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I feel like typically the "dead wife" montage does nothing for me, even when executed very well, because it's often just like "here's this woman you'll never get to meet, she only matters because a man loves her so much and now he's sad."
But the montage wasn't just Mark's recollections. It was her perspective too. He's her dead husband. He's her Eurydice as much as he's his own Orpheus.
This isn't humanizing Gemma for Mark's sake. This is humanizing Gemma for Gemma's sake and it's there not for us to root for Mark, it's there for us to realize we're rooting for Gemma. Every moment Mark reaches out for her, she's reaching back.
The dead wife montage normally deprives a woman her agency, making her a tool for a man's arc, but this episode fully restored Gemma's agency. She's fighting back, she's yearning too. She hurts, she aches, she angers. She fights, she bleeds, she gets frustrated too. And has been before she was ever Ms Casey,
I've never seen a show restore a character's humanity as fully as this single episode did for Gemma. She went from an abstract concept--a wife, a severed employee, a ghost--to a tangible person.
And this was realized so literally as well. We literally see her bleed, we literally watch her eat, her hands cramp up, her teeth ache. It's like watching a hologram become flesh muscle by muscle, bone by bone.
I'm in awe of what they were able to do for her in just 50 minutes. In many ways, I feel I know Gemma better than I know half the cast.