The Annihilation Interpretation

I was gonna let this one slide, mainly because at a certain point I just became plain disinterested, but as one of its main themes has some definite continued relevance to me and the blog, and as it offers me a way back into some sort of respectability, I guess I'll make some effort and give my interpretation of Annihilation.

I've seen everybody give explanations and opinions on this movie and I find that pretty much all of what I've encountered has contradicted what I thought the movie was, either in details or in all of it.
So here's where I'll give you my take, and as usual with these long-gestating posts, it tends to ramble while it tries to encompass every aspect of the thing itself.

Annihilation is a movie about an object from space that crashed into a remote shoreline of America. Quite soon after, a bubble, labeled 'The Shimmer', formed around this site, expanding outwards rapidly, while mutating everything within its confines.

Now, we follow a team of 5 women as they travel into the bubble, to explore its wonders and face its dangers, while they try to reach the site of the crash to determine the mystery at its heart.

It's at the very least an interesting movie and if you haven't seen it by now, you probably should. Be warned there's some body- and existential horror elements coupled with some truly bizarre and beautifully trippy visuals. The plot is undeniably confusing, and the movie's music is odd; very unconventional, though in my opinion wonderfully suited for where it is used.

The movie's themes are also unconventional, very un-mainstream. The central one is in the title: Annihilation. But not just annihilation of the other (, as in the movie's name-dropping scene, spoken by psychologist Ventress), but also of the self: self-annihilation; self-destruction.

Spoilers from hereon out.

Self-Destruction

In the first, for artistic license and to strengthen the movie's theme, one scene points to how aging is a flaw encoded into our genes, and that if one were to circumvent a cell's Hayflick limit, one could negate that cell's tendency to grow old, thereby eliminating the cellular encoding to self-destruct, leading one to be able to achieve that cell's, theoretical, immortality.

Second, in Lena's conversation with Cassie early in the movie we get insights into the nature and tendencies of the women in the expedition.

Which establishes that every single one of these women has a prediliction for, or is giving in to self-destructive urges.

Either through drink, active self-harm, or by volunteering themselves for the journey into the Shimmer out of a disregard for continuation through recognition of immanent death, or because of a disinterest for continuation in light of the loss of loved ones.

There's however a significant difference as to how Lena's character fits in here but I'll talk about that later.

Thirdly, in a scene halfway through the movie, where Psychologist Ventress has a conversation with Lena on the difference between Suicide and Self-destruction.

"Is that what you think we are doing? Comitting Suicide?... 

... You are confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct, in some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke. We destabilize the good job. Or the happy marriage. These aren't decisions, they are impulses...."

The movie is at this point making a hare-brained leap in that conversation, building on semantics rather than on what is intended, selectively taking a jumping off point to dive into a theme already heavily present.
We and Lena roll along with the conversation while it's clear that she did not intend her wording to be taken so literal. But Ventress does, and she builds on it and so the movie expects us to go along with this as well.
Time is taken out to define self-destruction, whereas suicide is left a little on the side. Despite it being crucial to the film as well.

In my opinion; while suicide is the word we use to define that individual act of ending, self destruction is a bubble term: All suicide is self-destruction, but not all self-destruction is suicide.

The movie does this, makes this ungainly leap, so it can add another piece of the puzzle that will inform the audience on how to interpret the ending. It also conveniently forgets to address the fact that Lena's husband did go on a mission that he didn't not expect to come back from, and that he indeed set out to commit suicide, albeit by delay.

Inept Crafting

Ventress in this moment leads the conversation in a direction to suit her own dialogue, inner psychology and ideas. Suicide is on her mind most because out of all these characters, she is the only one who knows that her time is running out. Therefore, when Lena gives an opening to touch on what she is obsessed by, she jumps on it and leads the conversation away from what is actually being asked.

This conversation and in fact, pretty much all of the dialogue in the movie, is directly contrived after the fact: Alex Garland constructed the beginning and middle of his loose movie adaptation, based on how he wanted to end it.

This is a different vision, a different take on Vandermeer's book. I haven't read it and won't, simply because even though he harps on about consciousness and nature, he's one of those that likes to demonize real people rather than actually taking the effort to self-identify.
Judgment without leniency.

