DON’T SHOOT ME! I HAD TO DO IT! AND IT’S LONG!! SPOILERS FOR SERIES 3!
I originally posted this on 1st July, but then messed up the cut and did all manner of thick things, so I pulled it, sorted it out and - here it is again! It's very long - sorry - but I'm too dumb to be able to split it into sections. It's mainly a character study of Guy, but with a bit of Izzy chucked in for good measure.
Right, I think a word of explanation before I start! I thought that Guy’s death was much better (well, in as much as he’s dead) than I’d expected, but apart from the whole Guy being dead thing, there was something else which frustrated and annoyed me. We wereoffered tantalising hints of his life before Vasey, but they weren’t really followed up and as a result, we were left wondering about that time and how it contributed to creating the man he became. (Ignoring, for the moment, RA’s wonderful contributions to the creation of the Guy we see, despite the best efforts of The Shower Currently Posing As Writers).
There’ll be brief allusions to series 1 and 2, but the bulk of the stuff used will be from series 3, for several reasons.
1) The writers of this series never watched any previous ones, hence anything revealed about Guy this series bears only nominal relation to anything revealed about him before due to lack of continuity
2) Until series 3, we, and presumably Guy, had no idea that Izzy existed
3) The need to write out actors who were leaving and introduce actors who might be staying led to plot lines of such stunning crassness and illogicality that some reasoning was needed in order to prevent brain freeze
4) I felt that this series was in serious need of therapy, it was so schizophrenic. It was pitched a lot darker, yet still had to have the kiddie element - hence hang gliding, mangy lions and absolutely NO BLOOD when people are shot, stabbed, crushed or just so desperate that they poke out their eyes with sticks. Too dark to laugh at, too daft to be so dark…recipe for a train wreck.
I’m not, for once, criticizing the writers of series 1 and 2 - well, not much, except for Dominic Minghella and That Episode that made absolutely no sense whatsoever and possibly contributed to the divine Richard Armitage bailing. He has always maintained that he hated that ending and found it traumatic to act, as well as being totally out of kilter with a character that he’d spent so long trying to make some sense of. Oh, well you can’t argue with the boss in the end, and sadly, RA lost that one.
I’m not overly stressed about points 1 and 2 above. Where I could do a Lizzie Borden with the writers of series 3 is when I see glaring inconsistencies and shoddy continuity WITHIN THE SAME SERIES - see point 3 above. Kill Marian to rock Bobbin’s world? Yeah, for an episode, after which we return to smug cheeky chap with an eye for the girls, a cheesy grin and a silly walk! As for point 4, that sums it up for me.
However, in my parallel world, I shall try to ignore the worst of it in a terrible but somehow enjoyable foray into cod psychoanalysis in order to give my take on the make up and motivations of Guy, and by association, Izzy. Of course, it’ll be Guy heavy, because I just loved that TDHBEW, but mainly because there’s more to go on with him than there is with Izzy. Unfortunately, she played little part in the flashback episode other than to be there and isn’t particularly given to revelations about her past other than that Guy sold her to a rotten husband. Yada, yada, yada.
Forgive the profligate use of those mighty cop-out words - maybe, possibly and if…but what else can I do in the absence of anything that makes remote sense from the people who got PAID to write this stuff?
I also have to say, hand on heart, that it looks like I’m taking this show way too seriously. Please, I do have a life - this is just a fun academic exercise!!! Karen - you’re to blame: you started me off with the GizKids. As you so eloquently put it - WTF????!!
BACKGROUND
I see the age gap between Guy and Izzy as being around 4 years, which would make their respective ages at the time of the fire as 14 and 10. This is enough of a gap to place Guy in the position of protective older brother, but keep him young enough for the events of that time to have serious implications for him and to make him quite young still at the time of Izzy’s marriage.
We learn that the Gisbornes held land as vassals of Malcolm of Locksley, as reward for services rendered to the King. RA originally said that the Gizzies were dispossessed at the time of the Conquest, but whereas that may have held up for series 1 and 2, the timescale has changed for series 3 because it’s now virtually a separate entity from what went before - maybe the writers only ever watch Eastenders or something equally grisly, ‘cos they sure as hell don’t watch RH.
