I Didn't Expect This

I’ve been watching The Great—the satirical, historical, often absurd dramedy about Catherine the Great. It’s full of twists, turns, terrible behavior, and more sex than can possibly be healthy for a royal court. But beneath the satire, the show hides something honest: the way intimacy and power warp each other, the way relationships change us, and the way love forces us to confront who we actually are.

Catherine and Emperor Peter III have a relationship that is… complicated is not even the right word. Their marriage begins as a cold political arrangement, sex is purely for pregnancy, and Peter spends his days entertaining what feels like dozens of lovers. And yet—slowly, surprisingly—something shifts.

By the middle of season two, they begin to genuinely warm to each other.

Little moments of shared humor.

Flashes of vulnerability.

A slow, strange thaw.

And eventually—almost against reason—they fall in love.

They welcome a baby boy. Peter chooses devotion, perhaps for the first time in his life. He tries. He grows. He reaches for her with full sincerity.

And for a while, it works.

Until it doesn’t.

In peak The Great fashion, Catherine’s mother—boundaryless, theatrical, wildly inappropriate—arrives and seduces Peter. Their encounter against a palace window ends in a spectacularly absurd tragedy: the window bursts open, she falls two or three stories, and dies instantly.

So now we have:

Peter III slept with Catherine’s mother.

And killed her.

Accidentally.

During sex.

Peter panics. He lies. He hides the truth.

Catherine eventually learns what happened, and the shock is so enormous it seems to tear through her bones.

And this is where the show becomes almost Shakespearean in its brutality:

They both believe the other might kill them.

Peter, terrified, asks himself whether he should dig deeper into the lie or confess—and concludes that if Catherine knows, she’ll kill him.

So he decides he must kill her first to survive.

And Catherine—devastated, disoriented, raw with betrayal—reaches her breaking point.

In the anguish of it all, she actually tries to kill him.

Her rage becomes action.

Her heartbreak becomes movement.

Her body reacts before her mind can catch up.

Two people who love each other—deeply, fiercely—now circling each other like animals in a closed room.

Fear and grief and ego mixing until neither can tell where love ends and instinct begins.

And then comes the moment that stopped me.

After all the scheming, panic, guilt, and the quiet decision to end her life, Peter III stands before Catherine and says:

“I never knew the difference between cowardice and courage until you.”

And then, with the entire court watching—after fully preparing to murder his wife to avoid losing her—he says:

“Catherine—I’m honestly just so fucking sorry.

It turns out the worst thing in life is to come up against your own limitations and stumble, and in the fall you crush the one person you wished to be your best for.”

I paused the show.

Because something in those words hit a place in me I don’t visit often.

A quiet, private place.

A place still tender, still carrying the outline of a wound.

Not because I expect an apology.

Not because I think it will ever come.

Not because I am holding on.

But because I recognize the shape of it—the longing for someone to look at you and finally say:

“I see what I did.

I know how deeply it hurt you.

And I am sorry.”

And what lingered for me wasn’t the absurdity or the drama or even the betrayal.

It was the courage and the apology.

And the recognition of a connection that was true despite all of the flawed humanity.

Because beneath the chaos of that scene—two people who loved each other, who hurt each other, who almost killed each other—there was something unmistakably honest:

A man facing himself for the first time.

A truth spoken without armor.

A moment where love didn’t erase the harm, but acknowledged it.

And maybe that’s what pierced me.

Not the confession.

Not the remorse.

Not even the words themselves.

But the fact that he tried.

That he reached for courage he had never once found before.

That he let himself be seen—not as an emperor or a character, but as someone who knew he had broken the heart of the woman he truly loved.

There is a certain ache in watching that.

A familiar shape.

A quiet recognition in the body.

Because some part of me still knows what it is to long for that moment—

for someone to stand in front of you, stripped of ego and defense,

and say the thing that could have changed everything if it had come in time:

“I see what I did.

I know it hurt you.

And I am sorry.”

And then the episode does something beautiful.

After all the devastation, all the fear, all the ways they nearly destroyed each other,

Catherine and Peter end up in an awkward, hesitant embrace.

Not reconciled.

Not resolved.

Not sure what comes next.

Just two people standing in the wreckage of everything that’s happened, holding each other because they don’t know what else to do.

And as they stand there—broken, imperfect, strangely tender—

“I’m Sticking With You” by The Velvet Underground drifts in softly.

The sweetness of the song against the wreckage of their relationship.

The innocence of the melody against the brutality of what they survived.

The strange, human truth of loving someone who has hurt you in ways words can barely hold.

It’s that contradiction—

that fragile, awkward, impossible humanness—

that stayed with me.

I don't know how the show will end but.

But in that moment—

Those writers got me.