TV Show ‘Dickinson’ Time Travel, Sylvia Plath Episode Explained – The Hollywood Reporter

[The following story contains spoilers from the seventh episode of Dickinson‘s third season, “The Future never spoke.”]

In the seventh episode of the third and final season of Apple TV + Dickinson, Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily and her sister Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov) travel to 1955 through a magical gazebo. There, they meet college-age Sylvia Plath (Chloe Fineman), who is a huge fan of “the great American poet Emily Dickinson.”

However, after being delighted to see that Emily is now a published author, the sisters find themselves confused and outraged when they learn how Emily is characterized.

“Emily Dickinson was the sad girl in the first place,” Fineman’s Sylvia said as she told the sisters, who Sylvia believes are Smith College students, about the poet “suffering from depression” whom she feels connected with. “kinship relationship”.

Sylvia explains that it is “common knowledge” that Emily is a lonely, “suffering, withering” person who wears white and cries.

Increasingly frustrated, Emily and Lavinia assert that what Sylvia said is not true, but Sylvia remains convinced.

That moment Dickinson Host Alena Smith said it allowed her to confront the “legend” about the show’s subject matter that the series sought to dispel.

“Emily will see that in the future she will be a published author,” Smith said The Hollywood Reporter. “However, she also has to face the fact that she is deeply misunderstood and misunderstood in this myth, that of course our show has broken and disbanded, that Emily is the who turned depressed has wasted unrequited love for a man. ”

While Sylvia Plath was, according to Smith, “perhaps the most important American poet of the 20th century,” Smith wanted her version of Emily Dickinson to meet her not just because they were both literary geniuses.

Smith said: “I feel there is a misunderstanding about Emily being someone like Sylvia who may have committed suicide and died at a young age, but that is not true about Emily. “Emily truly lived a fulfilling and long life and produced this extraordinary work and passed away as we all do when the time comes.”

After confronting lies about who Emily is, Lavinia says the future, “is not really what we expected.”

Smith explained that the sisters’ journey was “the world’s most incredible trip to the future.”

“They just arrived in 1955, and it turned out that things were pretty bad there,” Smith said.

And in the episode, Sylvia decides “the future never comes to women.”

Despite Emily’s frustrations over who she was, Steinfeld said, the trip to 1955 was significant to her legacy.

“We have to see inside Emily’s legacy that she left behind,” says Steinfeld. “It was so exciting to go through that moment, in season two we pondered all season whether fame is what Emily Dickinson really wanted, and to have this moment where she She actually saw her name on many books in her own room. future in a museum that is her own home in which she grew up being known for who she is, is a very interesting and bizarre thing. ”

The trip to the future also seems to bring Emily and Lavinia closer together, a bond that seems to be forged by history.

“We know from history that Emily feels very seen and understood by Lavinia,” says Baryshnikov CHEAP and a group of reporters during the visit Dickinson set this summer. “One of the things that we have had a great time exploring this season is the specific ways to their relationship. There’s something about Emily and Lavinia that Emily doesn’t need anything from Lavinia and she doesn’t expect anything from Lavinia. They can only coexist as sisters. I think that creates a lot of comfort and fun in my scenes with Hailee. There is a greater comfort that you get in a sibling relationship that is not contentious. “