YOUNG GUY
When we meet young Guy, his father had been off campaigning in the Holy Land, we assume for some time and was presumed dead. (Impossible to reconcile the timeline here, as the Second Crusade is too early and the Third too late. Hey, ho, since when did this show ever care about history?!)
Consequently, Guy had, in effect, had no father figure since around the age of 12 and had been forced to grow up quickly. He had a loving relationship with his mother and sister but his father’s absence and his being forced prematurely into an adult role had made him conflicted between the man he was expected to be and the child that he actually was, still craving attention from his mother. For this, he had to compete with his sister and because she was younger and manipulative in a way that he couldn’t be, he lost out more often than not. He was expected to do the right thing, always behave appropriately and it made him a rather serious and withdrawn boy. It also laid the foundations for the sibling rivalry that plagues the Gizzies as adults.
He therefore already had a tendency to accept that life would crap on him. He didn’t challenge Bobbin’s letting him take the blame for the arrow incident, probably because he thought that he wouldn’t be believed up against Locksley’s little darling. Even when Bobbin was forced to confess to his dad to save Guy from being hanged, he wasn’t made to give a public apology in order to clear Guy’s name. This reinforced Guy’s sense of injustice and underlined for him that he couldn’t trust people. He knew that you don’t always get what you deserve and that in his case, you frequently get what you don’t deserve. If something rotten was going to happen, it was going to happen to Guy.
Guy knew about Malcolm and Ghislaine’s affair but told no-one. He also found out about their proposed marriage, but again, told no-one. He was developing a habit of keeping his thoughts and feelings to himself. His issues with trust, loyalty and betrayal began here - he perceived his mother as betraying not only her marriage vows and his father’s memory when he was believed dead but also his father in actuality when he came back alive, having been captured and patently not killed by the Saracens. It’s why one of his first remarks to Izzy is to remind her she was joined in holy wedlock.
So from early on, Guy was made to feel that his quite normal reactions to situations were wrong - no wonder his perspective got skewed. He suppressed his feelings until they reached boiling point, at which stage, he lashed out in a temper which he had trouble keeping under control. What lesson did he learn from his father’s plight? That being noble and good, as Roger obviously was, got you chucked in a ritual grave when You’re Not Dead Yet (sometimes only Monty Python will do), given a one way ticket for the Twilight Home for Lepers in Varying Stages of Decomposition and crucially, cuckolded by the Hobbit That Escaped Bag End.
He also felt betrayed by his father - when he went to him to speak of the upcoming wedding, Roger seemed to accept it, saying that Ghislaine needed a husband and Guy a father. Guy’s very telling response was to say: I thought I already had one. Guy is fiercely loyal by nature and thought that Roger didn’t care because he wouldn’t fight for his family. His parting shot to his father was the word leper, showing just how deeply his emotions were running.
AFTER THE FIRE
With the fire, the Gizzies lost everything, for doing nothing wrong. Incited by Tricky Dicky from Eastenders, (obviously hired because it’s the writers’ favourite show) the villagers turned on them (loyalty and trust issues again), even the snivelling priest didn’t speak up for them and they left with nothing except the clothes on their backs.
We don’t know where they went. Possibly they went to Ghislaine’s family in France? As penniless orphans with noble blood but no land, they would hardly have been welcomed with open arms. They would have been regarded as a liability and expense and possibly ill treated or continually reminded of their reduced status and dependency on charity. This would trigger Guy’s deep insecurity and sensitivity about having no wealth or standing and set him on a path to acquiring both.