This is why whenever it sounds in the movie like this isn't really how people talk, it really isn't how they talk. The movie's ideas are bigger than its language. There's no way to introduce the concepts and ideas that build up the movie's ending that wouldn't bore the crap out of a regular viewer.
It is the movie's weakest aspect. The dialogue is almost exclusively expository. And specifically, the most-revealing answers, those meant to give the clues integral to our final understanding, are spoken by the ubiquitous 'very tortured clever person'; the thin-skinned, big-hearted, intense intellect type of character, the one supposed to be immediately likable, because of sympathy reasons; disease or mental illness as a superpower, a trope you've undoubtedly encountered already.
We're supposed to take the almost nonsensical diatribes at face value and as rule because she operates at a higher level than us, hard-won by the personal torment of the 'other', of the one apart.

This doesn't invalidate anything, it just makes it so that the dialogue is occasionally very ham-fisted and flat-out disconnected from the normality around it. Characters make leaps in intuition and logic only because they're written that way, to give arguments and clues as to how to interpret certain of the movie's parts.
This is not exclusive to Josie, but also very present in leading lady Natalie Portman, who can't seem to always hit the mark with the odd dialogue she's been given.

So then, with that out of the way; Explanations.

The Alien

The first thing to understand is that the alien entity, if it even is an entity, is entirely unknowable. It's wrong to assume it has any kind of agenda or goal. This is what the lengthy interrogation scene frequently visited throughout the movie, and specifically the part at the end of the movie, which was already noticably present in the trailers, is meant to convey: "I don't know." And can not know.

And remember the recent trend of how studios decide to put too much revealing information in a movie's trailer to further entice the audience that just wants to leave the theater with their movie already comfortably digested?
 Annihilation's trailer is definitely one of those. All the information about the alien is already in there: a spoken statement delivered at the movie's end already revealed in its entirety in the trailers: there is no information about what the audience will be most lost and confused about, and it is signposted before you even see the movie.

There is no answer for why it does what it does. Simply take it that it exists, and that it mutates everything around it. There's a reason why the first time we see Portman she is talking about a cell. Because the alien intrusion acts like a cell, and its programming is to cellf-replicate (AHAHAHAHAHAHAA,.. sorry.), but as it is delivered into this completely new environment, it subsumes and then multiplies.
With the way that the dialogue works in this movie: Lena states that it exists, so it exists like it is.
'I don't think it wanted anything'; so it does not want anything, and it just happens to superimpose itself on anything around it: Alteration without design, conflict that isn't conflict, but one-sided inclusion that is inimical to the very being of the other side, thus taken as aggression.

In other words take it as a given that mankind is still unique in its awareness of itself, and that it takes any outside intrusion as an act of aggression, even when what is happening is without intent.

-----

I had a lot more written out on the Alien but as that was annoyingly inconclusive, full of repetition and dead ends, and rambled on for quite a bit I will instead dump that in another post, as it seems a shame to just let it slip into the void.

The End

I think it is pretty much a given that the Kane at the end of the movie isn't the original Kane right? No need to argument anything here.
But just in case: apart from his own hesitant admission and the visual confirmation we get from the phosphorus-suicide of original Kane on the video tape found in the lighthouse, I'll also touch on Kane and the Kane duplicate's memories in a moment.

What merits more attention is the identity of the Lena at the end.

This is the one that most people have problems with: The vision of Lena's eyes lighting up like duplicate Kane's throws everything into the obvious conclusion; that this is not the original Lena, the one who goes into the Shimmer, but the duplicate created in the lighthouse.
They show the same eye-shimmer, so they must be the same, right?
But all this means is that they both have been touched by the Shimmer's rules, and that they have a mutating agent inside of themselves. It does not necessarily mean that it's been put there the same way.

In my opinion, and I think there's no question about this; it's the original Lena that returns.

There's a few ways to arrive at this conclusion.
Other than of course the purely visual, where one sees the Lena with the phosphorus grenade losing her Lena-shape and reverting back into the shimmering alloy-shape, right before the lighthouse door closes:
There's no reason why original Lena would revert to a previous shimmer-alloy state, not to mention that it then, fully ablaze, traipses through the lighthouse over the course of 2 minutes or so, to then collapse into the room beneath the lighthouse: something that is beyond the capabilities of any human, I should think.

