Right to Die

About Right to Die

"Right to Die" is the ninth episode of the second season from Masters of Horror directed by Rob Schmidt.

Overview

"Right to Die" is the ninth episode of the second season from Masters of Horror directed by Rob Schmidt. Plot Cliff Addison (Martin Donovan) and his wife, Abby (Julia Benson), have a road accident. He walks away unharmed, but she is left in a coma with her skin burned off. Cliff is told that there is a method of surgery that will allow her to live, but without speech or the ability to take care of herself. Cliff consults with his attorney, Ira, who persuades him to let his wife die. He reveals to Ira that he had an affair. Cliff remembers an instance where his wife found his cell phone with a video of his mistress, Trish (Robin Sydney), stripping whilst moaning his name. Shortly after, Cliff hallucinates that he is taking a bath with his wife and they make love while her skin burns off. While he panics, it is shown that his wife had died but was resuscitated, and that he has a hand-shaped burn mark on his back. Cliff runs into Trish, and it's revealed that she had been fired by Abby, and only slept with Cliff out of pity. Cliff visits Abby and attempts to kiss her. Her eyes open and she begins to flatline. Cliff then learns that she had flatlined two nights ago, but was brought back.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“I shall argue that although suicide is always tragic (because it always involves serious costs), we ought to be less judgmental about it, whether psychiatrically or morally, than people usually are. Suicide is sometimes a reasonable—even the most reasonable— response to a particular human’s predicament (rather than to the human predicament in general).”
— David Benatar, The Human Predicament (2017)
“Just as a man has the right to live, he ought also to have the right to die.”
— Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun (1947)
“All I ask of persons to whom any form of euthanasia is morally repugnant is tolerance and understanding of the feelings of others who want the right to choose what happens to their bodies in a free society. To every person their own way of death.”
— Derek Humphry, Final Exit (2002) ISBN 978-0385336536
“In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients’ “ease” but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonguing and even magnifying patients’ dis-ease.”
— Jack Kevorkian, Prescription: Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death (1993) ISBN 9780879758721
“There exists a right by which we take a man's life but none by which we take from him his death: this is mere cruelty.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Human, All Too Human (1996) ISBN 9780521562003
“They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, On Suicide, contained in Studies in Pessimism (1913)

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.