Say Nothing Recap: Don’t Blink

Say Nothing takes a decisive turn after its sixth episode, “Do No Harm,” which chronicles the Price sisters’ 208-day hunger strike at Brixton Prison in England. Caught fleeing London after planting four car bombs in the city, the Prices are detained at a men’s prison. They refuse to take anything but water until they are transferred to a women’s facility in Ireland, the same where generations of their family had served their own sentences. “By electing this particular mode of protest,” Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in his 2018 book, Say Nothing, “the Price sisters were invoking a long-standing tradition of Irish resistance.” Since the Middle Ages, the Irish had engaged in hunger-striking as a way to “express dissent or rebuke.” In 1920, a man named Terence MacSwiney died in British custody after refusing to eat for 74 days. From that same book of Keefe’s: His sacrifice “articulated a philosophy … that would help define the emerging traditions of Irish Republican martyrdom. ‘It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer,’ MacSwiney declared.”

“Do No Harm” is a grueling hour of television, the show’s pièce de résistance. It is an unflinching depiction of the price of commitment on the bodies of two young girls; when they started the strike, Marian wasn’t yet 20. But if the episode resonates, it’s also because of the questions that build in it: Who is the war being fought for? And at what and whose cost?

At least partly at the cost of the McConville children, no doubt. Episode four, “Tout,” opens with a familiar scene: Helen McConville is getting ready to go out when her mother asks her to pick up dinner for the family. When Helen returns, Jean is gone, and nobody can help or tell her what’s going on. IRA sympathizers urge Helen and her brother Archie to drop it, and the social workers who come to whisk the children away show no tact or compassion as they separate the siblings into cars. The lack of sympathy for an innocent group of orphaned children is unconscionable, but then so was touting for the people who were controlling their fates. There is a sense of inevitability to the way everyone speaks about touts — as if their deaths were no more unavoidable than waking up with a hangover after drinking too much. “That man has made his own bed,” Jimmy Doyle tells Seamus Wright’s wife, Kathleen, when she brings the news that he is a British informant.

Having taken Seamus outside the wake, the British flipped him by offering the prospect of a better life for him and his wife in London. Hoping that Brendan would find it in his heart to spare her husband’s life, and knowing that the IRA was bound to discover his double identity sooner rather than later, Kathleen confesses to Brendan. By this point, the network of support that had sustained IRA operations in West Belfast was beginning to show signs of tear. “I didn’t trust Belfast,” Brendan tells Mackers. When Kathleen came to him, he was already bullshit from a raid at one of his secret arms dumps. Along with Seamus, the Brits had also gotten a hold of Kevin “Beaky” McKee, a kid barely 17 who just loved guns.

The man behind the double-agenting is, of course, the villainous General Kitson. Kathleen was right to go to Brendan, who knew Seamus since they were kids and took a fraternal liking to the cheeky Kevin. Gerry is determined to punish their crimes with death, but Brendan sees an opportunity to keep them alive: They can employ the boys as triple agents, sussing out Kitson’s intelligence from the inside. On his Belfast Project tape, Brendan reflects that despite the “culture of self-sacrifice” promoted by the IRA, “when you’re staring down the barrel of a 20-year prison sentence, it’s human to be selfish.” Brendan’s instinct is to honor, rather than punish, that humanity, and ultimately his plan reaps good rewards: Through Kevin’s spying, they uncover a massive surveillance operation disguised as a mobile laundry service that had managed to identify almost every call house in West Belfast.

Brendan’s devotion to his men is inextricable from his purpose in the army, but the lofty Gerry sees it as a weakness. After ordering Kevin’s and Seamus’s executions behind Brendan’s back, he advises his friend not to put his men before the cause. But for Brendan, “the men are the fucking cause.” This internal discord is music to Kitson’s ears, whose goal is to have Irish Republicans murder one another. Like Joe Lynskey, Seamus knew what was happening as soon as they were put in the car with Dolours; unlike Joe, he considers making a run for it, though Dolours, a little hardened, stops him from trying. Poor young Kevin never saw reason to doubt Brendan’s word. The execution of the two boys, Keefe wrote, “would trouble [Brendan] for the rest of his life.”

Given the awful job of seeing her friends to their deaths, Dolours also questions Gerry’s iron fist. “I just didn’t know my contribution to this war would be killing Catholics,” she laments. The idea to bomb London is a result of this dissatisfaction: Why should the Irish people bear the brunt of the war when the enemy is just a ferry ride away? Dolours and Marian get the green light from leadership after presenting their plan convincingly, and though the Prices are in charge of the mission, the gaps between Brendan’s and Gerry’s conduct continue to widen. While Brendan thinks it’s important for Dolours, the operation’s commander, to “ride with the gear” — meaning to drive one of the cars smuggling the explosives into London — and boost morale, Gerry urges her to take a plane and avoid the risk of getting caught. Brendan evokes the Irish Republican tradition of self-sacrifice, while Gerry embodies a new attitude geared toward self-preservation.

Dolours ultimately follows Gerry’s advice, and it’s Marian who has to swoop in when one of their co-conspirators, a young girl named Róisín, freaks out on the ferry. For as long as it goes according to plan, their operation has the irreverent tone of Ocean’s Eleven: They flirt among themselves, the boys drink too much, and on their night off, they go see a play about the Troubles starring Stephen Rea. The blast, for them, is “symbolic” — in order to spare as much civilian life as possible, they put out a warning to the authorities an hour before the bombs are set to explode, giving them the locations of the cars along with their plate numbers. By the time the British — doubly warned by the IRA and by the Palace Barracks, which tipped off Scotland Yard after getting wind of the plan through an informant — get to the bombs, the crew is already at Heathrow.