It's hard though to give a fool-proof argumentation for the explanation because we know of only 2 instances of a human duplicate in the movie. The Kane-duplicate, and the Lena-duplicate. Rules for 1 can not be used to make assumptions about the rules regarding the other. 1 does not make a system after all, and though we get flashes of the creation of the Kane-duplicate, they are nowhere near as detailed as what we see of the Lena-recreation.
But, this is quite simply the way the movie works and if it doesn't then all bets are off and there's no way to offer up one explanation above others. If all else fails, because of how this movie was created; always assume: dialogue before visuals.

Memories:

Think of the Kane-duplicate, who we know is the Kane-duplicate, not knowing anything upon his return to their home at the start of the movie. He looks at Lena and states he recognizes her, but he doesn't remember her.
At the movie's end he hesitatingly admits he doesn't think he is Kane. But he reaches out to her because needs comfort, and she responds because they have chemistry, because this is the original Kane replicated, yes: The physical aspect is there, the chemistry, and the consciousness is there, but all the memories that inform an identity are not. For whatever reason, we can deduce that even though the duplication process seems perfect, it is an incomplete one as it is duplication without the original's memories.

As for Ending-Lena; she is being interrogated after the events on the beach and supplies an account from a time before having gone into the shimmer, and in her time in the Shimmer we are supplied to flashbacks in which she cheats on her husband. Ergo: the Lena who went in is the Lena who went out, albeit completely physically altered as is evidenced by the tattoo on her arm and the shimmer in her eyes which demonstrates that her time inside of the Shimmer and her contact with her duplicate has genetically altered her.

-----

I feel like this is a good time to address this: Oddly, most everyone, in order to make sense of the movie's ending, relies on the movie's use of tattoos, specifically, on a single tattoo, which appears on at least 4 arms. (Anya, Lena, Lena-R, Man in the tape)

The mistake is in the assumption that the tattoo originates from inside the shimmer. See picture below; Anya (Lady on the outermost right), right before the team is about to enter the Shimmer. It's not so clear in the picture... because it isn't meant to be. But if you take a look at the scene itself, it's undeniable: Anya's tattoo is present before her entering the Shimmer, and Lena through the Shimmer's refraction also ends up with the Ouroboros-tattoo on her arm.

There's no good definitive explanation for it but I'm of the opinion as the marine/army dude, the one with the mutated intestines in the tape, has the same tattoo at the time of the filming, I'm assuming that he and Anya either served in the same outfit, or that the tattoo is a Southern Reach tattoo.
Southern Reach is the organization, or something, in charge of the monitoring of the Shimmer.

Bottomline though, is that it doesn't really matter.  It's a red herring; all it indicates is just another way in how the Shimmer's refracting properties work.

Consciousness

If like many you're still hung up on an alien antagonistic force, than any argument involving memories is moot, of course. Because in this case, there's no reason to take it as a given that this force isn't lying about what it remembers. Anything it says might as well be a lie, and nothing it says can be used for argumentation.

So I also have another argument. Based, once again on how I see the movie's rules.

1. To whit: One of the movie's most fucked up scenes, in my opinion;

 mainly because I read too much Karl-May as a child and around that time also somehow stumbled on an account of the last hours of Timothy Treadwell, the so-called Grizzly Man, and read and re-read the particulars with a certain horrified fascination... 

Some things one doesn't really forget.

The scene, where after Cassie's demise, the four remaining members of the team make camp in a house, gives the key to understanding what happens in the climax.

This house, incidentally, has more than a passing resemblance to Lena and Kane's house.

I'm undecided if this is artistic license, see those couple of frames of Kane sitting or standing in a similar position to Lena? Or if this is just another consequence of the Shimmer's refracting properties.

Before, during the team's rest at Fort Amaya, Cassie dies, dragged away screaming into the dark, where an already heavily mutated bear twists her leg nastily out of shape, and eats out her throat, more specifically; eats out her throat and consumes her voice box.

Fast forward to where 3 members of the team are on the cusp of being tortured by the seriously unhinged 4th member; Anya, and where the bear then, after mauling Anya, strolls in and proceeds to scream in Cassie's voice at the tied up team.

It paces around them, venting an almost continuous horrifying mimicry echo of Cassie's death wail, as if it expects something from these three women. It stares at them, screaming literally in their faces, looking for a response. It plants its jaws almost lovingly around Josie's shoulder before it is assaulted by the dying Anya.

