Zilpha Finally Kills Her Dickwad Husband on 'Taboo' 

Thorne Geary has been The Worst for all six episode of Tom Hardy’s period drama Taboo. He’s manhandled and attacked his wife, Zilpha, and used racial slurs and tried to kill his brother-in-law, Tom Hardy’s James Delaney. But finally, enough is enough for both the show and Zilpha. In the sixth episode, she finally murders him and fucks James at the scene of the crime. The sibling fucking part goes a little haywire — more on that in a bit — but the murder part pans out pitch perfect.

Initially, after getting murderously pissed off at his botched exorcism attempt last episode — recall that it ended with her standing by his bedside with a knife — Zilpha seems disappointingly docile with Thorne. James’s would-be stepmother Lorna visits Zilpha and Thorne looking for James. A battered-looking Zilpha stands by her husband’s side and tells Lorna to leave. Later, while she’s in the bath, Thorne furiously pounds on the door, demanding that she open it. It seems he’s about to attack her again, but he smugly shows her a letter about a new job he got in Australia behind her back. Oddly enough, it isn’t the beatings, the taunting, or the attempted murder of her half-brother and nocturnal sex partner that’s the final straw for Zilpha. It’s Australia.

“Australia is too far. Please leave. Let me finish here,” she tells Thorne with a cold serenity. She then picks up the knife she held last episode as she watched him sleep, and this time, she follows through. She creeps onto Thorne’s bed and stabs him right as he wakes up.

Triumphantly, she then appears on James’s doorstep in the rain. “I killed him. Just like you said,” she whispers, kissing him. From his frozen expression and displeased “what have you done,” it’s obvious it wasn’t what he said. Whatever demonic whisper Zilpha thinks she’s obeying, it sure isn’t James.

Of course, because this is Taboo, they later share a dramatic glance across the graveyard at Thorne’s funeral before returning to Zilpha’s house, fucking at the scene of the crime and stopping when James accidentally starts to strangle her because he has visions of his dead mother. This would seemingly indicate that the plotlines are linked — the mother is also responsible for the voice Zilpha hears and mistakenly attributes to James. Both siblings like to think they control their magic, but Taboo is suggesting the opposite. The plot thickens.