wildeabandon | The Queen's Gambit

I'm currently watching The Queen's Gambit with

leonato, and we watched the third episode last night. I'm finding it quite an interesting work, because parts of the subject material are really quite dark, and also related to things I find quite personally traumatic (addiction, institutionalisation, childhood isolation).
But they're handled in a way that neither trivialises them nor leans in really hard to the grimness. And there's something quite cathartic about that - it feels like an acknowledgement that these things are serious, but that they don't have to be the be all and end all of a life.

During this episode the protagonist, who had been somewhat ostracised by the popular girls, is invited to a party after having been featured in a magazine. I had a knot in my stomach, waiting for it to go horribly wrong as she is set up to fail some social test, but it didn't. She clearly feels a bit uncomfortable, and after a while pretends to go to the loo and slips away home, but in a way that is obviously her choosing to reject them rather than the other way around.