homeless woman who taunts her with the idea that Elliot, rather than being more for being a twin, is actually being reduced, absorbed, lessened somehow into a sort of half-life. Furious, she pushes the woman over the ledge of the roof, but believes it was a drug-induced hallucination when no body shows up (it will later).
In the end, this question of whether each of the twins can have their own separate life becomes the core of the problem. Elliot is now a liability, and as much as Beverly is aware of the inherent immorality of where the funding for the birthing centre comes from, as much as she despises Rebecca’s morality, she cannot let go. She betrays Elliot, cuts her out of her life (there’s a whole episode in which the vibrating of unanswered phone calls sets the background beat for every scene). It's impossible to truly capture the finale, the way it ends, except to see it. There is an underlying thread throughout the show about the annihilating aspect of motherhood, the idea of the pregnant woman being a vessel for something outside of herself (the show briefly touches on the question of abortion in discussing what it would mean if the Mantels could save even the youngest premature babies). In the calculation of identity, of whether it is an addition or a subtraction for the Mantel twins, both come to the same conclusion: their love for each other, the deep entanglement of their lives, leads to a bloody and brutal final switch – like they couldn’t live either with or apart from each other. Dead Ringers is an utterly captivating death spiral.
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