1) Sense8 – “I Can’t Leave Her”
Leave it to the show with the psychic orgy to construct the most devastating season-ender of the year. The 12 episodes before Sense8‘s season one curtain call are overflowing with enough moments for their own year-ending top ten list: that ridiculous-yet-not-tacky orgy, 4 Non Blondes karaoke, Wolfgang’s shootout, Daniela’s reaction to Hernando and Lito… I’ll stop myself now. But it’s the season finale – and the slow realization that if this sprawling ensemble has a main character, it’s Tuppence Middleton’s Riley – that wedges Sense8 into the brain with no way out.
Here we learn that Riley was in a car crash that killed her husband, Magnús, immediately, and left her to give birth to a baby girl, Lúna, on the ceiling of the overturned vehicle. She perseveres, escaping with Lúna into the Icelandic wilderness and eventually coming to rest on a snow-capped hillside, her newborn frozen in her arms. In the present storyline, once it’s up to her to get an unconscious Will to safety after their big break from Mr. Whispers and BPO – protecting the cluster in the process – she pauses, wondering if it’s time to just give up.
“I can’t,” she stutters after Will asks her to get in the ambulance and drive them to safety, looking down at a phantom of Lúna in her arms. “I can’t leave her.” It’s a clever reversal on viewer expectation (easy to assume Will would mutter those words) and a sucker punch of empathy for hands-down the best creation of the series. It combos Sense8‘s best assets (deft emotional undercurrents, cool sci-fi touches, gorgeous landscapes) into one coalesced moment of epiphany for its viewers: the show was never about how “cool” it is to live someone else’s life, but how easy it is to forget that everyone we glimpse on the street has not only faced love, joy, and happiness, but world-ending, can’t-move-forward-from-this trauma, sadness, and death.