The Fall (TV Series)

The Vast Abyss (2013)

Gillian Anderson: DSU Stella Gibson

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Quotes 

• Reed Smith : The older I get the more I have two selves, the medical self that's confronted every day with the biological basis for existence - blood, internal organs, corpses. And then I have another self that bathes my kids, puts them to bed, kisses their little cuts and bruises better. Examining dead bodies is one thing; living victims is something else.

  Stella Gibson : There's a name for it. It's called doubling. I do the same. So does the killer.

• Mary McCurdy : If he has children, do you think he loves them? Do you think he *can* love?

  Stella Gibson : Most human emotions exist on a kind of continuum. People talk about lack of empathy, but we all have limits to our empathy. Some people are profoundly moved by children starving on the other side of the world, and some people it barely touches. For them, things need to literally be closer to home. I'm sure he is way out there on the sex continuum, but we all know men who have fantasized about having a woman completely under their control, or initiating a young girl into sex.

  Mary McCurdy : Yes, but most don't act on those fantasies. But he does. Why?

  Stella Gibson : Well, maybe, maybe it's not that he's devoid of emotion at all. Maybe it's the reverse. Isn't it emotion that the sexual sadist feeds off - blind panic, abject terror? I think he feels their pain acutely. It's just that he gets pleasure from it.

• Paul Spector : [on the phone]  We're very alike, you and me.

  Stella Gibson : Oh, I don't think so.

  Paul Spector : We're both driven by will to power, a desire to control everything and everyone. Obsessive, ruthless, living and breathing moral relativism. It's just you're bound by conventional notions of what's right and wrong and I'm free.

  Stella Gibson : How are you free? You're a slave to your desires. You have no control at all. You're weak. Impotent. You think you're some kind of artist. But you're not.

  Paul Spector : Art is a lie. Art gives the chaos of the world an order that doesn't exist.

• [last lines] 

  Stella Gibson : [replaying phone call]  You fucked up and we're on to you.

  Paul Spector : If you're on to me, you'll come for me. You have no idea who I am.

  Nurse : Ma'am, Annie Brawley has regained consciousness.

• Paul Spector : Watch me walk away.

  Stella Gibson : It's never over for someone like you. It won't be over until I stop you.

• [first lines] 

  Stella Gibson : Are paramedics inside?

  Cop : Yes, Ma'am.

  Stella Gibson : We're going to need human scent dogs.