The 2-part season finale of Lifetime’s Mary Kills People, “The Judas Cradle” and “Morning Glory,” which aired Sunday night, wrapped up the season with this message: Those in favor of assisted suicide are “the good ones.” Those against assisted suicide are “bad guys.”
Even in the midst of a murder investigation, her partner turning on her, and her daughter never wanting to speak to her again, Holy Mary (Caroline Dhavernas) still finds the time to kill people. She meets a man suffering from cystic fibrosis in a hotel room, and the two proceed to push the show’s justifications for assisted suicide, likening “refusing to let people die” to medieval torture.
Patient: When I was younger, I developed this obsession with medieval torture, like the Judas Cradle. Did you ever hear of that?
Mary: No.
Patient: They sit you on this triangular metal point, and you slowly become impaled, or they strap you to the iron chair with hundreds of tiny little spikes, or they tie you up in the town square, and you die the slowest death imaginable on display for the whole town.
Mary: Nice. Why are you telling me this?
Patient: Because in 100 years, they'll look back at now and say that the most popular form of torture was refusing to let people die. Dragging it out. Give people false hope, false relief, hook them up to machines. You know, something that should take months to kill them would take years. Those people? They're the bad guys. But you? You're one of the good ones.
Mary: Do you really think so?
Patient: Oh, yeah.
The writers at Lifetime use the show as a podium to tout their beliefs about euthanasia whilst congratulating themselves for their own opinions.
Earlier, the patient asks Mary, “Do you find this hard? Bringing death to the decrepit and vulnerable?” Mary responds with the classic pro-euthanasia line, “What was hard was watching people suffer. Nothing worse than an undignified death.” However, she does admit doubt about her line of work as she fears being sent to jail. She confesses, “But I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I deserve.”
In an attempt to shoehorn some anti-religious sentiment, a doctor complains that a patient’s family wishes to pray for the patient in a coma. The show blatantly attacks religion as the doctor argues, “I’m not gonna do that. I’m a man of medicine, Mary, you know, science, reality.” He then makes the preposterous suggestion: “You know what I think? There should be a rule, I know, against asking doctors to pray in a hospital.” Fortunately, Mary Kills People combatted this idiotic statement by having the man eventually wake up from the coma.
Last episode, we learned that Mary helped her mother kill herself when Mary was only 16-years-old. The finale revealed that Mary's mother suffered from depression and wanted to die. Mary admits that helping her mentally ill mother commit suicide filled her with “relief.”
As the show wraps up its last two episodes, it becomes a soapbox for different characters to rattle off their support for assisted suicide. The wife of a man killed by Mary asserts she was “grateful” her husband found someone to help him die. Mary’s partners Des and Annie describe how handing a patient a pamphlet with the life-ending information on it gave those people “comfort.” Anne insists, “The law is wrong and it will change.” What a truly enlightening show that only presents one stance the whole season.
Finally, Mary and her partner successfully frame someone else for the deaths they caused, leaving them without charge. Mary and the police officer who used to be investigating her fall in love. And Mary is free to continue killing people. For the liberals at Lifetime, the season finale was one big happy ending.
