2023-07-28 0:56:36 ¶ ●

Okay I thought I was ready to shut up about Gertrude Robinson but it turns out I’m not and I never will be. The thing that really gets me about Gertrude is how opaque she is as a character.

It’s striking how little she tells, even to the characters she’s closest to. She never tells Gerry that Juergen Leitner is living under the archives. She never tells Leitner that someone who wants him dead works in the archives right above him. She never tells Michael what’s going to happen in Sannikov Land. (I realized when I checked that the episode doesn’t specify, but I’d always imagined that when she got back to the Archives, she never told her last remaining assistant what had happened to Michael.)

We also know so little about her motivations. Obviously one of the biggest examples is this quote:

ALT

But the one that I always come back to is Gertrude killing Emma Harvey after Emma got Sarah Carpenter killed. Is the violence of Gertrude’s response a sign that she cared about Sarah? That she cared about Emma? The episode mentioned that she showed Emma a level of trust that she didn’t show to many people - did she feel betrayed? Or did she, like Jon says, truly feel “only an eagerness to expunge an infection that had gone unnoticed for too long?” We can’t know. Gertrude isn’t alive to say, and she even if she was, she probably wouldn’t.

We only know Gertrude through her actions. We can guess what her motivations were for a lot of things - the stakes were so high, it’s pretty easy to imagine she thought the ends justified the means. But that’s thing that really, truly makes me insane about Gertrude Robinson — it turns out the ends pretty definitively didn’t justify the means, and she realized that before she died, and we never find out how she felt about that. She killed so many to prevent an apocalypse that it turns out was never going to happen - her entire life’s work was moot - and how that realization made her feel is left as much of a mystery as everything else about her.