#tw;sexual harassment

[lonelier-version-of-you]

Back to series 15 of Holby - this time, I’ll be watching S15E24 “Journey’s End”. I don’t know what it says about me that I just keep thinking “oh, there was also a Doctor Who episode with that title” lol.

Edit 1: Oh, Tara. :( And Ollie being so worried about her. :’))

Edit 2: It’s Chantelle’s birthday! This episode aired on the 26th of March 2013, so unless they go on to say it’s set some other day (but it definitely seems like it’s been a week since the previous episode), that’s when her birthday is.

Edit 3: That scene with Chrissie and the patient was lovely.

Edit 4: Tara 😭

Edit 5: Chantelle thinking her ex (maybe Torchwood Boy, maybe another ex, it’s not clear) is the only one to remember her birthday. :(

Edit 6: Henrik and Tara scene!!

Edit 7: It honestly didn’t click with me until just now that Jake doesn’t know (at this point) about Malick being gay.

Edit 8: I’m so obsessed with this whole “secret birthday party for Chantelle” plot. This is the kind of fun later Holby almost always lacked in.

Edit 9: This episode is leaning really hard into the whole ‘Arthur is autistic’ thing, lol.

Edit 10: Jing Lusi being brilliant again. I love Tara (and her relationship with Ollie) so much.

Edit 11: I hate how this dad on AAU is behaving towards his daughter.

Edit 12: Arthur and Ollie scene! I do miss when people from different wards would interact.

Edit 13: Speaking of autistic Arthur, he just said: “The thing is, I just - I tend to find that being myself doesn’t really work for me.”

Edit 14: “Technically that’s four words, isn’t it? Two contracted.” Why is Arthur in this episode acting just like me.

Edit 15: Okay, so apparently Torchwood Boy is indeed the ex who called Chantelle earlier. And she’s going out for a meal with him. Chantelle, turning Arthur down is one thing, but don’t give Torchwood Boy the time of day! He never deserved you! You deserve better!

Edit 16: Henrik calling Tara by her first name 😭 He almost never went by first-name basis with people at this point, especially not at work. So you know he’s worried when he addresses her as “Tara” and not “Dr. Lo”.

Edit 17: Wow. Just... wow. That final monologue from Tara just blew me away. The writing, the delivery... the whole thing is just heartbreaking.

Also, just... see, this is why I don’t understand “Henrik saw Sahira as a daughter!” takes (or the fact that his actual Wikipedia page says that - I really need to update it at some point). For one thing, Guy Henry himself has said that Henrik was sexually attracted to Sahira.

But even if he hadn’t - Henrik was very clear on his interest in Sahira being romantic (he freaked out so much when she asked him if it was for a reason, he wouldn’t have been so bothered if it wasn’t the case), he repeatedly compared himself to Sahira’s romantic interests (both Greg and Rafi) with comments like “why would you be [dependent on Henrik for emotional validation] when you can derive your self-esteem from the fawning attentions of our finest beta males?”, or “What you felt in there [theatre] just now... you won’t feel that anywhere else. Or with anyone else.” (this was literally part of a rant about how if she left Holby and moved away with her husband, she’d come to resent Rafi and want to still be with Henrik instead!). Even just the way he looks at her - that’s not the way you look at someone you think of as a daughter.

I mean, I know fundamentally abuse and harassment is more about power than attraction - and it’s about power in Henrik’s case too - but in this case, attraction was most definitely a facet in the whole thing. It would still have been sexual harassment and emotional abuse (yes, I said the words, the words fandom utterly refuses to apply to Henrik and his treatment of Sahira! Actually, there might be some interesting analysis to apply here about how people struggle to accept that someone can be an abuser to someone in their life and also have genuinely loving and positive relationships with others. Because Henrik’s not a complete monster all the time, and has had plenty of moments of care and compassion, people struggle to accept that he can have done all of that and still have abused Sahira.) if he wasn’t attracted to her, but he was.

Whereas if you look at his relationship with Tara - he genuinely loves her, worries about her, and treats her like a daughter. He cared deeply enough that even Roxanna felt the need to tell him how sorry she was after Tara’s passing. I don’t know why people say Sahira was the one he viewed as a daughter, when he was so much more parental to Tara.

I might edit this again later to cut down this meta, because the rant’s gotten longer than I intended. I have a lot of feelings about the Henrik/Tara relationship.

[lonelier-version-of-you]

Not me watching Laila Rouass on House of Games and getting mad again thinking about the Henrik sl and how they retconned everything

Hold on a second, Laila Rouass is on House of Games?! I haven't seen it in ages, but I want to watch this week's episodes now, lol.

But yeah, I really don't blame you. Even the slightest thing gets me thinking about the fucking Reyhan storyline again (I was thinking about it just the other day, after the anniversary of that episode where Henrik hired Rafi so Sahira would be forced to stay at Holby). I hate it so much. What a load of sensationalist nonsense, and it's utterly laughable that they pretended it was about "raising awareness" - it was so clearly solely done to villainise poor Sahira and treat Henrik as the real victim of "the evil Shah family". Like... he literally sexually harassed and emotionally abused her! One would have to be outright biased against Sahira and desperate to claim Henrik can do no wrong to say that's not a true statement, because by just about any definition of those terms, what Henrik did falls under it.

Once upon a time, during the original Sahira storyline, the show acknowledged that. It was only in his second stint (yet another reason he either should never have come back, or left after the Gaskell storyline), when they went for the “moral compass Henrik” narrative, that the trauma Sahira went through became too inconvenient for them to acknowledge and so they shoved it in the bin in favour of “super privileged bully Sahira and poor little victim Henrik” (which made absolutely no sense).

I got reminded, recently, of this dialogue from Sahira in S14E26 "Equilibrium" (emphasis mine):

Sahira: "Apparently I'm not focused enough. Apparently, there's no place for 'domestic entanglements' in theatre. 'Singular opportunity', 'singular capability' - I mean, how many times do I have to hear that same old song? What do I have to do to get him off my back? Out of my head?"

How do people watch this stuff and still victim-blame her, or think how Henrik treated her wasn't abusive, or think it was at all okay for the show to rewrite her entire backstory just to make the viewers pity her abuser instead of sympathising with her?!

Gah, sorry. I've had this entire rant building up in my mind for a while but was too scared to post it (because of the fear of getting shouted at or told I hate Henrik - my literal favourite character! - just for pointing out that he's an awful person who should not be romanticised) and this ask just unleashed the ranting. I do apologise.

It's a shame the show didn't bring Sahira back properly. The very, very least she deserved after everything Henrik put her through was an apology from him. I always wanted to see Henrik actually apologise to Sahira and own up to his actions and now he never will... sigh. :/ And the fact that so many people haven't seen old Holby and will now forever think the Reyhan storyline is canon, and that Sahira Shah was Henrik's childhood friend whose dad abused him, is so upsetting to think about. It isn't, and she wasn't! She was his mentee he met in 1995, whom he bullied and harassed. Any trauma as a result of their friendship was caused by him to her, not the other way around. But now people just think she's some terrible abuse-apologist bully when the original Sahira was literally nothing like that (okay, she did refuse to believe an abuse case once, but that was only because she didn't want to believe something so terrible could happen, and she did come to see the truth eventually). She may have been far from perfect, but she and her family did not in any way bully Henrik, or abuse him, or ruin his life. That was all him.

[lonelier-version-of-you]

Hey, remember when Henrik got Sahira demoted from her own fucking unit solely because her husband - not even Sahira herself, HER HUSBAND, whose actions she is not responsible for because she is her own individual person - called him out for sexually harassing her?