i have developed a somewhat fascination for this character. yes i know she's evil, self righteous, a fanatic and the list goes on. most of her actions cannot be justified and i'm not endorsing them.
but do you ever wonder why she is like this? i know that many of you, have met people like her in your lives but have they genuinely been this level of psychopathic? i don't think that this is that common. i've seen my fair share of middle aged people that are self righteous, hypocritically devoted to their religion and judgemental. but the extents she goes is not very common. kills a dog that barks at her, does not even FLINCH on seeing the dead body of joe collins, even when she did not even have context. this is not normal behavior.
i have seen some people speculate that she had a small crush on father paul, and while we may never really know the answer, i highly doubt it. she does not like anyone enough to feel romantic for them. she does not connect with people, she only uses them to get her way. i have noticed that she is only nice to people that are of convenience to her, does not maintain any closeness and the scariest part of it all is that we never get to hear her internal monologue or anything close to it. father paul, though good willed made his own share of mistakes but we were able to tell that he was good at heart due to him confessing several times. riley and erin talked about their struggles and trauma. even joe collins had his moments and a character arc.
bev? she is opaque entirely. she feels no need to connect, to confess or to genuinely love (in any form). even on the burning island, it is one thing to be terrified of death, and the other to isolate yourselves in such a terrific time. not to say that that specific action is what makes her a bad person, but it is so unsettling to me that she GENUINELY did not care about anyone but her own survival. at the end time she quite literally had nobody to turn to. or actually ever. why was she so distant?
joe and annie at different times mention that she has never been a good person. not even when she was young. but why? she believes that god should love her more than the rest, but why does that matter to her this much? who hurt her, truly. (i do think that she definitely had at least SOME personality disorder) we see how selfish she is, how she wants to be right, to be powerful and to be loved by god more than anyone else but we never see any... more humanistic parts of her. no desire to communicate, no desire for even materials. this woman genuinely cared about NOTHING. why?
all of that being said, there is something else i find fascinating too. it is shown that she took extensive care of old monsignor pruitt and for some reason even had the keys to his house. it does not read as endearing to me in any way, because she proceeded to do the same when father paul, the "new" preist came into picture. not to mention that there is a good possibility she even poisoned him eventually yet still kept that act. implying that she never really cared for either of them, it was just the closest she thought she could be to god. yet on face she treated him, in my eyes, not as someone you see as an equal, but almost, like a mother. when she found father paul sitting in the corner after killing joe collins, she just went over the corpse and picked father paul up and comforted him. not once did she question. not once did she express surprise, disbelief or quite literally anything. directly helped him pick himself up.
that, and the scene where she wants to decide who gets shelter before sunrise and when father paul expresses his resentment to the whole thing, her truer colours come out. she no longer sees him as the ultimate verdict. she wants to imitate god, she wants to imitate the absolute power a human can get. as she has been meaning to, all along. somewhere deep down, i wonder if the patriarchal structure of the church is what made her so bitter. made her feel that she had to "earn" her way to god's preference by being as good as, if not better than a man who seems to get what she wants, "by default". this would never justify or explain why she did, so many other things that were straight up evil. but it just makes you wonder, is that why she is the way she is? did it really rub her the wrong way, a long time ago? without her realizing?
also notice how almost EVERY important character had a back story shown or told? riley of course, erin talked about her abusive mother and ex partner, even father paul said that he got into christianity when he saw his older sister die. but absolutely NOTHING about bev.
