Give Archie Panjabi an Emmy for ‘Under the Bridge’ Finale

There are many things about Under the Bridge, Hulu’s devastating limited series that chronicles the period surrounding the brutal 1997 murder of Canadian teenager Reena Virk (played in the show by Vritika Gupta), that have stayed with me during its airing. Its depiction of adolescence as a long, tumultuous road that eventually reaches an obscured fork is riveting. Then there are the kids involved in the crime, barely old enough to have a learner’s permit, who make microscopic, rash decisions that will alter their entire lives just to take someone else’s from this world. These teenagers, played by a cast of gifted newcomers, entwine a sense of suffocating dread throughout the show. It’s hard to watch, but that’s the point: If it’s difficult just to observe this semi-fictionalized retelling, it was horror to endure it.

But amidst all that repugnance, what I really can’t seem to shake is one awful term: “Bic girls.” The phrase is a nickname for the young, troubled girls of Victoria, British Columbia, coined by members of the local police force like Cam (Lily Gladstone) and repeatedly used by area residents. “Bic girls” references Bic lighters, the cheap drugstore brand, known for being as easy to get your hands on as they are disposable. While it doesn’t excuse their actions, it’s clear to see how the young girls involved in Reena’s murder could feel unloved, their isolation colliding with adolescent hormones to turn into a violent rage. To say it’s dark would be putting it mildly.

Despite all the murkiness that fills its first seven episodes, there is light at the end of Under the Bridge. In its eighth and final episode, the series comes to a stunning close, unwilling to relent on its unsettling atmosphere, but giving some grace to the beleaguered hearts at its center. While it’s interesting to watch Cam reconcile with the disconnect between her Indigenous identity and her occupation—and how she closes the chapter with her old friend, writer Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough)—it’s Archie Panjabi as Reena’s mother, Suman, who steals the show. Struggling to wade through her despondency after the death of her daughter, Suman finds a path forward through radical forgiveness, and Panjabi’s quietly affecting performance leads Under the Bridge to an ending more haunting than anything in its first seven episodes.

The series finale opens with a few brief cuts to its first episode, reminding viewers of how quickly Reena’s murder was organized and carried out, within just a matter of hours. Reena and the other Bic girls, Josephine (Chloe Guidry), Kelly (Izzy G.), and Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow)—who all met at Seven Oaks foster home for girls—dance around and Chloe’s room listening to The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Kick in the Door.” Their brief moment of untroubled freedom is interrupted when Josephine shouts at Reena to get off her bed, alluding to Reena’s weight.

Under the Bridge’s writers have carefully layered its themes throughout the show’s run, and Reena’s constant struggle between two worlds has been one of the series’ richest. It’s so simple to see how a 14-year-old girl could feel torn between her friends and her family, especially when Reena’s home life felt doubly chaotic. In the show’s premiere, Reena refuses to eat her family’s Indian cooking, claiming that it’s making her fat. She rebels against her mother and father, Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan), whose traditional Indian customs clash with the culture of the Virk’s Jehovah’s Witness community. Pulled between religion and race, Reena is stuck. Rebelling alongside Victoria’s other outcast girls is the only place she can find the validation she seeks, despite the Bic girls’ mockery of her, and the warm love Reena always receives at home.

Months after Reena’s murder, with Kelly, Dusty, and Josephine facing trial for their involvement, Suman can barely move. She returns home from court hearings and resigns herself to her bed with the curtains drawn, trapped in the house where she raised her daughter and rooted in the place where she died. When Manjit offers her the chance to leave Canada and return to India to try to get on with their lives, Suman finds the courage to speak. “We can’t run away from this,” she tells him. When Rebecca drops off pages from the book she’s working on about the murder, Suman tells her that dealing with the death is excruciating. As she says this, Panjabi channels a full-body despair that needs no outsized delivery to convey its truth. Suman is past hysterics. All that’s left is a cold, hollow look in her eyes.

Rebecca offers to set up a visit between Suman and Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), one of the teenagers involved in Reena’s death, who is in prison after admitting his complicity. Warren is the only person who can testify against Kelly, as both Kelly and Warren carried out the actual murder after a larger group of teens beat Reena first. Sitting across from one of her daughter’s killers, Suman tells Warren to his face that she wants retribution. “I’ve started losing sleep thinking about ways to hurt you,” she says. “I’m not able to be a mother to my children because I’m too afraid to love them in case I lose them too. You took away my chance to fix things with my daughter. You poisoned our life, and I need it to stop.”

Panjabi is astonishing here. Once again she knows how to carefully walk a line between what is too showy and what is real. Words fall delicately from her mouth, and her pain is laced with venom, which is why it makes what she says next to surprising. “In my faith, we believe in mercy,” Suman says to Warren. “So I came for that, to say I forgive you. It’s the only way out of all of this.” Walton holds his own sitting across from an actor as seasoned as Panjabi, expressing Warren’s sincere regrets, and both of them bring it home when it comes time to remind audiences what Under the Bridge begs audiences to have: compassion. “If someone had shown you kindness earlier, then maybe our daughter would’ve lived,” Suman finishes.

Kelly is convicted after Warren’s testimony, but Suman’s downcast expression doesn’t change when she hears this news in the courtroom. Later, however, while cleaning Reena’s bedroom with Manjit, she finds the Biggie CD that Reena had in the first episode, just before she died. The two pop it into Reena’s old stereo and sit together on the edge of their daughter’s bed, smiling together for a moment as they listen to the music that Reena loved, remembering how they used to hear it blasting from her bedroom. Suddenly, the CD skips and stops, leaving the couple alone in silence.

This could easily be an overly literal moment to end on, an obvious and even cloying way to convey how Reena’s life was cut short before it even had a chance to really begin. Instead, it’s treated with breathtaking gravity. Suman gazes into the mirror across from them, envisioning Reena standing in the doorway, looking back at her parents. Suman and Manjit sit together quietly, staring forward, feeling their daughter all around them. Every memory of Reena will always be tainted with the knowledge that she is gone. But each shattering acceptance of her death also presents a new opportunity to honor and celebrate her. It’s the worst possible way that something could feel ever bittersweet, but it’s real. Injustice is as pervasive as it is pernicious. For the Virks, forgiveness is the only way out. It’s not perfect, and certainly not easy, but it’s something. And something is better than nothing at all.