Finale

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of physical and emotional abuse.

Dreams occupy a significant narrative and thematic role in Tella’s storyline in Finale. Most are the dreamscapes through which Legend visits and speaks with her. For Tella, these dreams become dangerously addictive, reflecting her yearning to be truly loved, not possessed or admired. For Legend, the dreams reveal his internal struggles. He fears losing his immortality and the self-control that this trait affords him, yet his repeated appearances in Tella’s dreams expose the depths of his feelings. What should be a landscape of controlled illusion instead betrays the truth. In one dream sequence, for example, Tella acknowledges the growing gap between illusion and reality, questioning whether the Legend who visits her at night is the same man who coldly distances himself by day. The dreams thus become a form of emotional double exposure; they reveal Legend’s love even as he resists admitting it, and he becomes most human in the space where nothing is supposed to be real. The dreams also deepen Tella’s conflict over whether to trust what feels real in a space that is inherently unreal.

Further complicating the matter are Jacks’s intrusions into Tella’s dreams, and these more ominous interludes serve as distorted reflections of obsession rather than love.