In the finale of The Reckoning, inquisitor Sarah Willis finally revealed the crime for which David and Dione Sinclair's young daughter, Teah Grace, was arrested by the Ministry of Justice. [Spoiler alert] On October 12, 2035, Teah attacked Mrs. Aurora Miller, a yoga teacher living at 12 Maple Close. Mrs. Miller was having an affair with her father and was seven months pregnant with his child, and as soon as Teah discovered David's secret, she attempted to eliminate the child inside her womb, as she did not want another child brought into this broken world.
From a young age, Teah had been in an extreme environmental action group, the Earth Warriors, who believed that humans had been destroying the planet with their growing population, and it was time for them to call it quits and stop reproducing in order to ensure the safety of the planet. The episode, through an intense interview with David and Dione, highlights all the childhood incidents that shaped Teah's extremist beliefs and influenced her decision to take such drastic measures against her father's second son. So, without further ado, let's take a detailed look at everything that happened in the episode and the characters' ultimate fates.
Director: Michael Samuels
Writer: Mark Burt
Stars: Claire Skinner, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, India Fowler
I suppose the point of the Milligan Act and holding parents accountable for serious crimes committed by their children, especially minors, is to point out that parents sometimes ignore the fact that children are not adults. In other words, we must be very careful about the situations a child is exposed to at home. In David's case, he mistook Teah's high intelligence for emotional maturity and showed a five-year-old girl a live stream of the flood disaster in Bangladesh, which killed more than 200,000 people in three days. Teah, obviously, didn't have the emotional strength to witness so much death and devastation, so she began to have nightmares about the end of the world. The parents had to consult a child psychologist, but it didn't help. Teah was never the same after the traumatic incident and became obsessed with global warming, which later convinced her to join an eco-terrorist group and take drastic action against those who had been directly or indirectly harming Mother Earth.
But David wasn't the only one to blame. Teah's mother, Dione, also believed her inquisitive daughter was mature enough to accept the truth and ended up sharing her unfiltered thoughts about pregnancy with her. Dione never really wanted to bring a child into the world, believing pregnancy would hinder her career success. She had terminated her pregnancy twice and was going to do so for a third time, but her dying mother talked her out of it. Dione thought she could try, but ended up hating every second of her life for the next nine months. When Teah was nine, Dione told her that she sometimes regretted bringing a child into the world. The young woman seemed to blame herself for her mother's experiences during pregnancy, and those thoughts likely stayed with her, which could be why Teah couldn't accept her existence and wanted to dedicate her life to a cause. She began to view human reproduction from her mother's perspective and didn't want any other woman to go through the same suffering and pain. Her mother's words greatly influenced Teah's attack on Aurora Miller, as she believed her father would bring forth a child similar to hers, though she seemed unaware that Teah's extremist thoughts were the result of poor parenting and nothing more.
At the end of The Reckoning, Inquisitor Willis revealed that David had worked as a police informant for the past two years to protect his daughter from arrest. The security services, who had been monitoring Teah and her eco-terrorist group, contacted David to serve as an intelligence source to protect his daughter. This was the reason David started attending all those demonstrations and meetings with Teah to gather information against his friends and get them arrested. Well, it's debatable whether he genuinely wanted to help Teah or whether he simply became a mole because he knew he'd be arrested under the Milligan Act if Teah's crime was discovered. So, maybe David wasn't helping Teah, but himself?
Be that as it may, the local committee of Teah's extremist group found dirt on David and asked him to spy on his father. It was then that Teah discovered the specialized communication device David used to contact his contact. But although Teah knew her father was a snitch, it wasn't something that prompted her to attack Aurora Miller. While surveilling her father, Teah discovered his infidelity and the secret child he would be carrying into the world.
As soon as Teah learned the revelations, she suffered a nervous breakdown and called him a traitor, not expecting him to betray the cause he had worked so long to achieve. As mentioned, Teah wanted humanity to stop reproducing, considering them the root of all evil, but she lost her composure when she discovered her own father was secretly reproducing with another woman. Teah likely planned the attack while her parents were at a party and went to Mrs. Miller's house to kill her child in the womb. Well, fortunately, she didn't succeed, as Ms. Miller knew something about martial arts and yoga. However, as Inquisitor Willis explained, the act itself carries a life sentence, suggesting she could spend the rest of her life behind bars. But since Teah had confessed to her crimes, the court approved her request to serve the sentence in a punitive coma so she wouldn't have to witness the end of the world, something that traumatized her throughout her childhood.
A child's mind is like wax. Good parenting can mold it correctly, while bad parenting could make it worse. Growing up, a child absorbs everything that happens around them, and over time, this shapes their personality. The problem is that, once they grow up, it's impossible to change how they function. What happened to them in their childhood has become part of their consciousness. By the end of the interview, the parents knew they were both at fault, but instead of accepting their own flaws, they focused on pointing fingers at each other, which might make you realize that, like Teah, David and Dione were also beyond saving.
The point is, David and Dione weren't meant for each other. They shouldn't have been together in the first place. Call it bad luck or something, but the sexual encounter between two people brought a life into the world they weren't capable of nurturing. David knew he'd made mistakes with Teah and wanted a second child, but Dione didn't want to go through those nightmares again and refused to get pregnant again, which led to David's extramarital affair with Aurora, who became pregnant with David's second child. David didn't want Dione to find out about his affair, which is why he didn't give the court access to his personal online records. I mean, David might have seemed like someone who cared about people's rights and freedoms, but like Dione, he was a narcissist who believed in his own political ideologies and barely cared about his partner.
He didn't even know anything about Dione and only pretended to follow the manual for being a good husband or a good father, but let's be honest, he failed miserably at both. I guess at some point David realized he'd made a huge mistake with Teah, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't rectify it, which is why he wanted to start over with Aurora. I think he would have abandoned Teah and left Dione's life as soon as their second daughter was born. And as for Dione, well, it was pretty obvious she valued her career and partying more than her daughter, and she was quite ashamed of her existence, even if she never said it out loud.
In the finale of The Trial, both David and Dione were found guilty of psychological, empathic, and emotional neglect of a child, for which Teah committed a serious crime. The parents were taken into police custody pending prosecution under the Milligan Act, which governs these types of crimes. David and Dione likely won't receive life sentences, although their punishment would be no less severe. I expect things will be different for Aurora's son, especially when David isn't around to traumatize him with live videos on his phone. And even after he's released from prison, I hope Aurora learns a lesson from what happened to Teah and doesn't allow David to cast his shadow over the baby. Also, before I miss it, I believe that at the beginning of the episode, Inquisitor Willis stated that the Milligan Act came into effect in 2033; however, at the end, it was passed in 2030, which I believe is a mistake in the episode itself.
The ending of The Trial suggested that Sarah Willis was pregnant with a child and had high hopes of doing a much better job than the parents she dealt with on a daily basis.
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