It’s possible, however, that they were on their own, with Guy again taking the position of head of the family and protector of a spoilt little sister. What could he do? He would have been taught the skills of a knight, we know that he could read, but he could hardly turn his hand to manual labour, could he? Perhaps he sold his fighting skills -it’s easy to forget, watching the sometimes inept way in which Guy is made to handle himself that he would never have survived if he’d been the numpty that the writers insisted on making him. Perhaps this is when he caught Vasey’s attention. It was still dangerous, though, and if anything happened to Guy, what would become of Izzy then? Unprotected, she would be at the mercy of any villain crossing her path and unless able to go to a convent, could possibly end up in a nunnery (Hamlet’s definition of!). So, when the opportunity came to provide her with a husband, Guy took it. She’d be safer within marriage than on her own. Maybe Thornton’s money helped him with equipment etc to make his way up in the world, so they’d both benefit.
Did he do wrong by Izzy? Only if he knew that Thornton was an abusive bastard. Izzy had no marriage prospects - no land, no money, no dowry. Her only protector was her young brother who was struggling to make a living and regain what they’d lost. Thornton was a bit older, presumably wealthy and prepared to marry her. OK, she was 13 - but that signifies nothing. In mediaeval times, a girl was considered no longer a child at 12 so he was only contravening modern convention, not the actual times in which the series is set. (not for one moment am I suggesting that the writers looked this up in the interests of accuracy). Guy thought he was doing the best for her that he could.
IZZY
At the time of the fire, Izzy was very young. Her father had been away for a long time so her relationship with him wasn’t particularly close. She may even have believed that he abandoned his family - first for war, then for exile as a leper. Her attitude towards men may already have been a little off. On the other hand, she was very close to her mother, and thanks to Guy, knew nothing of Ghislaine’s dubious taste and her dalliance with Malcolm. She probably vied with Guy for her mother’s attention, for which she was very needy, having seen her father leave his family. Her life was comfortable and cocooned - it was Guy who had to grow up fast, not Izzy.
Suddenly, everything was stripped away from her with the fire. She lost her home, her father and particularly her mother at a very vulnerable age. Perhaps sub-consciously, she blamed Guy - certainly a brother only a few years older was no substitute for a mother.We know nothing concrete about Izzy at this stage in her life - the only hint we have later is that she regarded her mother as a saint. Again, Guy had played things very close to his chest and it’s only when Archer goes to her much later that she finds that her mother’s halo has slipped a bit.
We have no way of knowing whether she agreed to marry Thornton, but as marriage or the convent were the main choices for girls and I really can’t see Izzy as ever being convent material, I’m assuming that she wasn’t unwilling. (It’s my take and if I want to make uncorroborated assumptions, I will - so there!)
So, where did it go wrong? It’s hard to say, as her back story is as much a mystery to the writers as it is to us. Did Thornton push her to consummate the marriage too soon? Again, we look on a 13 year old as a child - the mediaeval mindset was quite different but it’s possible that she matured late and wasn’t ready for it. Presumably Guy had moved on, leaving Izzy to her husband and, for some reason, severing contact. Maybe Thornton, as a classic abuser, discouraged it or intercepted it in order to isolate Izzy and thus gain control. Eventually, it just petered out. Guy’s life at this time wasn’t easy, as his remarks to Archer later imply - maybe he had just too much on his plate to worry about a sister whom he thought settled and who didn’t try to correspond with him.
There were no children in the Thornton marriage, although Izzy’s remarks to Bobbin suggest that she would have wanted them. Was she barren? Was the problem Thornton’s? Either way, Izzy would have got the blame. Did he throw it in her face at every opportunity? Did he resent her for it? Then why not divorce her? Barrenness wasn’t grounds for divorce in the Middle Ages, but it was a motivation for it and with his wealth and influence, Thornton would have been able to conjure a legitimate reason. It’s not like she had a powerful family to come to her defence. She is obviously afraid of him - that reaction when he comes to Nottingham is genuine - but it seems unlikely that he would have kept her just so that he could inflict physical, and by implication, sexual abuse on her. Like all men of the period, he’d have wanted heirs, so perhaps the problem was repeated miscarriages rather than infertility?
