[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Dickinson, Season 3, Episode 5, “Sang from the Heart, Sire.”]
Dickinson continues to rip hearts out in its third and final season as the latest installment, “Sang from the Heart, Sire,” made way for a shocking rift between fan-favorites Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) and Sue (Ella Hunt).
Despite most of the season encompassing a Dickinson family civil war, the discord never interrupted Emily and Sue’s relationship, until the latter’s postmortem blues arrived. “Sue is really at war with feeling erased by everyone,” Hunt tells TV Insider. Now a young mother, Sue struggles to support her baby son, deal with unhappy husband Austin (Adrian Blake Enscoe), and maintain her presence as a person in the eyes of everyone around her.
(Credit: Apple TV+)
In the latest episode, Sue laments for herself as she relays what her new reality is like to Emily who convinces her to join the rest of the Dickinsons for a family singalong (which included a tune from Steinfeld) on patriarch Edward’s (Toby Huss) birthday. But the brief happy moments don’t last too long as Sue asks herself, “‘what is my worth now that I am a mother?’” Hunt says.
After Austin enters the celebration to inform his family that he’ll begin practicing as a divorce lawyer as he also plans to divorce Sue, she exits the room to take refuge in Emily’s bedroom upstairs. It’s upstairs that Sue discovers Emily’s correspondence with Colonel Wentworth Higginson in which the poet conveys a sense of loneliness and inability to share her work.
(Credit: Apple TV+)
Sue is understandably upset by this and those feelings of betrayal force her to go so far as to liken Emily’s behavior to Austin. “I had some really wonderful conversations with Keith Powell, who is our director of Episode 5,” Hunt shares. “Keith was telling me he and his wife have recently had a baby and he was describing that his wife had some days of feeling like a machine that was built just to keep a human alive. And I think that’s how Sue feels in Episode 5.”
And Emily’s secret correspondence is just the tipping point for those feelings to take over. “I love that Alena [Smith] gave me the opportunity to go there because it is such a common feeling,” Hunt says. “And then there’s communication with Austin about the sort of parents they could be,” she adds, referencing Sue’s dismissal towards Austin’s desire to stay at home and care for their son alone rather than attending the singalong.
“I think it’s really special for us to have had that this season to dive into non-traditional family dynamics that are so familiar to us in this day and age,” Hunt muses, “but so unfamiliar on screen in a period piece.” The series will continue to bend the rules of its time with its uniquely forward-thinking characters, who are just as ahead of their time onscreen as they were in reality.
“One of the things I think about often is how remarkable it is that Emily and Sue, these two very ahead of their time, complicated, and at times difficult women managed to find each other,” she says. “The Dickinson family are pretty damn strange.” And we wouldn’t want them any other way.
Tune in as the season continues to see how Emily and Sue’s relationship is impacted by this event, and how the Dickinson family civil war plays out.
Dickinson, Season 3, New Episodes, Fridays, Apple TV+
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