wicked knows what it's doing to your good girl story
Emergency post: Dropping everything to talk about that Wicked final scene.
Hi everyone!
Breaking from regular programming because I finally watched Wicked earlier this week and I've been doing that thing where you start writing an essay in your head while walking down the street, nearly getting hit by cars because you're too busy thinking about power dynamics in fantasy musicals. You know, normal stuff. Then again, this is a final scene newsletter after all - and while TFS isn't exclusively about endings, some climatic moments simply demand an emergency dispatch. This is one of them.
Disclaimer: While this isn't primarily about plot, there are specific details about Part One's ending discussed. I've marked the spoiler sections clearly - you can skip it and still follow the broader meditation on visibility if you're planning to see it fresh.
Till next Thursday,
Sophie x
It was raining in London the morning I went to see Wicked, the kind of November rain that turns the city into watercolor. The theater was (unexpectedly) full. I found myself sitting next to two teenagers who kept checking their phones during "Thank Goodness" (the audacity). Their screens casted brief, sharp shadows on the ceiling, little rectangles of light that reminded me of all the times I've sat alone in dark theaters, watching other people's transformations.
I had not expected to think about perception, about the particular violence of being seen on someone else's terms. The musical has always been about transformation, of course - this is what we tell ourselves, what the marketing promises, what holding space-gate videos confirm in their infinite scrolling wisdom. But sitting there in the dark, watching Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba read the Grimmerie for the first time - a book no one else in Oz can decipher - I began to understand something else entirely about the nature of visibility, about the specific weight of being exceptional in a world that demands conformity.
Jon M. Chu's adaptation strips away the comfortable distance that made the stage version digestible. There is no theatrical barrier here, no fourth wall to protect us from the immediacy of Elphaba's otherness. The camera stays close - too close sometimes, reminiscent of those rare moments when a filmmaker understands that fantasy requires intimacy to break your heart - as if determined to make us confront what it means to exist as spectacle. In Erivo's hands, every interaction with the Wizard becomes both seduction and threat, each moment of recognition carrying the subtext of what we're willing to sacrifice to be seen the way we've always dreamed.
Erivo builds this understanding through moments so quiet they feel like confessions. The way she angles toward Jeff Goldblum's Wizard in the Emerald City, hungry for the validation she's been denied, only to recoil when she realizes the price of his approval is complicity in oppression. How her voice shifts between public and private spaces, as if she's learned to modulate not just her magic but her entire existence. By the time she reaches that tower with the stolen Grimmerie, we recognize the particular exhaustion in her eyes. It's the same exhaustion that lives in every person who's ever been asked to perform their difference as entertainment, to turn their existence into a palatable spectacle for someone else's comfort.
What we're watching isn't just a story about a witch choosing sides – it's a meditation on the price of legitimacy. Chu understands this. He expands "Wizomania," the show-within-a-show at the heart of the Emerald City, into something more unsettling than its stage counterpart. The sequence now includes the Wise Ones, who sing of prophecies and power, of a stranger from the sky who might read their ancient texts. "In Oz's darkest hour / Though we cannot say when / There will come one with the power / To read the Grimmerie again." The irony cuts deep – they're celebrating the Wizard, this man from Omaha who's built his authority on illusion, while the real reader of their sacred text stands in the audience, her green skin marking her as both spectacle and threat. It's a perfect encapsulation of how power works: the ability to determine who gets to be extraordinary and who gets to be aberration.
The relationship between Elphaba and Glinda crystallizes this tension. Their paths to visibility couldn't be more different – Glinda, who transforms her name from Galinda in a bid for sophistication, understands instinctively how to perform palatability. She's what the philosopher Sara Ahmed might call a "willful subject" who aligns herself with power's desire lines. When the Wizard reveals his model of Oz, complete with a path from Munchkinland to the Emerald City, it's Glinda who gets to choose the yellow brick road's color. She's rewarded for knowing how to play within the lines, even as those lines tighten around her friend's throat. Meanwhile, Elphaba's authenticity becomes increasingly dangerous – her ability to read the Grimmerie marking her as both invaluable and uncontrollable. The same power that makes her exceptional also makes her impossible to contain.
