Reply To: Do you think justice was done? 

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January 25, 2025 at 12:14 pm #33719

You raise a lot of good points here, Maureen, and it got me to thinking. It occurs to me that even though Sam said it was a duty to eliminate Burgess given his predatory nature, the manner of his death was extremely violent. He was beaten and brutalized before death. He wasn’t merely executed, he was tortured. Sam was unable to curb his own need for revenge in carrying out this task. I would assume that legally, this might fall under “cruel and unusual punishment” nowadays. Given Burgess’s treatment of the women he, too, brutalized, it was an act of reciprocation, but still, it disturbed me. At what point does a person become the thing they despise?
I’m not saying that I would be any better at self-control than he was, if I were in his shoes; I have no idea how I would have reacted. But it reminds me of Jean-Guy’s restraint when facing down Abigail Robinson in TMOC (SPOILER ALERT here, if you haven’t read it! Go no further!); he wanted so badly to kill her, to kill the threat to others that he felt her to be, but ultimately he held back because he couldn’t be the man he wanted to be for his children if he let himself go to that level. Given the times and the justice system, I still would have been more onboard with what happened to Burgess if they’d simply put a bullet in his head (or whatever was expediently available), instead of resorting to so much violence themselves.
As to your query about “Revenge?” I did wonder why that was brought up and emphasized, but had no idea what part it would play in the narrative!

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