She probably felt that Guy had abandoned her - it’s unlikely that she would have contemplated that his silence was engineered rather than designed. She certainly grows up to hate men - even her interaction with Bobbin, though overtly sexual, is really a power play. She has learnt, possibly by appeasing Thornton, that men can be manipulated by appealing to certain parts of their anatomy. Her flirting with PJ is an extension of this - there are the homo-erotic nuances of PJ with Guy - PJ talks of ‘services’, but Izzy has so much more to offer, if he wants it. The telling looks that she gives Guy while this is going on once again take them back to their childhood rivalry for attention.
Why did she take so long to run? Was it that she literally had nowhere to go and had lost track of where Guy was? Her leaving her husband, however loathsome he may have been, would have been frowned upon by the Church, which comprehensively pervaded the mediaeval world view, so breaking marriage vows was a serious thing - especially, of course, if you were a woman. Izzy would have had no support network, and as a wife of a nobleman, precious few skills to enable her to support herself. It would have been a big step for her to take without some idea of where she could find a safe refuge.
As Guy’s position strengthened, did she get wind of where he was and so gain the trigger to escape? He would be her only possible protector against retaliation and it implies a level of trust on her part that she’s prepared to take a chance on him. However, she doesn’t run away from Thornton destitute - she makes sure that she takes money, an expensive horse and - inexplicably - mustard bombs. (Yeah, right, the first things a battered wife would think of. OK, I’ll just pop down to Ye Olde Condiment Based Bomb Shoppe first!)
This doesn’t fit with the image of a terrified wife escaping an abusive husband as soon as the opportunity arises - it implies planning and forethought. Izzy is undoubtedly calculating and clever and it does raise the question that perhaps the problems in her marriage were more complex than just wife-beating. Certainly Guy is convinced that she failed to make the best of her opportunities, but like a typical Gisborne, Izzy never tells him how it really was. Guy isn’t the brightest button - he needs such things spelled out to him - preferably in words of one syllable and with diagrams.
GUY AND IZZY - TOGETHER AGAIN
So, Izzy throws herself on Guy’s mercy and good old Guy doesn’t disappoint. He’s appalled that she’s broken her vows - a throwback to his issues with Ghislaine, but he doesn’t pack her straight back to Thornton. He threatens to do so if she consorts again with Bobbin, but he never carries it through and SHE KNOWS HE WON’T. They’ve settled back into their old pattern of behaviour, with Guy doing the right thing and Izzy running rings round him.
But then - we come up against something I can’t get my head round. (Oh, all right - none of this makes sense in the real world because the writers all got locked in separate rooms without food or water until they hallucinated some old drivel and scribbled it on the back of an envelope). BUT I’M TRYING!!
The implication is that all will be well with the Gizzies if only Guy apologises to her for marrying her to Thornton. Guy is capable of making apologies, (in series 1, he apologises to Marian and her father over the necklace affair) but only if he thinks he’s in the wrong and he clearly doesn’t feel he’s in the wrong here. The more she pushes, the more stubborn he becomes until she shoves so hard that he feels compelled to silence her with the ‘good price’ barb. I do think that he feels guilty. However, I think that Guy’s guilt is a combination of thinking that it was his actions that got them orphaned and cast out in the first place and of thinking that he failed to achieve success early enough to make her marriage unnecessary at that time. I don’t think he feels guilty about making what he believes was the best match for her that he could, given their circumstances. Guy is still that insecure boy he always was and can’t brook having his decisions questioned - he needs to feel that he has done the right thing. Plus, of course, he can’t bring himself to explain his actions.