In the resulting mayhem the creature dies.

At the time, without the benefit of Josie's explanation, I took this scene to be purely mimicry: An animal copying a sound to lure in its victims. And why wouldn't you? It's not too far-fetched as it's already present in known nature.

On top of that: The Shimmer had already shown its remarkable properties; given that the bear consumed Cassie's voice box it seemed likely that it could have become part of the bear's anatomy, allowing the beast to copy Cassie's voice, as it heard and remembered it to be at the time.

But of course, there are some details off with this explanation. Most importantly, it doesn't explain its self-apparent air of expectation, as if it is looking for something.

But then, the following morning, we get Josie's explanation of the night's events.

"It was so strange hearing Sheppard's voice in the mouth of that creature last night.

I think part of her mind became part of the creature that was killing her.

Imagine dying frightened and in pain and having that as the only part of you which survives.

I wouldn't like that at all..."

Add to this little segment, some of Ventress' final dialogue:

"Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains."

And now we have the full picture:

The bear's consciousness had a small part of Cassie's added to it; a terrified consciousness that only wanted her friends to help her, that could do nothing but try and reach out to them while it died screaming in fear and pain; this is why the bear doesn't immediately attack as it paces around the tied up team; the part of the bear's consciousness that houses those few remaining bits of Cassie's demands help from these women. But it is a small part, and its wants are unclear to the bear, so its baser instincts begin to assert dominance as it finally receives a reaction from Josie, and proceeds to do what it wants before being stopped by Anya.

This is about consciousness intermingling.

So, from this we can go our climax:

2. Lena and The lighthouse dance.

At the movie's climax, Lena enters the lighthouse to discover a video tape that shows her husband killing himself. He ignites a phosphorus grenade and sets himself on fire right after telling something that looks like him to make it out of the Shimmer in order to find her.

Before this can be properly processed by Lena,

and here we could say something about inept crafting again, but that would be uncharitable I think; I've settled on Lena being just completely bewildered by one thing after another enough, to be hung up on something as trivial as the apparent suicide of her husband

she is distracted by an eerie wailing coming out of the hole in the ground where something crashed into the lighthouse from above to plow into the rock beneath; it is a tunnel leading to the very heart of the Shimmer.

Going down it she finds a strangely shifting chamber, with a seemingly unhinged Ventress seated on a dais at its center, spouting seemingly nonsensical lines before she dissolves into a beautiful glowing light show.

Said light show swirls around the room before forming something in the heart of the chamber.

And here we get our first glimpse of the alien. Except, it is not the alien at all. This floating thing, is just the way for the alien intrusion to almost perfectly recreate the complex human organism.

There is no goal here, unless that goal is to replicate, to duplicate. There is no intent, unless that intent is to copy. There is no design, there is no long-term plan, there is no far-fetched goal of annihilating the human race or whatever.  There is no consciousness. All it does is act like a cell.

And this is actually a clever marriage of director's intent and viewer bias.

As a human you can't help but initially view any action of the alien that the movie provides, this apparent interaction; as hostile intent. But like Lena says, there isn't any interaction on the part of the alien, all it did was react to the input she gave it. There's a very natural skewing of perception here, and it's all on your side; you see an alien that does something with you, so it is either hostile or ally.

Lena is mesmerized by the shifting mass and stares in wonder. Then the forge at the construct's heart sucks in a drop of her blood, her DNA, and begins to replicate it. Stage 1.

I call this a forge, because both in purpose and in visuals that is what it most resembles.

I label the whole thing the Forge-Construct.

And quite soon, at the heart of the chamber a shimmering humanoid shape stands revealed. It approaches Lena who, propelled by her experiences as a soldier, opens fire.

But as this does seemingly no damage, she turns her back on the creature and flees back into the room above, where she finds it is already waiting for her, somehow having instantaneously transported from one chamber to the other.

Now things get interesting.

Gunfire having proven useless, Lena tries to leave the room but finds that every thing she does the shimmering alloy-shape mimics, and every step that she takes brings the creature the same step and the same movement closer to her. We are at stage 2.

In desperation she grabs the tripod with the camera and smacks it into the creature, who, having no tripod, imperfectly imitates her attack and slaps her easily to the ground, temporarily rendering her unconscious.