The brilliance of splitting the musical into two parts reveals itself here – Elphaba's transformation isn't about vanishing (yet) but about choosing the terms of her own visibility. When she rises above the Emerald City on that enchanted broomstick, Erivo makes us understand. This isn't an escape, it's a declaration. There's a particular power in refusing to perform the version of yourself they've scripted, in claiming the spotlight on your own terms. In becoming the author of your own story, even if they label that story wicked.
Some of us know this power. We learn it in cities far from home, in moments when we finally understand that being seen isn't the same as being known. Sometimes you have to defy not just gravity but the entire gravitational pull of the life they thought you should want before you can build the one you need.
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Growing up in Athens means I inherited a particular kind of destiny. My parents mapped it out with the best intentions: good university, good job, good life, all within the safe radius of family Sunday lunches and summer houses in the islands. A life that looks perfect on paper. That summer, at twenty-four, I had everything my parents had planned for - a prestigious tech internship offer, a clear path forward, the beginning of what should have been my real life. Everything was falling into place exactly as designed. Except.
Except in the middle of the night, I'd find myself sitting on my childhood bed, surrounded by travel magazines that felt like my own version of Elphaba's pop-up book about the Emerald City – windows into somewhere else, somewhere different. The D word doesn't always announce itself with dramatic gestures. Sometimes it's quieter - the slow realization that you're suffocating in a life that fits you wrong, like clothes you've outgrown but keep wearing because everyone tells you how good they look. I had mastered the art of being okay. Of showing up to friend hangouts with the right answers about my future. Of performing contentment so convincingly I almost believed it myself. Like Elphaba at Shiz, sent there only to watch over someone else's interests, even my presence in my own life felt like an afterthought to someone else's plan.
The truth about being born in the wrong place isn't about the place at all. Athens was beautiful. Athens was home. Athens was also a cage built from love - from my parents' dreams, from cultural expectations, from the suffocating certainty that my life had already been written. Every street corner held the ghost of the person I was supposed to become. Every coffee with childhood friends became an exercise in nodding along to plans that felt like fiction. Everyone was so sure about everything. About who we were supposed to be, about where we were supposed to go, about what happiness should look like. It was its own kind of Emerald City – gleaming with promise from the outside, but built on comfortable lies about who gets to be what.
I bought the one-way ticket to London at 4AM, the screen of my laptop the only light in my room, my hands shaking like Elphaba's when she first touches the Grimmerie. The next morning, I turned down the internship offer - the kind of opportunity that would have set up my whole future back home. My parents' faces cycled through disbelief, anger, and that particular kind of hurt that comes from watching your child reject the life you carefully built for them. They were sure I'd be back in a month, the same way Glinda is sure Elphaba will apologize to the Wizard, return to the fold, accept the constraints of their reality. How could I explain that coming back would mean dying in small ways, day by day, in a life that looked perfect to everyone except the person living it? That sometimes the bravest thing isn't disappearing, but choosing to be visible on your own terms, even if it means being branded as selfish, ungrateful, wicked.
The strangest part about choosing to rise up is how many of us are doing it at any given moment. We rarely talk about it this way - we use softer words like "moving abroad" or "starting fresh" or "finding yourself." But sitting in that dark theater watching Erivo's Elphaba ascend above the Emerald City, broomstick in hand, I recognized something in the eyes of those two teenagers with their phones. The way they kept checking their screens like lifelines to somewhere else, anywhere else. A generation planning their own defiance, crafting their own prophecies in TikTok comments and Snapchat streaks, each one a tiny rebellion against the lives being written for them.
// Wicked spoiler in the next paragraph //
There's a reason "Defying Gravity" resonates so deeply now. We live in an age of aggressive visibility, where existence demands constant documentation, where every moment unshared feels somehow less real. The irony doesn't escape me - writing this in London, years after my own flight, for people I'll never meet. But Elphaba understood something essential: sometimes you have to reject the story they're telling about you before you can write your own. It's why Chu ends Part One here, at this moment of spectacular defiance. With a declaration.
// Wicked spoiler ends here //
I think about all of us who've done it. The queer kids who move to cities where they can finally write their own names in lights. The artists who leave towns where art isn't a "real job," carrying the same wild hope as those winged monkeys before their wings became weapons. The eldest daughters who flee countries where their lives have been plotted out since birth, refusing to be another voice in someone else's "Wizomania" chorus, singing praise to a comfortable lie. Each of us crafting our own spells of transformation, not to disappear but to finally become visible as ourselves. Like Elphaba in that tower, choosing the western sky – not because it's safe, but because its harsh landscape offers something better than safety. The chance to stand, unflinching, in the full light of who we are.