Izzy, of course, sees it differently. She feels betrayed by him, the good old Gizzy hang-up, and abandoned and because she was either too young or too protected by him at the time, has no concept either of the plight they were in or the terrible burdens he was having to bear. But, here comes the rub. If a simple apology would satisfy Izzy when she first comes to Nottingham, where does the gargantuan leap happen that requires nothing less than his death? Where does the change kick in that makes her so consumed with hatred for him? A desire to bring him down, to get one over on him, as in vying for top position with PJ, for me would be a logical reaction. To humiliate him as payback I can understand. But the bloodlust? Sorry, no.( Of course, she could just have been utterly pissed that the best looking bloke in Nottingham was her brother, forcing her to try to get her jollies by slurping strawberries with Bobbin…)
GUY AND VASEY
Guy’s fight to the death with and his eventual killing (ah, alas, we know better) of Vasey is a monumentally important act for him in several ways. Guy has been fiercely loyal to Vasey, despite their tortuous relationship and the humiliations dumped upon him at regular intervals. He has consistently sought Vasey’s approval as a surrogate father figure and rarely achieved it, but he has kept trying. Vasey has, in fact, had a large input in forming the man that Guy has become. Theirs is a twisted father/son relationship with added sinister undertones from Vasey. Guy comes back to Nottingham with Vasey, but I always had the impression that he went into his service quite young and always felt that there was a homo-erotic subtext from Vasey towards a pretty, vulnerable boy, even if it was never carried through to fruition. There is no doubt that Guy strives continuously to impress him, grateful for any crumbs that come from the table, and think that his desire for power is an adjunct to this - the need for affection is paramount and if power comes with it, then bonus. Guy gives his word to the man he serves and never wavers until Vasey betrays him to PJ, bringing up again all his past issues over trust and betrayal.
After this, Guy’s loyalty shifts to PJ - PJ wants Vasey dead and Guy will oblige. Except - it becomes a far more personal affair. He wants to kill Vasey because of all those past humiliations and because at this stage, he is blaming Vasey for bringing about Marian’s death. It’s quite a sea-change in his attitude.
GUY AND MARIAN
Guy begins by wanting Marian as a trophy wife and if he can take her away from Bobbin, all the better. However, he grows to love her and begins to display the emotions which he has always been encouraged to suppress. He has a desperate need for a family life, so cruelly snatched away from him and believes that he and Marian can have this. His love for her becomes so blind that he only sees what he wants to see and convinces himself that she feels more for him than she does. She sees the potential better man in him, but emotionally, they are miles apart. Guy loves her unconditionally, she manipulates him in order to get information for Bobbin. Guy is essentially a straight man and this lays him open to her deceptions.
But then … well done, writer of episode 2-13! Time and again, Guy forgives Marian’s betrayals because he loves her. He risks his life and his career for her. His murder of Marian simply would never have happened - Guy just couldn’t do that. RA had a dreadful time trying to work out Guy’s motivations for it, disagreed with it and repeatedly said (after the end of the series, like the true pro he is) that he was really unhappy about it. We have Guy doing a complete volte-face, as he talks of taking by force the woman who has led him on unmercifully and from whom he’d always backed off when he perceived he’d overstepped the mark. Then we are led to believe that he would suddenly flip and end up running her through with a sword? Please!! If this wasn’t satisfying some erotic fantasy of the writer, then I’m Tolstoy.
This aberration is rendered even more incomprehensible considering his dealings with Izzy. He blusters, but is never a real threat to her - something of which she is quite aware and which she uses to manipulate him. On several occasions, when he has the opportunity to kill her, he hesitates and she asks what is wrong with him. Easy answer to that - HIS HUMANITY, YOU DAFT BIT!
So, Guy comes back from the Holy Land a broken man, still under Vasey’s control. Under the writers’ control, having lost his sanity and all pretence of logical character development, he temporarily loses his humanity as well and spirals downwards to the point where Vasey sells him out to PJ and RA returns to England to film Spooks and perhaps enjoy some job satisfaction. On his and Guy’s return to RH, Guy has washed his hair, spruced himself up, set squillions of hearts a-flutter in telly viewing land and set off to revenge himself on Bobbin and Vasey on PJ’s behalf. (in the interests of kindness to animals, we’ll gloss over Clarence the cross-eyed lion).