For a moment the creature stands with its back to Lena, before it turns around and moves itself to lie on the ground in imitation of our downed heroine.

As Lena starts to rise, groggy and disoriented, it mimics this too, keeping her in sight all the while.

As Lena is again aware of where she is, she makes a dash towards the door, desperately trying to open it to make her escape, before the creature slams into her, having again mimicked her movements. 

They are pressed together against the door, but while Lena is pushing off from the door trying to get away, she pushes against the creature, who then of course pushes back. She can't breathe, and begins to lose consciousness.

And then, as her consciousness begins to surrender, begins to let go, something happens.

Stage 3. There is a moment, where the desperation in Lena's eyes, turns into awareness, and into realization, if not understanding.

Because of what has already been established with Cassie and the bear, though it is slightly different here, this is where Lena's consciousness is imprinted on the alloy-shape.

I say it is different, because I stand by my interpretation that there is no alien consciousness inside of the alloy-creature: it is, before this stage, purely a construct, solely imbued with the imperative to mimic and copy the original DNA donor.

It is also different, because neither the alloy-creature or Lena dies here, which gives us something rather remarkable in stage 3's continuation.

It gets a little weird, because as Lena passes out, the Alloy creature, more than ever similar, and dreadfully connected to Lena in this moment, both becomes and keeps following Lena's movements.

Their consciousness has connected, and as one of these two passes out through the actions of the other, what does this do to that other, who has only become connected now in this moment of supreme loss of self, this headlong barreling into the void? It's something that's a little hard to explain or even interpret because it's such a mind-boggling concept, but the consequence is that they sag against each other, before

with a certain artistic license

they fall in perfect identical symmetry back in the centre of the room.

Then, after a little while on the floor, having fallen on the ground with their backs to each other, in perfect mirror, they both sit up, breathing in perfect synchronicity, before tottering upright in the exact same way, without ever even looking at each other.

As they stand there, we read on Lena's face another moment of dawning awareness, presumably also present in the alloy-shape, whereupon she whirls around and faces the creature, who in that moment has done the exact same thing.

From here on, Lena has a plan, while the alloy-shape's imperatives are still not finished with it and which continues mimicking Lena until its imperatives run out and becomes, as the Kane-duplicate before it, a final self.

There are some problems here, because we've seen minds existing together in the same moment before in this movie; In the Kane and Kane-duplicate who interact with each other in radically different ways; one killing himself while the other looking on, and in the two deer, spotted by Lena in the forest where they move in almost perfect synchronicity.

But as the human consciousness is an infinitely more complex thing than an animal's instinctual imperative this can likely be discarded.

It's also possible, once that the duplication process is fully completed, this consciousness-link would shut down.

It's hard to tell, because there are no clear examples of this.

The movie coats itself in a number of possibilities, while refusing to give rules, thereby allowing for most of these possibilities.

Lena and her burgeoning duplicate move towards Kane's gear where Lena reaches in to grab a phosphorus grenade, while the alloy shape looks expectantly on.

She holds it out towards the shape, which reaches out and clasps the grenade as well.

Their hands and fingers touch, and the final stage commences.

Stage 4. Lena's every physical attribute as it is in that moment is imprinted onto the alloy shape and the stage ends, with a perfect duplicate of Lena, with her nature and consciousness as it is at that time, minus her memories.

Again, why the process fails to reproduce memories (experiences) I don't know.

As the two Lena's stand there, the original lets the safety pin slip out, before dashing out of the building, leaving the duplicate-Lena, no longer a slave to the duplication imperatives, holding the bag.

-----

From our experiences with the Kane-duplicate, we know that there's a point where the duplication process ends, where the duplicate has become as much of the original as it is going to be.

This happens through a few stages, and we know them because of Lena's experience, though we don't get to know if stage 4 is the final stage. Presumably, because it would be artistically ideal, it is.

1. Blood/DNA gets sucked into the forge-construct, which is used to re-create this world's most complex organisms; humans. A shimmer-alloy duplicate is created, imbued with the possibility of the donor DNA's most current form to be made manifest.

2. The duplicate imitates the original as much as it can, seeking to become identical.

3.The duplicate imprints consciousness of the original via proximity and touch

4. The duplicate copies every last physical attribute of the original donor by touch once consciousness has been linked, in order to become as perfectly up to date with the original as it can.

