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Breaking Down the Reveal in I Know This Much is True
HBO’s I Know This Much is True is a cathartic search at how intergenerational trauma manifests. Dominick Birdsey and his twin Thomas, both portrayed by Mark Ruffalo, represent two different end results and are the main focus of the six-episode series. As Thomas struggles to cope with paranoid schizophrenia in the early 1990s setting, Dominick walks through life as a bitter man who blames everything on his genetic makeup despite not knowing the identity of his biological father. He believes that knowing who this missing parent is will fill a void or heal an emptiness within his heart and continually pesters his mother for the answer.
Connie, the Birdsey twin’s mother, is a meek woman who refuses to tell her son the true identity of his biological father. After she dies, Dominick thinks his only chance of knowing who his missing dad might be lies in an autobiographical manuscript that Connie’s father left behind decades prior. The case of the missing parent is not solved by reading the writings of a man full of bigotry and prejudice and Dominick begrudgingly accepts that the secret of his father went to the grave with his mother.
Of course, if you’ve seen the series you know that Dominick does find out the answer to his lifelong question in the last minutes of the final episode. His name was Henry Drinkwater and he was a Native…
