Cogs can think.

I’m in a Dead Like Me period again. I’m watching the series for, I don’t know, the tenth time or something. I can basically lip-sync the entire show.

Episode 5 of season 1, ‘Reaping Havoc’, is probably my favourite; it also happens to split the series in two. Part one, with Betty, and part two, with Daisy. In this episode, Betty ‘piggy back rides’ along with a dead soul into the afterlife, right after becoming George’s only real friend, leaving George devastated.

Betty - “a real pistol” - is probably the most mysterious character in all of Dead Like Me (as George puts it, “mysterious and reassuring”). She appeared in the first five episodes only, and she spent one of those locked in one of those drawers at the morgue (”She’s incapacitated.”). Apart from Rube, Betty was definitely the most skilled reaper of them all. The ease with which she reaped souls was stunning, and she always tried to put a smile on the face of the person she was about to reap. Her Polaroid camera was invaluable - “happy thoughts”, she’d say, right before taking a picture of the soon-to-be dead person. The photo would go into one of her many sacks.

Betty disappears, and nobody knows what happened to her. Reapers can’t go to the afterlife like the souls they reap can. When Betty jumps into the afterlife, we see her turning into lights, that circle around one another right before they explode. We don’t know if she’s in the afterlife, or just plain ‘gone’.

This episode is filled with nothing but brilliant and beautiful quotes, but I think the final voice-over by George is the one that touches me the most.

When you can’t make sense of someone leaving, you try to make sense of what they left behind. And it makes it a whole lot easier when what they left you was beautiful.