Guy eventually kills Vasey (or so he thinks - oh, Guy!) and becomes PJ’s flavour of the moment, gaining for himself the position and status in life that he has craved ever since he was driven from his childhood home. Of course, this is Bobbin Hood and the writers are generally out of their heads on some substance or other, so we get Guy turning on PJ ten minutes after he’s achieved what he wanted and become Sheriff of Nottingham. Some fancy footwork but no schematic sense renders Guy an outlaw and Izzy the Sheriff.
IZZY AS SHERIFF
Humanity is something which Izzy has presumably had knocked out of her by Thornton - in episode 9, she has Guy in the dungeon awaiting execution. She extends mercy at first to Meg because she perceives her as a fellow man-hater - a mercy later abandoned when she sees that Meg, in fact, doesn’t hate Guy. He, at this point, is so isolated, in despair and wracked with guilt that he would welcome death as a release - he’s accepting of it until Meg gives him hope that there is still some good left in him and so something worth living for. His cathartic moment comes when he stops blaming everyone and their aunt for Marian’s death and takes responsibility for it himself.
Here, we see how far apart the Gizzies actually are. The irony is that if Izzy hadn’t imprisoned him, Guy would never have stood by and watched Thornton abuse his sister. Family loyalty, pride and an inherent respect for women would have overridden any resentment he felt towards her.
She, on the other hand, is hell bent on revenge, and I’m still not clear why this has grown to these proportions. Even when, at the block, Guy says that he’ll do whatever she wants if only she’ll spare Meg’s life, she gives the order to proceed. I got the impression that if she’d wanted a public apology at that point, Guy would have given it. His redemption arc is beginning, while she is descending into a level of villainy that he never plumbed, even under Vasey. Loyalty doesn’t figure on her radar - she will always gravitate to the highest power and give no thought to those she tramples in her wake. It makes her now very dangerous, as normal parameters don’t apply. Family loyalty doesn’t exist for her and she will do whatever she has to or kill whoever she has to in order to get what she wants. At some stage, and for reasons incomprehensible, she decides that she quite wants Bobbin, but can’t hack it when he rejects her. He therefore joins Guy on her Blokes I’d Most Like To Dismember list.
Guy, on the other hand, never kills for himself (apart from the totally OOC writers’ implosion of 2-13), he’s no sadist and takes no pleasure in inflicting pain - he’s simply doing the job which his overlord has asked him to do. This is emphasised when PJ burns Locksley church and instructs Guy and Vasey to prevent the peasants extinguishing the fire. Guy doesn’t set about them with his sword - he intimidates them instead and tells them to back off.
As Bobbin rescues Meg, and by association Guy, from the block, Guy becomes an outlaw. His moments with the dying Meg allow him finally to mourn for Marian and take another step along his redemptive path, while Izzy is left to fume and fulminate and increase in bitterness. The problem now is that she has achieved such a position of power that she’s a nasty piece of work indeed. (Full marks to the writers - they took a potentially interesting and complex character and turned her into the Wicked Witch of the West.)
GUY AND BOBBIN
We find out in episode 10 just how much more Guy knew about the night of the fire than Bobbin and we find out through Malcolm the truth. We also see the level of guilt that has plagued Guy and the lack of support he has experienced from an early age. Bobbin may have lost his father, but he had the support of the priest and the villagers - Guy had nothing and once he had married off Izzy, no-one, until he landed in the clutches of the appalling Vasey.
Again, we come to a theme which I can’t quite get the handle on. I can see why Guy hates Bobbin - he and especially his father were instrumental in ruining the Gisborne family, but I can’t see what Guy ever did to engender the reciprocal hatred in Bobbin, unless it all stems from the accidental starting of the fire. That’s the crucial word, though; it was an accident as far as anyone was concerned - only Guy and Izzy knew about the struggle with Malcolm that caused the fire to start. However, Marian can’t have been the reason either, as her involvement with Guy always circulated around her helping Bobbin and despite our longings, there was never a love affair going on from her perspective.