From this point on the duplicate is finished.

There is no goal beyond this however: like a cell duplicates itself in micro, the forge-construct duplicates the human's body in macro. 

It all comes from the cell. Concept, execution and rules.

Memories preventing self-destruction

So then, reasons:
To come back to that part where we talk about the movie's characters self-destructing: With our main protagonist, Lena, this self-destructive tendency manifests itself in her destabilization of her marriage by cheating on her husband.

However, Lena's reason, very integral to the movie's climax, for entering the Shimmer, the so-called suicide mission, is different than from the other characters. It is Lena who is here trying to heal something, fix something; She goes on what might be a suicide mission, and remember; her husband has already made it out, she is here, not because of self-destructive urges, but first and foremost to try and save that husband.

For the original Lena, standing in front of her duplicate, there are still the memories of a husband outside of the Shimmer, even if the identity of that party at the time is still in question.


Consciousness enabling self-destruction

It's why the Lena-duplicate continues to commit self-destruction when the phosphorus grenade goes off, because she does not have the memories of a husband outside of the Shimmer. She does not have that hope for continuation, as is evinced by her touching the corpse of the original Kane, the husband who Lena at the moment of her consciousness-copying identifies most as being her husband, having just come face to face with his death. And from this moment onward the duplicate is ruled by her self-destructive nature and lets the fire do its work. She chooses Annihilation for the Shimmer because as Josie said earlier:

"Ventress wants to understand it, you (original Lena) want to fight it...".

There's also the dubious artistic license imparted by Ventress' and Lena's earlier conversation; 'Isn't all life hardcoded to self-destruct?" Which alludes to the particular part in the movie where Lena and Kane are in bed and she explains to him how mortality is a flaw encoded in each cell. Without any imperatives to shunt her forward duplicate-Lena follows this rule programmed at the cellular level.
But again, this idea doesn't stroke very well, even though it does strengthen the theme.

Be reminded here also that the Kane-duplicate was given a mission, a reason to live, by his original, to go and find Lena.
And that all that the Lena-duplicate was given by her original, was a live grenade.

Is there a hierarchy? Must the duplicate follow the original? I don't know.

I do know, that in the ending scene, it is Kane who reaches out to Lena, implying autonomy and not mindless dependency after either a period of time, or when the original has died.
Again, there are not enough examples to pinpoint rules by.

So then, to reiterate; when self-destruction by fire becomes apparent: As a perfect copy, with everything but the memories, those memories of her husband which are Lena's reason for being in the Shimmer: the hope for retrieval of her husband (or something like her husband), the hope for continuation and a happy end, without this way forward, all that influences the Lena-duplicate are Lena's self-destructive urges, her will to fight "it" and the current Lena-consciousness; likely also appalled at itself in recognition of it not being the original, just as End-Kane hesitantly admits it doesn't think is the original Kane, whereupon it needs comforting.
But where duplicate-Kane takes the easier way out, as per his programming, duplicate-Lena fights and annihilates, both herself and the source of her grief, as per her programming.

Artistic Character Death

-Josie indulges in physical self-harm; the reason given:

"She's tried to kill herself?"

"No, I think the opposite, trying to feel alive."

Josie ends up literally turning into a tree. Literal blooming life. Can't get more symbolic than that.

-Ventress wants nothing in the face of her own death. Just to see the lighthouse and understand the mystery at its heart. Once she realizes understanding is not possible there's nothing left for her, so she dissolves as she gives herself over to... Annihilation.

-Anya who practically introduces herself with her makeshift theory of whether something killed the previous teams or whether they went crazy and killed each other, seems to get confirmation of the latter theory when she views the tape found in Fort Amaya. From that moment on, because she thinks so much about it, her body starts to change as the man's body did in the tape.
She becomes paranoid, even though she really has a reason, as her became-crazy theory seems to have become true; with Lena lying and forcing the team deeper into the Shimmer's heart towards certain death.
And she would have hurt or murdered her team mates, until the bear, something inside the Shimmer, killed her, neatly allowing her to inhabit both of her theories at once.

- Cassie:

"In a way it is two bereavements; my little girl and the person I once was."

dies a second time, becoming an even smaller, lesser part of the person she once was as she lives on inside of the bear's consciousness, until finally her identity dies a third time alongside the creature that killed her body.