Payback

This is the episode where the book walks onto Atwood's home ground, and she stops being a visitor. Revolutions, she argues, follow a pattern: the women who make them get sent home once they're won, the accusations cannot be allowed to stop once they start, and underneath it all sits the oldest ledger there is. Blood debt, running from the Oresteia through Hamlet to the Albanian hills; she wrote a whole book on it, called Payback. Dickens knew the pattern too. The live question: once vengeance is owed, can anyone choose not to collect?