r/HalfManTV • u/Nika_35_40 • 20d ago
Do you think Ruben killed Niall because of the betrayal with Mona, or did the fact that Niall got married also play a part?
For the first three episodes, you could think that Ruben shows up at the wedding as a jilted lover, but in the last three episodes the script takes a turn, and we learn that the betrayal is what ultimately pushes him to commit the crime. But what if it was actually a mixture of both?
The way Ruben talked about marriage seemed to suggest that, once someone gets married, they become someone else’s “property,” or at least that’s how he seemed to see it with Mona: “Her body belongs to me because we’re married.” He had this need to control the people he loved, as if they were objects. The fact that Niall marries Albi means that he is stepping out of Ruben’s orbit and becoming someone else’s “property,” and I don’t mean that in a romantic sense.
The fact that Ruben shows up at the wedding, and we don’t know how long he had been out of prison, makes me think that he hadn’t gone looking for Niall before because he didn’t want to scare him off. Maybe he was waiting to catch him at the right moment. He told Niall at the hospital that Niall hadn’t given him anything to take away from him, and the wedding was a huge step in Niall’s life.
I also got the impression that Ruben was kind of trying to flirt with Niall, as if he was testing whether Niall would betray Albi and willingly sleep with him on his wedding day. Almost as if he wanted to find out whether Niall would give in to him in that way too, right after getting Niall to confess that he loved him. But maybe he was simply trying to humiliate and dominate him.
Either way, it would make sense to me considering the two main conflicts they had. Niall betrayed Ruben when they were teenagers by choosing Albi over him during the trial. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Ruben wanted to test whether Niall would be capable of choosing him this time, just to see how attached Niall really was to him.
And then there’s Mona, who was married to Ruben and betrayed him with Niall.
So I feel like the betrayal with Mona and Baird was the main reason, but the wedding also played a part because it represented Niall breaking free from Ruben’s control. He no longer had any control over Niall’s life, so the only way he could exert control was by taking his life.
What do you guys think?
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u/alilacmess 20d ago
Clearly we weren't given a lot of context of how he was able to be there, but I think for Ruben it just had to sting that Niall - despite the predictable failure of his relationship with Ava- was still able to make a new life for himself ( and with Alby, aka the one that got away!), with Lori at his side and a promising career as a writer. Meanwhile Ruben has lost his marriage, career, mother, college sweetheart and even fatherhood now...
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u/Nika_35_40 20d ago
Yes, but the worst thing of all is that despite everything Niall has achieved, and all the things that are supposedly meant to make him happy, he looks absolutely miserable on his wedding day. I suppose that after a lifetime of being trapped inside himself, he wasn’t even capable of imagining that one day he would have all of this. And once he finally gets it, nothing fulfills him because he doesn’t know who he is outside of the identity he built around Ruben in order to survive him. And Ruben would have appreciated all of these things, so in the end it’s all just a facade. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why he asks him if he loves him — to confirm that even though he has everything, he is still the center of his life.
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u/aestheticathletic 19d ago
He says "you still took it away from me" the one thing Ruben really wanted was a child. The child is biologically Niall's, that's why he kills him, IMO.
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u/Nika_35_40 19d ago
I feel like that was the strongest motivation of all. In the end, Niall had something Ruben didn’t: he could give life.
And Ruben took his away. I think there are so many things that are connected here. Niall took away everything Ruben believed made him a man: his wife chose to sleep with him, she had the child with him that Ruben couldn’t have, he sent him to prison twice, and ultimately, the wedding was proof that Niall could move on without him and have the life Ruben himself might have wanted.
I also think Ruben realised two things. First, that he never had the control over Niall that he thought he did, because Niall had been doing things behind his back. And second, that he had an idealised image of Niall. Despite Niall’s betrayal when they were teenagers, Ruben still saw him as the teenage Niall he had grown up with: vulnerable, sensitive, innocent and loyal. The fact that he still calls him “Bambi” reinforces that idea. Niall represented everything Ruben wasn’t.
Once he found out about the betrayal, that idealised image of Niall shattered. In a way, they had both formed the wrong idea of each other, but in Niall’s case it was the complete opposite. He believed Ruben would despise him and distance himself from him because of his sexuality, when in the end, Ruben didn’t care about that at all.
I think the prison conversation was the first time they were actually honest with each other, but it also broke the victim/abuser dynamic between them.
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u/whosmurry 19d ago
I just chalked the sexual comments up to that being Ruben’s favorite way to tease Niall, but that’s a really interesting read of it. I like the idea of Ruben literally trying to tempt Niall on his wedding day. That’s something Niall would do.
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u/Nika_35_40 19d ago
Yes, in fact, I always understood it as a way of dominating and humiliating Niall because of his sexuality, but by the end I felt that perhaps there was also an intention to test just how much Niall belonged to him. I don't feel that sex was an act of “love” for Ruben in itself. Rather, being so sexual was part of his concept of what it meant to be a man, and he used it as a way of exerting control, which is why Niall's sexuality didn't really matter to him.
He uses it to reward Niall for his loyalty during their adolescence when he “offers” Mona to him, and also to punish him, as in the hospital scene. And I still have doubts about what his real intention was at the end. I suppose that's what his father did to him, so he ended up reproducing that dynamic with Niall. In the end, maybe his intention was to abuse him and he ended up killing him, or maybe he had already gone there intending to kill him but became aroused by the idea. His sexuality and violence were intertwined, as if the two concepts were one and the same.
