A theory about the tempest and WfM. Spoilers up to ep 18.
The thing that haunts me about this show: who is Caliban?
And now, a thought: What if Suletta is Caliban?
The initial reading of the show, navigating around the key markers of Prospera and Aerial, was that Suletta was in place of Miranda and Miorine was in place of Ferdinand. Suletta's marriage to Miorine serves Prospera's ambition of getting revenge on those who wronged her and freeing Eri/Ariel.
But. After the last episode, we have a lot more information and a new state of play. Miorine is Prospera's marriage pawn. Her marriage to Guel explicitly serves Prospera's goals, and with Delling and Suletta out of the picture, Miorine and Prospera might not have a mother-daughter relationship, but they do have an "authoratative adult/subservient young adult" relationship that isn't a million miles away. The vibes, I'm saying, are there.
At the same time, we have a new understanding of Suletta, a tool made by Prospera to serve her goals, and cast aside when she was no longer valuable. Someone so tightly bound that she felt she had to obey her mother's every instruction, but ultimately, that love was not returned.
In the tempest, Caliban is the original inhabitant of the island, the son of the witch who used to rule it. When Prospero shows up, Caliban is key to his survival. He shows Prospero where and how to find food, he teaches him all about the island. In return, Prospero teaches Caliban to read. He educates/civilises him, and then casts him aside when Caliban threatens to rape Miranda. Caliban is an ugly, monstrous thing.
But of course, when we read the play through a postcolonial lens, there are big questions there. Caliban is very clearly an indigenous person, and a slave. No wonder he's angry. No wonder he acts in opposition to Prospero. Even the rape, which in the play is a very straightforward element, becomes a bit dubious. It plays into such old stereotypes of violent men of colour despoiling innocent white women. Read from another angle, one can wonder if Miranda desired Caliban, and the construction of that desire as a rape was about reinforcing colonial hierarchies. That's certainly something that's been repeated in history many times.
And now we have Suletta. Who loved Prospera, and was loved by her, but was cast aside. Who was instrumentalised, made a tool, made a thing for Prospera to use. Who desired Miorine, and who was desired by her, but that desire was broken because it didn't serve the political machinations of the powerful.
I don't know how credible this is, but I do know it would be an incredible bit of storytelling. What if Suletta is Caliban? And what if, in this story, Caliban gets to win?
