You don’t let feelings get in the way. You rotate problems… security, people, timelines. You spin them in the three-dimensional space, like puzzle pieces, until they click. It’s not the way I think, but… I trust your judgment. I really do.
Really the thing that makes me most emotional about that whole scene with the two of them at the finale is how Nate is enumerating out loud all the variables and writing them off in that piece of cardboard and that thing looks like the most difficult math problem I’ve ever seen, and he has that moment when, for the first time, really talks to her out loud about how he sees her and you can tell she’s obviously touched by it. But then he walks away and she composes herself and the only thing she says back to him is the answer. (which she already knew because she had already made the calculation in her mind when he was saying it. I mean, gurl.) And he smiles at her and they don’t say anything else and everything is beautiful because it’s not just the answer to the question of who was the most appropriate person to take over the crew, it’s the culmination of Nate and Parker’s relationship through the series.
For three years he’s been measuring them but the difference is that Parker observes him and measures him back, she analyzes people and situations and everything around her just like she’d analyze a safe before opening it (people are like locks) and he trusts her because of that because that’s essentially what he does, but that’s also how they communicate; they understand each other at a fundamental level because their brains work alike so they don’t really have to say anything to let each other know that they do, they just click. (like a lock, like everyone in this family, like puzzle pieces. get out with your perfection show) and this scene is all that in a nutshell and I’m still dying at of how much beautiful sense this ‘reveal’ makes, both narratively and emotionally, specially if you step back and notice Nate wasn’t really teaching her those things because everything was already in her, and his job was never teaching them, but knowing what they could already do and exploit that potential. And none of this final move could have been possible without everyone else’s help at making her connect with other people and her own emotions, so if you look at it that way, at the end of the day, this was a 5 people con who run for 5 years and it’s beautiful and symmetrical and perfect.
