#voyaging-too
I’m not sure I know how to best explain this, but I’m very glad that the writers gave Outside Burt a husband. Or boyfriend, whatever.
The romance between Burt and Irving is beautiful, and it’s incredibly fragile and precarious because they are both mindwiped office workers in an evil basement. The scene were Burt retires (and is permanently ripped away from Irving) was a gutpunch, because we got to see that Outside Burt has a life where he doesn’t know or care about Irving, or even his own Inside self, at all. He has a whole other life, and he may have a whole other family. When the last episode rolled around, and Irv finally got a chance to visit Burt on the Outside, I thought, oh shit, Burt has a wife, that’s going to be the twist of the knife, that’s going to be the tragedy, I’m not sure I like that. And then Burt had a husband, because the show’s thinking was thankfully less heteronormative than mine. The tragedy is still there, it’s still heartbreaking, but we don’t get the tired trope of the gay outcast gazing in at the happy normal straight life he can never have. Irv sees that the man he loves is locked away in the mind of an identical man who seems happily married to a man, and Irv will never have that because neither he, nor the man he loves are considered people. This scene would have had homophobic and maybe biphobic baggage if Burt’s spouse was female, and is incredibly poignant since Burt’s spouse is male.
Basically, the writers managed tragedy without burying the gays. Burt is still alive, and he’s still gay, he’s just completely beyond Irving’s reach.
