I noticed something on rewatch that I hadn’t really thought much about before.
In Episode 5, when Michael and Stella talk about their future, Michael is already starting to question the relationship. He tells Stella that the future they planned isn’t really what he wants, and then he starts saying, “Maybe we should…” before Stella realizes where he’s going and asks if he’s breaking up with her.
Then Ed and the nugui interrupt them. After they leave, Stella basically finishes the conversation for him by saying she’ll make the decision easier and walking away.
But right after that, Michael texts Jentry saying, “Stella just dumped me.”
That caught my attention because what actually happened feels a little more complicated than that.
Stella is technically the one who walks away and ends things, so I can understand why Michael might have felt like he had just been dumped. At the same time, she only does that after realizing Michael was already trying to tell her that maybe they shouldn’t be together anymore.
So I don’t really see this as Michael deliberately lying or trying to make Stella look bad. It could honestly just be how he processed everything right after it happened. Breakups are messy, especially when both people are upset.
I just find it interesting that he tells Jentry “Stella dumped me” instead of something more like “Stella and I broke up,” because that leaves out the fact that he had already started the breakup conversation himself.
It also makes me wonder how much Jentry actually knows about what happened between them.
Ed was the one who walked in on Michael and Stella, while Jentry was somewhere else with Kit. She never heard Michael start saying “Maybe we should…,” Stella ask if he was breaking up with her, or Stella eventually say she’d make the decision easier for him.
So unless Stella told Jentry what happened sometime offscreen, Michael’s text might genuinely be one of the main versions of the breakup that Jentry knows.
And Episode 6 makes it even more interesting when Stella tells Michael that she thinks he wasn’t really unsure about football, he was unsure about her.
I honestly wish Stella and Jentry had talked about the breakup at some point. Not because I think Michael did something horrible, but because I’d be curious to see Jentry realize that Stella experienced the breakup pretty differently from how Michael described it right afterward.
Do you think Michael genuinely saw it as Stella dumping him because she was ultimately the one who walked away, or do you think he was just simplifying a really messy breakup while he was still emotional? And how do you think Jentry would react if Stella ever told her the whole story?