Five Minute Friday: MERCY

Today I'm linking up with Five Minute Friday, writing for five minutes on a given prompt. This week's word is MERCY.

Richard and I have been watching a very entertaining drama series called A Place to Call Home this summer, and the episode we watched last night was a fascinating example of the complex relationship between justice and mercy. (NOTE: IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY WATCHING OR INTEND TO WATCH THIS SHOW, YOU MAY WISH TO STOP READING TO AVOID SPOILERS.)

In the show, an evil, malicious man and woman (we'll call them Bad Guy and Bad Gal) are working together to bring down a wealthy but (mostly) good family. They do some terrible things to this family out of ambition, envy, revenge, resentment, twisted love -- all kinds of reasons.

But eventually Bad Gal is brought low, and gradually, over a period of three years, she starts to change. Bad Guy wants to keep using her to hurt the rich family -- but bit by bit she starts siding with the family, telling them Bad Guy's plans and how to get back at him. Because she's done such awful things on her own and in the service of Bad Guy, none of them wants to trust her at first. But slowly that changes too. The warnings she gives them come true. The suggestions she makes for how to thwart Bad Guy actually work. They begin to believe that -- despite all her malicious deeds -- she might actually be on their side after all.

When Bad Guy realizes Bad Gal has been working against him rather than for him, everything explodes, and Bad Gal is found dead. All the evidence points to Bad Guy, who is charged with her murder.

But then two members of the family make a shocking discovery: that Bad Gal actually ended her own life in hopes that Bad Guy would be charged with her murder. Bad Guy had the motive to kill her, and he probably wanted to, perhaps even tried to -- but he didn't do it.

So then the family must make a choice. Do they stay silent about what they've discovered, honour the sacrifice made by a woman they once despised, and let Bad Guy, who has caused them so much suffering, be punished for a crime he didn't commit? Or do they tell the police what they know, thus allowing Bad Guy to go free and (seemingly) nullifying Bad Gal's final attempt to atone for her misdeeds?

After deciding that the choice to keep silent must be a unanimous one, each member of the family states their opinion. One by one, each of them states that they want to keep silent and let Bad Guy go to prison. Finally the matriarch of the family speaks, casting the single opposing vote. She says, "I once betrayed my moral code because of love [helping her terminally ill husband end his own life]; I refuse to do it again because of hate." So the family tells the police, and Bad Guy goes free.

So is this an example of justice? Or mercy?

For Bad Guy, justice prevails: a man is accused of a crime, he's proven not to have committed that crime, and he's freed.

But Bad Guy also receives mercy. The family owe him nothing; he owes them reparations for all the ways he's violated them. But they make a choice that frees him of all obligation to make amends. He never pays and (from what we know of him) probably never will.

For Bad Gal, justice also prevails: she has done awful things, and she pays with her life to atone for them.

But there is mercy for her, too. The family has had every reason to reject, disbelieve, and mistrust her; yet they give her the gift of trust, of believing her when she says she's changed -- and she honours that trust. She ends up dying for people who have given her a chance. There's redemption in that.

Sometimes fiction is too black and white: the villains too villainous, the good guys too perfect, the outcomes too cut-and-dried. But good fiction reminds us how complex life can be -- how the black and white can blur into gray, how justice and mercy, love and hate, forgiveness and vengeance, can be all mixed together in a very complicated, and very human, package.