Survival looks different for everyone. For Elphaba, it means refusing to trade her principles for acceptance, choosing the harsh western sky over the Wizard's golden approval. For me, it meant a one-way ticket and the courage to be incomprehensible to those who thought they knew me best. For others, it might mean changing names, changing cities, changing the entire script they were handed at birth. We transform in ways both spectacular and subtle, each of us finding our own version of defying gravity.
Next Friday I’m turning another year older in London, a city that was once my own Emerald City fantasy, now just home. There's something fitting about watching Erivo's Elphaba rise above the city on the eve of marking another year of my own chosen path. That moment when she soars above the Wizard's guards isn't really a spectacle – it's a birth announcement written in skywriting.
What no one tells you about choosing yourself is how permanent it becomes - not the choice itself, but the knowledge that you're capable of making it. Eight years after that flight from my hometown, I still sometimes catch myself mapping escape routes from perfectly pleasant parties, keeping my passport in my bedside drawer, holding onto the muscle memory of rebellion. Not because I need to flee anymore, but because understanding you can rise up is its own kind of freedom. Looking at old photos from Athens now, the girl in them looks like someone performing a life rather than living one - all careful smiles and calculated poses, a person constructed entirely from external expectations. I used to think I left because I was running away. Now I understand I was running toward the one thing no one around me could comprehend: the possibility of becoming unrecognizable to everyone who thought they knew exactly who I was meant to be.
// Wicked spoiler in the next paragraph //
This is what Erivo's Elphaba shows us in the final scene, refusing Glinda's plea to apologize, to come back down, to make herself small enough to fit their dreams of her. The radical truth pulses underneath every frame. Some stories can only be written from heights they never expected you to reach. A profound difference lives between being seen and being witnessed, between visibility on their terms and visibility you've claimed for yourself, between apologizing for your power and wielding it anyway, knowing the cost.
// Wicked spoiler ends //
We keep telling stories of transformation, of witches who refuse their assigned roles, because we recognize the revolutionary act buried in their bones. The courage to become incomprehensible to those who thought they could read you like their ancient spellbooks lingers in every fairy tale we pass down, in every myth of metamorphosis. These stories whisper the truth we're afraid to say aloud. Choosing to be seen as wicked is better than being good on someone else's terms. True freedom might require us to leave the ground entirely, to find our own orbit, even if they brand us defiant for daring to fly.
Stories about defiance run through every culture, reaching a fever pitch in this moment of perpetual performance. We craft our lives in public now, each post and share another brush stroke in the portrait others paint of us. I think about this watching Erivo's Elphaba rise above the Emerald City, claiming the spotlight on her own terms. Her choice burns bright in an age where visibility has become both currency and cage. The particular perversion of performative visibility lies in its promise of freedom. We're told being seen means power, representation means revolution, visibility means victory. Yet Elphaba understood something deeper. The most rebellious act lives in choosing which parts of yourself to illuminate, in shattering the frame others built to contain you.
Gravity was simply the beginning. The real rebellion soars higher. In the years since leaving home, I've found others who chose to write their own myths. We recognize each other somehow, those of us who've broken free from predetermined lives. Something electric lives in our shared glances - the quiet certainty of people who learned to turn witch hunts into flight paths. We understand now what Erivo's Elphaba embodied in that tower. Identity blooms in the space between what others demand to see and what you dare to show them. Sometimes you have to rise so high they can't tell if you're flying or falling. Sometimes that uncertainty becomes your freedom.
P.S. Apparently hitting that little heart button is the equivalent of leaving a good tip for the algorithm™ gods. So if you enjoyed this essay, please give it a like. And if you're sharing any of these takes in the wild (bless you), tag me - I love seeing which parts made you go "YES FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT." Sharing is also deeply appreciated because, you know, sharing is caring and all that cinema-loving jazz.
Fantastic review - i just saw it and wasn’t expecting to be moved to tears. I was, in fact sobbed at home afterwards. I agree with that leaving home, rising up, as I did the same years ago. I never really thought of it as a revolutionary uprising but I love that