Warning: This article contains major spoilers for The Drama and discusses school shootings and gun violence.

I finished The Drama and I wasn’t happy.

Not because I think Emma was right. Let’s get that out of the way immediately because I already know this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion.

Emma was not right.

What she planned to do was horrific. At 15 years old, Emma planned a school shooting. She practiced with her father’s rifle. She got terrifyingly close to actually doing it. And I’m not going to sit here and make excuses for that because she was depressed, bullied or a kid.

It was fucked up.

Even the reason she initially stopped was fucked up. Another mass shooting happened nearby, people died, and suddenly the thing Emma had been fantasizing about wasn’t some abstract idea anymore. She saw the reactions of the people around her. She saw what a shooting actually did to a community.

And she stopped.

That’s the part I can’t get past when I look at the way everyone reacts to Emma’s secret.

When does choosing not to do the horrible thing count?

Because everybody sitting at that table had some fucked-up shit in their past.

Charlie admits that he cyberbullied another kid so badly that the kid’s family ended up moving away. Mike admits that when a dog attacked, he used his girlfriend as a human shield.

And then there’s Rachel.

Rachel locked a neighboring child with special needs in a closet in an abandoned camper and left him there overnight. People had to search for that child before he was finally found.

That wasn’t something Rachel thought about doing.

She did it.

There was an actual child inside that camper.

There was an actual child who was scared and trapped and didn’t know when—or if—someone was coming to get him. His family actually had to wonder where he was. A search party actually had to look for him.

And that matters to me.

Trauma doesn’t necessarily end when somebody opens the door and lets you out. Something like that can follow a person. Being vulnerable and having someone deliberately lock you somewhere can change how safe you feel and how much you trust other people’s intentions afterward.

Rachel created an actual victim.

That’s why I have such a hard time watching her act morally superior to Emma.

Rachel gets to look backward and essentially say, I was a kid.

Okay.

Emma was a kid too.

You can’t use childhood to explain your own horrible behavior and then decide somebody else’s childhood doesn’t count because what they contemplated was scarier than what you actually did.

And yes, Emma’s plan was scarier.

I’m not going to play stupid here.

Had Emma walked into that school and pulled the trigger, this would be an entirely different article. She would have created victims. If she had killed people, she’d be a killer. She would deserve to be held accountable for those lives and face the legal consequences of what she’d done.

But that’s not what happened.

Emma stopped.

There are no victims of Emma’s school shooting because Emma’s school shooting never happened.

That doesn’t erase the intention. It doesn’t magically turn what she planned into something harmless. It doesn’t make 15-year-old Emma a good person.

It means she didn’t become a killer.

And that distinction has to matter.

How many people have thought about doing something absolutely horrible and never done it?

We’ll never know.

How many people have gotten frighteningly close to doing something that could have destroyed other people’s lives and, at the last moment, stopped?

We’ll never know that either.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

Because if somebody gets all the way to the edge and chooses not to hurt another human being, isn’t that exactly what we want them to do?

Stop.

And then tell somebody and get help.

Because choosing not to follow through matters, but nobody should have to sit alone with thoughts that frightening. Stopping the act prevents victims. Reaching out for help might keep you from ever getting that close to the edge again.

If deciding not to do the horrible thing doesn’t count for anything, what exactly are we asking someone standing on the edge of doing something horrible to do?

Emma stopped.

She wasn’t a hero for stopping. She simply didn’t become the monster she was dangerously close to becoming.

Then she grew up.

Emma didn’t spend the next 15 years showing everyone around her that the violent teenager was still there. She became involved in gun-safety advocacy. She built a life. She fell in love. She became a completely different adult.

If Emma had never revealed her secret that night, would Charlie—or Rachel or Mike or anyone else in her adult life—have ever looked at her and thought, That woman once planned a school shooting?

I don’t think they would have.

And that has to count for something too.

It doesn’t erase who Emma was at 15. It tells us who Emma became afterward.

All of us can look back at things we did as kids and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Obviously most of us aren’t looking back at something remotely as serious as planning mass murder, and I’m not pretending those things are equivalent.

They’re not.

But hindsight is 20/20.

Kids make decisions with kid brains, kid emotions and kid understandings of consequences. Sometimes the reasons behind their choices look unbelievably stupid when viewed through adult eyes.

Emma finally saw the consequences.

Another shooting made it real.

She saw other people’s reactions. She saw grief. She saw what the thing she’d been contemplating actually looked like when it wasn’t an idea anymore.

And she made a choice.

She didn’t do it.

Then there’s Rachel, who has every right to have complicated feelings about Emma’s revelation. Her own family has been affected by gun violence. I understand why Emma’s confession would hit her differently and personally.

But having understandable emotions doesn’t automatically make every judgment you make fair.

Rachel actually hurt someone.

So did Charlie.

So did Mike.

Everybody at that table has something to answer for, and I think they should be judged accordingly for what they actually did.

That’s where I apparently differ from a lot of people when it comes to Emma.

I’m thinking about the victims.

Not hypothetical victims who thankfully never became victims.

The actual ones.

Rachel’s victim existed.

Charlie’s victim existed.

Mike’s girlfriend experienced what Mike did.

Emma’s potential victims never became victims of Emma because Emma made the decision not to follow through.

I hate what Rachel did more.

There. I said it.

That does not mean I like what Emma planned. I don’t. I think it was horrifying.

But Rachel did something horrible to another child and then grew up.

Apparently we’re capable of looking at adult Rachel without believing she’s forever the child who locked a vulnerable kid away and left him there.

So why are we incapable of doing the same thing with Emma?

If Rachel can become more than the worst thing she actually did as a child, why can’t Emma become more than the worst thing she almost did?

And then there’s Charlie.

Charlie drove me nuts.

At some point, Charlie has to decide what Charlie believes.

Everyone else can have an opinion about Emma. Rachel can decide she doesn’t forgive her. Other people can decide they wouldn’t marry her. The audience can decide they could never look at her the same way again.

That’s fine.

But they’re not marrying Emma.

Charlie is.

If Charlie knows the truth and decides that the woman standing in front of him today is the woman he loves, that’s his decision. It’s his relationship. It’s his life.

Nobody else gets a vote.

Maybe that’s ultimately what The Drama left me thinking about more than anything else.

When are we allowed to become someone other than the worst version of ourselves?

When does changing count?

When does making amends count?

And when does not doing the horrible thing count?

Because Emma’s past should bother us.

It should.

Planning a school shooting should never become something we casually dismiss because somebody was young.

But neither should we pretend there’s no meaningful difference between thinking about something, planning something and actually doing it.

There is.

Emma isn’t innocent.

Rachel isn’t evil.

Charlie isn’t innocent.

Mike isn’t innocent.

They’re human beings who did—or nearly did—some seriously fucked-up things and then continued living.

Judge them.

But judge them for what they actually did.

And when someone gets all the way to the edge of doing something monstrous and makes the choice to stop?

That choice has to matter.

Because the alternative was creating victims.

Emma stopped before there were any.

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