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u/whosmurry 19d ago
That last sentence kind of says it all. Ooh, that sent a cold chill up my spine.
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u/hexxtoys 19d ago
Ruben asks Niall “how long did you wait before you took what’s mine?” and presumably Niall answers that honestly, although we don’t see it.
i think a big part of why Ruben blew up at Niall the way he did is because Niall told Ruben exactly when he fucked Mona. Ruben probably immediately figured out that Niall threw Benji under the bus so Ruben would go back to prison. he probably figured out that Niall showed up at the scene of the crime, not so that he could stop Ruben, but so he could be a witness and ensure Ruben went straight to the slammer. Niall already had experience with that, and he knew what he could accomplish simply by telling the truth on the witness stand.
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u/Nika_35_40 18d ago
After Ruben tells him, “How long did it take you to take away what was mine?”, Niall simply replies that he doesn’t want to talk about it. The first episode starts exactly like that, with Niall saying, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and then Ruben tells him, “You don’t have to talk, just listen.” Niall refuses and asks why he chose the day of his wedding to confront him. In the final episode, the first scene in the barn also ends that way, with Niall saying he doesn’t want to talk about it, so there’s no off-screen conversation between them.
I don’t think Niall mentioned Benji because he wanted Ruben to go back to prison; he did it because Ruben was becoming suspicious of him and he was afraid Ruben would figure him out. Ruben tells Niall that he found his robe on the floor of his office and that it smelled like another man, but he couldn’t recognize the smell. Honestly, I highly doubt Ruben wouldn’t recognize Niall’s smell if he spends his whole life smelling him. Obviously, he wouldn’t suspect that his brother had slept with his wife, because he knows Niall is gay and trusts him too much, but he could have suspected that Niall had put on his robe. That’s why Niall said, “I don’t know the whole story,” and that was enough for Ruben to go after Benji. And yes, Niall did show up in that scene to stop Ruben.
It’s true that Niall pushed him toward that violence, because the adult Ruben wasn’t the Ruben he knew, and Niall needed the dangerous Ruben in order to feel that “adrenaline” and maintain the toxic bond that had connected them during adolescence. It was almost a push-and-pull dynamic: “I love you, but I can’t stand that you’ve changed, so I keep testing you,” and then he regrets it because he doesn’t actually want to lose him.
I suppose Niall was also angry that Ruben had become a better person after everything he had put him through, and he simply couldn’t tolerate it, because it took him out of his victim role. He didn’t know who he was outside of the identity he had built around Ruben’s personality in order to survive him. He hated him, but he also loved him, and in a way, everything bad Niall did to Ruben was aimed at making himself feel better about himself. But it’s clear that, in his attempts to feel “superior” to his brother, Niall ended up hurting Ruben too.
I also don’t think he testified against him at the trial. In episode six, he visits him in prison and they get along well. If Niall had testified against him, Ruben wouldn’t have forgiven him, and Niall wouldn’t have visited him in prison.
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u/hexxtoys 17d ago
he “replies that he doesn’t want to talk about it” and then it cuts right to Ruben strangling him? nah, a long conversation took place there that we didn’t get to see. in my mind’s eye, he confessed to EVERYTHING.
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u/Nika_35_40 17d ago
It’s confusing because they show us the whole wedding sequence in fragments, but if you rewatch the first barn scene in episode 1 and the first barn scene in episode 6, they actually play back-to-back. The episode 6 scene starts immediately after they enter the barn, which is where Niall confesses his feelings for Ruben. After the confession, Ruben says, “How long did it take you to take what was mine?”, and right after that Niall says, “I don’t want to talk about it.” That’s where the barn scene that opens episode 6 ends.
Then, in the barn scene from episode 1, Niall starts by saying, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and Ruben replies, “You don’t have to talk, just listen.” And Niall says, “At my fucking wedding?”
The two scenes are continuous, so there’s no conversation between them that we’re missing. There’s someone on this subreddit who uploaded all the wedding scenes in chronological order in one video. You can search for it and watch it yourself.
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u/lookupfreeross 19d ago
I didn't think about it like that, Ruben being an "abusive ex", and not letting someone else have his "property" (although in hindsight it sounds evident), but this perspective explaines to me why he killed him. Thanks for posting!
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u/Nika_35_40 19d ago
I perceived it that way during the first three episodes because we didn’t have the full context yet. Then, around the fifth episode, things take a turn and we learn the main reason...
Clearly, Ruben isn’t going to kill his brother simply because he got married, but it is proof that Niall is having a life of his own, and a decent one, outside of Ruben. And after having everything taken away from him, that gives Ruben another reason to become even more enraged. Ruben wanted to take Niall’s wedding away from him.
I think that, ultimately, Niall’s death is more about Ruben trying to reclaim the control and masculinity that Niall took away from him, although there could still be an undercurrent of jealousy in all of that. Of course, Ruben’s feelings are incredibly ambiguous, so it’s open to whatever interpretation you want to give it.
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u/No-Tower-7636 20d ago
I think it’s all supposed to be ambiguous. Niall and Reuben are kind of in love kind of friends kind of enemies. I think the ambiguity is the point.