I still don’t get what this Seven Seconds negative anon (link) was talking about. Maybe it’s because I’m not Black and don’t have the same perspective, but I thought the show was very good overall and I loved KJ’s character to the end. The whole show has ungodly amounts of pain and heartbreak, that is true, given its subject matter. It is not an easy watch. I cried a lot through it, especially during Latrice’s and Isaiah’s scenes, and hugged and kissed my child throughout. It may well be unwatchable and retraumatizing for many members of the U.S. Black audience, which is why I hope nonblack and international audiences will support it all the more.

That said, unless I’m given more insight I’m going to stand by my stance that “torture porn” is a deeply unfair characterization. The ending of Season 1 was actually more hopeful and healing than I’d been dreading, though the journey of grief is never a straightforward one and I hope there will be a Season 2 and beyond for more complexities to emerge even as the characters progress. There is unbelievable pain, yes, but the show doesn’t wallow in it and portrays the characters worst affected as dignified and resilient while also showing them to be messy and human.

As for KJ, follow me below the cut so I can fistfight anon with spoilers.

Why wouldn’t I like KJ after watching the whole thing? She is and remains an amazing character! Yes, she is not the best lawyer as she herself admitted, and she probably did a lot of damage to an already difficult case by humiliating herself in court, getting her bad moments on film, and being removed from court just before closing. She’s a highly flawed character, that’s been established from her very first appearance.

And you know what? I loved that about her. She didn’t give up. No matter how many times she got knocked down, no matter how many mistakes she made, she just got up and kept punching and punching until she eked out a kind of underwhelming victory, legally speaking, but still a victory. She wrecked her career to do the right thing, as did Fish. If she hadn’t gotten Teresa to blurt out the location of the grill Jablonski would have walked scott free.

Arguably her biggest victories were out of court, though. She talked Latrice into cooperating instead of trying kill Jablonski, a quest that would have destroyed Latrice and her family. Though the sentence was underwhelming (and, though I may have missed something, contradictory–I thought the automobile manslaughter conviction came with a mandatory 5-10 sentence?), having the truth come out in court was still healing for Latrice. Both Teresa and Marie ditched their demon cop men. The cop gang showed their hand and killed a young white girl. These developments will have important implications for Season 2 and beyond (please let there be a Season 2).

Was I supposed to dislike KJ because of the children who starved to death after KJ arrested their brother? Again, I might not be impacted the same way as Black audiences, and I understand if people hate her. Nobody hated her for it more than KJ herself. Fish, who had always been sympathetic to her or at least amused by her antics, was horrified and called her out on feeling sorry for herself. He couldn’t even bear to be in the same car with her, and I might have reacted the same. It also put KJ’s behavior in so much more persective, though I can see if some people see it as excessive.

That said, I find it believable that it happened without any malice on her part given how deeply fucked up the legal system and the associated social services are. It wasn’t the assistant attorney’s job to check up on any dependants a defendant might have. The arrested youg man probably told someone or tried to tell someone and it got dropped, or no one heard him out in the first place. Handling situations like this requires clear lines of information and cooperation across different parts of bureacracy, and that clearly broke down in this case.

KJ was, in other words, taking on the guilt of a broken and racist system because no one else would. Could she have checked? Yes, and maybe the children would have lived. But the thing was, it’s like trying to stop a broken dam with your own body. One person’s diligence can’t make up for a system that is meant to work with thousands of people working together.

This scene, furthermore, was meant to be in clear contrast with Jablonski and DiAngelo’s earlier scene where DiAngelo told Jablonski he was a good man and that trying to keep that self-image of himself was breaking him. (The closing statement, of course, shows that Jablonski was anything but.) Here we have two men who won’t even accept the consequences of their own action, and on the other hand we have KJ who hates herself for not having gone above and beyond. The episode is asking, who’s the actual good person? What does being a good person or a bad person even mean?

So no, I don’t hate KJ, though I don’t blame others if they do. I love her, flaws and all, and I want to give her a hug. She owned up to her mistakes, she came back and back and back in the face of humilitaion and knockdown and tragedy, and she won a profound and difficult victory that may seem piteous at too high a cost but is a part of something bigger.