Guy makes the first move towards Bobbin in their quest to find their hitherto unknown and unsuspected half-brother, introduced as a plot device to set up a possible replacement for JA if the Beeb decides to commission a fourth series. He joins the outlaws in an uneasy truce, although at this stage his only motivation is for revenge on Izzy - perhaps because of her condemning him to death, but more likely, I think, for Meg. He comes across as a wry, funny, courageous man, loyal to a fault, and with his own defined moral and ethical code. Unfortunately for Guy, not everyone agrees with his take on morals or ethics.
His initial cooperation with the outlaws may have been to exact revenge on Izzy, but he opts to stay in Nottingham even though she is captured. He has found a purpose through Bobbin (a little too quickly for logic, but this is Bobbin Hood and we are on the final episode!), found to his horror that he should have checked Vasey for a pulse and to an extent, found the man in himself who was stunted by tragic events as a teenager.
LAST THROES
And then - his humanity trips him up again. Rather than see her hanged as a traitor, he extends to Izzy a mercy she would never have given to him - the poison, so that she can preempt matters, choose when to die and die with dignity. Other than acknowledging that Guy loved her once, there’s no desire or attempt on Izzy’s part for reconciliation, but through RA’s expression and body language, you can see that Guy needs and wants that, although he’ll never say. So, she becomes the instrument of his death - she lures him into Vasey’s trap. Was there brief regret at what she’d done, perhaps a hint back to her emotions in an earlier episode when she was telling Bobbin how she hated her brother? I’d like to think so, but it was so fleeting, that I can’t be certain.
Izzy was always going to gravitate to the most powerful - she did it with PJ and she does it now with Vasey - presumably, had she thought that Bobbin and her brother had any chance of success, she’d have moved towards them. Like Guy, she has had to learn to survive - he in the harsh and violent world in which he found himself and she in an abusive marriage. Their positions, however, weren’t that different. Guy’s relationship with Vasey was also abusive - he gave him Locksley along with humiliation and scorn in the same way that Thornton made sure that Izzy had nice frocks and jewellery along with the fear and brutality. He took away Guy’s freedom every bit as much as Thornton took away hers, but the fundamental difference for me is that, ultimately, Guy is the better person.
He’s learned to suppress his emotions and compassion, to bury that better part of him deep inside as a survival mechanism - he thinks that doing anything else will make him look weak, and in the environment he fetches up in, weakness would equal death. We don’t know Izzy well enough to know how she would have turned out - after all, in episode 10 she was a rather sinister looking little mute who had NO LINES AT ALL!! We can only judge on what we see and what we see is borderline psychotic. Has Thornton driven her so close to the edge that she needs only a little more tipping? Has she spent so long blaming Guy for the marriage that she can no longer differentiate between him and Thornton, transposing her hatred for her husband on to her brother?
Her descent into a kind of madness is the only way in which I can come near to explaining why she turns on Guy in such a spectacular fashion, changing from a desire to beat him in a game of one-upmanship (shades of Gollum - see, nobody likes you, Guy) to an obsession either to have him killed or to do the job herself.
I still don’t like the literal and metaphorical dagger in the back thing; it upset me, in a way, more than Vasey. I always thought that Vasey would be the agent of Guy’s destruction - after all, if Guy had done what Marian wanted in the Holy Land and tried to kill the Sheriff, Vasey already had a dagger poised to fillet him with. I think that in connection with Izzy, it’s sadness for what could have been for these two, the wasted potential, the denial of all Guy had ever been to her and the refusal to see anything in him except the absolute worst. It’s sadness, too, for Guy himself, finding a sort of comradeship built on mutual respect (with Bobbin - totally out of character, I know, in view of their past relationship, but this is Bobbin Hood!) and a chance at belonging to a family (with Archer) that doesn’t involve dodging nooses, axes and various other deadly missiles as his sister strives hard to become an only child. He’s been seeking that all his adult life and comes near to getting it just as that life draws to its end.
S’NOT FAIR!
Well, there it is. Some valid points or a pot of poo? I don’t know, but I enjoyed scribbling it, so it can’t be all bad. Please be kind when assessing the poo level as I’m a sensitive soul!
Oh, to have a talent for writing! How I envy those that do!