The fifth episode of Dickinson‘s final season, titled “Sang from the Heart, Sire”, written by Alena Smith and Francis Weiss Rabkin and directed by Keith Powell, starts out happily enough. Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) has gotten a glowing letter back from her potential mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Gabriel Ebert) praising her poems, there’s a laugh-out-loud funny quilt auction sequence, and Emily has the great idea to cheer everyone up with a family sing-a-long. And then, in the last eight minutes of the episode, it all falls apart.
“I do think it’s a turning point in the season,” Jane Krakowski, who plays family matriarch Mrs. Dickinson told Decider during a recent press day for the series.
Despite some positive sequences early on, including an incredibly romantic declaration of devotion from Emily to a child-weary Sue (Ella Hunt), the cracks are already showing throughout the episode. Mr. Dickinson (Toby Huss) is being shunned by society for supporting his Confederate brother in the local newspaper, on his birthday no less, and has decided that he’ll just fade away and die — which is what leads to Emily proposing the sing-a-long.
But the bigger, more ominous moment comes between Sue and her husband Austin (Adrian Blake Enscoe), who is also Emily’s brother. When Sue essentially demands that Austin, who is not speaking to his father, come to the sing-a-long, he instead begs her to let him stay with their new baby. He has barely seen the child, but Sue explains that fathers are supposed to be absent, and it’s a mother’s job to raise the baby. Incensed, Austin drunkenly lunges towards her, and Sue, terrified, backs away.
“That was probably the scariest day on set,” Enscoe recalled, “just because going to that place with Austin, this character that I really love and believe in was, I don’t know, just…”
“We were both really scared,” Hunt added.
Ultimately, Sue pushes back by diminishing Austin, which leads directly to the end scenes we’ll get to in a moment. But particularly for the in-real-life earnest and kind Enscoe, this was a difficult role to jump into.
“My god, it was a real challenge for me because I tend to be like a bubbly personality,” Enscoe said. “Which doesn’t mean that I don’t have turmoil inside, I just had to tap into that a little bit more, but Austin is definitely confronting his innermost demons in this season. He’s burning down the great house of Dickinson and trying to seek a better way forward. And so I really had to give myself the space to let go, and really sink into the scary moments of this character arc.”
With Austin stewing back at his own house, the Dickinson women — Sue, Emily, Mrs. Dickinson, and Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov), who is doing a silent performance piece — gather in the parlor to surprise Mr. Dickinson. Probably not the absolute best idea, since he suffered a small heart attack in the season premiere, and again almost collapses here. But it leads to a joyful sequence as the assembled cast dances and sings to old-time favorites from the 1800s.
It’s what Krakowski called “as close as we’re going to get to a musical episode of Dickinson,” while Hunt called out that it felt like a “play,” thanks in part to showrunner Alena Smith’s playwright past; and the whole sequence was essentially filmed in real-time by Powell. Also perhaps of note? The scenes were filmed on Hunt’s birthday.
“[We] ended up doing that quite a bit with this camera rig that we had with the sing along,” Steinfeld said. “And so we lived in that space for quite a long time, and it never felt any less fresh than the last take. It was so real and so nuanced on everyone’s part. It’s a little bit of light. It’s like this fire that they’re struggling to keep alive, really lit.”
For each “performance,” the main singer would come onto the set, share what they had prepared, and it would be filmed without cutting. As Krakowski recalled, “We applauded when we wanted to applaud, we laughed or danced when we felt moved to dance and move. And so it was a joyous moment for us cast members to all share that sing along together.”
The final song performed is a rendition of the Stephen Foster classic “Hard Times Come Again No More”, performed beautifully by Hailee Steinfeld.
“They were recording just the audio, and I was in the next room, so I was just listening,” Baryshnikov said. “I found myself sobbing, because it was just one of those moments that I let myself feel how difficult the past year had been, and how it feels like, right now… Sometimes if you take a pause to think about the loneliness of this past time, it’s almost too much to bear.”
That sense of catharsis, both for society and the Dickinson family, crests when out of seemingly nowhere, in walks Austin. He’s fully dressed, composed, and begins to duet with Emily on the song, leading to a hope from both the characters and the viewers that this the turning point when the Dickinson family Civil War is finally over: Austin has settled his differences with his father, rejoined the family, and as the song says, hard times will come again no more.