Marian can tell right away that it’s a bad idea to leave London so soon. The fuse on the bombs was long enough to tell the authorities that the bombers had given themselves plenty of time to leave, so they lock all exits. The blast goes off while the Prices are detained at the airport. In interrogation, the sisters might have remembered their father’s tactic: Focus on a point on the wall and zone out. Although Dolours feels responsible for her sister’s arrest, the two of them won’t relent. They can’t plead guilty, as a lawyer advises them, because they “don’t recognize the court.” Marian urges her sister not to feel bad as she looks out at the hordes of reporters covering their arrest: “That’s mission accomplished.”

“When you join the IRA,” Dolours tells Mackers, “there’s always this question: ‘How far are you willing to go?’” In the Price family, going to prison was seen as a badge of honor or a rite of passage. But the reality of it doesn’t feel half as noble as the idea. The girls are locked up with male inmates who are only too happy to harass and intimidate them, and they can count on only each other to make it through the days. If getting arrested was a tradition in the Price household, so was the strength of sisterhood: Dolours remembers her mother’s lifelong devotion to Aunt Bridie.

We don’t see the Prices conceiving of the hunger-strike plan, but by the time they are locked up in their respective cells, they’re ready to start. “Tell [the governor] we will bring fury down on his head,” Dolours says to the nurse who brings her breakfast tray. “Tell him we will embarrass him in front of his nation.” Not that the governor seems predisposed to care. “If it were truly up to me, Miss Price,” he told Dolours earlier, “I’d bury you in a hole.”

Compared to the fast-paced, action-packed rhythm of the previous episodes, the days of the hunger strike drag on, merging into one another — it’s day two and then it’s day 17, the girls looking sicker by the minute. “It’s like a staring contest,” Dolours tells Marian. “We’ll just have to make them blink.” Their mother, Chrissie, comes to visit them at Brixton and tells them that Brendan and Gerry have also been arrested. Although Chrissie is visibly shaken by the condition of her daughters, she doesn’t try to talk them out of the strike — in fact, she’s proud of their determination. In a radio interview, she maintains that she “respects [her] daughters’ wish to die” for a cause. Besides, she reminds the interviewer that her daughters’ deaths are not a given: The British government can still spare them by sending them home to Ireland.

It’s not long after Chrissie’s visit that the forced feeding begins. For all of the emotional strain of the episode, these scenes are the hardest to watch; I was caught unawares with my lunch in front of me when they began and had to put my food away. One morning, a group of guards and nurses drags and ties Dolours to a chair, secures a mouthpiece around her head, and shoves a tube down her throat, through which they funnel a mixture of eggs, flour, juice, and protein powder. The British government decided that it would simply force the girls to eat — if acceding to their demand would make them look bad, letting them die would make them look worse. The whole thing is so traumatizing that Dolours questions whether she can endure it again. Marian tells her that it’s okay to break the strike. “It’s a totally new situation now, and everyone will understand,” she assures her sister. But Marian wants to keep going, and Dolours decides they’ll either “come off it together or not at all.”

The next day, Dolours tries to barricade the door, but if she was already skinny and petite before, now she has no chance against the burly guards. By the 67th day of the strike, the sisters have figured out they can communicate through the sink drain in the bathroom. The first time Dolours is tied to the chair, we see the whole gruesome process, but as the days go by, the steps are jump-cutted together. We become used to the sounds of a blender whirring and the straps on the mouthpiece tightening. The feeding is banalized into autopilot, coming to seem as familiar as brushing your teeth. Even then, we have to face Dolours’s eyes as the tube is slid down her throat. The reality of what the girls had to go through sinks in; this went on for more than a hundred days. 

Dolours develops a rapport with the kind-eyed Doctor Mansuri, who oversees the process. She respects his commitment to human life and believes him when he says that unlike the British government, which is more worried about optics than anything else, he actually cares whether the Prices live or die. They engage in discussion of the situation’s tangled ethics: Is the forced feeding, the only thing keeping the girls alive, a kind of torture? Dolours is game to banter with the doctor, but when a weakened Marian chokes on the tube and faints, she becomes angry and twice as resolute. “You’re prolonging our suffering,” she tells Dr. Mansuri. If only he would let the girls arrive on the verge of death, the British might finally give in. She renounces the resigned attitude she had taken toward the feeding and puts up a fight: She kicks and bites and refuses to sit still, perhaps hoping to injure herself. “I’m giving you the privilege of killing me,” Dolours says to Dr. Mansuri. “You can tell the governor that this is how it’s going to be from this point forward.”

It’s more than the doctor can take. He resigns, citing ethical concerns, and the feeding stops. By this point, it’s day 202, more than six months in. The girls are so sick they are put in a wing the nurses call “the terminal ward,” where they are allowed to share a bed. Marian is convinced she will die at any minute and feels prepared to go. She barely has the energy to lift her torso, let alone stand up like Dolours wants her to. On day 205, they pray the Rosary together. On day 208, when Dolours wakes up, Marian looks cadaverous and Dolours begs her to wake, promising they can quit the strike. Just then, a team of nurses comes in with fluids. Marian wakes up. The British blinked: The girls are being sent back to Ireland.