As Theodore speaks, he lowers to his knees in front of the body and clutches Powell’s cold, stiff, cruel hands in his. He had the words love and hate tattooed onto his fingers for some unfathomable reason; the one he clutches now reads love.

This is as he was conditioned to do: turn away from the living world to mire himself in guilt, in what was never really a failure at all.

“You make it sound so wonderful,” he sighs. “But I’m no plant, Spirit. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t—I don’t know if I can.”

He knows he’s speaking metaphorically, but the point us that he feels far more like a dead bush whose woody skeleton has been there for years more than he does a thing that can change. Not in a way that matters.