Only instead, the worst is yet to come. First, there’s a gasp-inducing gaffe from Sue when, responding to Mr. Dickinson saying that “you two” should teach the song to their “young boy,” she excitedly says, “You mean me and Emily?” Confused, Mr. Dickinson responds that no, of course he means her and Austin. Perhaps because of Sue’s flub, or perhaps because he had already made up his mind, Austin starts pouring drink after drink, and explains that not only is he leaving the family law practice to start a new one without his father, he’s specializing in divorce — starting with his own. Oh, and also he’s planning on taking full custody of their child.
He’s not done, though. After Sue gives a withering glance towards his drink and notes he probably won’t even “remember this in the morning,” Emily tries to soothe tensions — though Austin shoots back that she probably knows why he’s doing this better than anyone else; a tacit admission that he knows his wife and sister are in a romantic relationship, even if they’re not saying it out loud.
But what comes next is something that hasn’t been said out loud, harkening back to a shocking event from the first season: when Mr. Dickinson hit Emily. After Edward becomes furious in this scene and slams his hand on the piano, Austin yells at him, pointing to Emily and saying, “Why don’t you go ahead and hit me? Come on. Hit me like you used to hit her.” And though Austin is right to call out the behavior, and Mr. Dickinson is wrong, by the end of this scene Austin has alienated every member of his family, and Emily has chosen her own father over him.
It all ends with Mrs. Dickinson, dressed in her wedding dress, falling down the stairs (don’t worry, Krakowski assured us it was a stunt double).
“The family, everyone in this family has matured so much,” Steinfeld said. “Their point of views of the world have changed. The world that they’re living in is changing so rapidly. And although their lives are very intertwined, they are very much all on their own personal journeys. In a time of hopelessness and in a time of loss and pain, they find this glimpse of light and of hope and of love and this togetherness that is soon to be broken up by Austin, who is in this heartbreaking place in his life.”
As for Lavinia, who is silently reacting to everything as it goes down, and ultimately breaks her vow to yell that, “this family is absolutely insane,” Baryshnikov noted that, “I was just feeling what Lavinia was feeling, which is that this is an incredibly hard time for so many people, and so many people have spent so much more time with their family than they ordinarily do. It feels like a lot of unsaid tensions have risen to the surface. There’s a way in which that’s good, because it means that people can move forward, and that there can be healing, but it’s also hard. It’s like ripping off a scab.”
Though this is all grueling to watch, Steinfeld called out Enscoe’s work as an actor in the scene, adding that, “I feel I’ve seen some of the best work I’ve ever seen in the actors, in the show and in this season.”
And while the bulk of the vitriol is between Sue and Austin, for Hunt and Enscoe? It was kind of fun.
“I will say it was also fun to see this character do things that you didn’t expect him to do,” Enscoe said.
Added Hunt, to Enscoe, “And to see you as an actor, getting to flex that side of yourself, I think for all of us cast was so much fun. You brought the house down, literally.”
Still, there’s one more scene to go in the episode, and after five minutes of emotional devastation you’d be forgiven for thinking as a viewer you’d get a respite. You don’t. Heading up to her room, Emily discovers Sue at her desk, distraught. Emily thinks it’s about Austin, but in fact it’s because Emily has been sending her poems to Higginson, including a poem she previously gave to Sue. But perhaps the real issue? In Emily’s letters to Higginson, she’s made herself sound like she’s “helpless,” according to Sue, adding, “you’re completely alone, it doesn’t even mention me.”
Finishing up, Sue lays it all out: “You think you’re fighting for something,” she tells Emily. “You’re just running away.”
And with that, she walks out of the room and closes the door between them, as Emily watches, stunned.
“Susan, this new chapter of her life where she is embracing messiness, she is allowing herself to feel all of the feelings, whereas she’s been so repressed in season one and season two,” Hunt said. “Her love for Emily and her acceptance of that love allows her to be messy. And so I felt able to embrace that in myself as an actor and I didn’t overly plan and I came into each scene just up for getting messy with it.”
Clearly, that New Sue led at least in part this week to a huge fracture in the relationship between the two, but don’t give up hope: there are still five episodes to go before the series ends for good. And we all know Emily Dickinson has a little something to say about hope… Even if, right now, all we have is the mess.
Dickinson streams Fridays on Apple TV+.
Where to watch Dickinson