The episode was indeed heartbreaking. It was also a very uncomfortable episode for me to watch for a lot of reasons. I mean…on the one hand Rosalee and Monroe truly care for each other and were following each other’s wishes when they made that commitment to one another.

On the other hand, one of the problems with euthanasia practices is that elderly and/or disabled people, especially those with mental illness, dementia, or other such problems are especially vulnerable to abuse of any kind. There’s an ugly tendency in Western culture–and other cultures, I’m sure–to devalue human beings who don’t meet a certain standard of health or “productivity” as burdens or even dangers to society who are unworthy of life.

There are very real concerns among the disabled and mentally ill communities about euthanasia, precisely because of those attitudes and because of the risk of disabled people being euthanized against their will or pressured into choosing euthanasia by family members who don’t want the burden of caring for them.

So watching an episode that validated that narrative by depicting elderly victims of dementia as literal murderers was extremely disturbing to me. The episode treated euthanasia completely uncritically, as necessary and merciful without any caveats, and even dismissed criticism of it as outsiders just “not understanding” a community’s needs.

That was horrifying. And that horror undercut the episode’s emotional punch for me, because the whole time I was sitting there as a chronically ill person thinking about the message it was sending about people like me, whether intentionally or not.