Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘The Tourist,’ the story takes many twists and turns before the truth of the matter is revealed to the audience. Jamie Dornan plays the role of a man whose memories are wiped after a terrible car crash. He wakes up with no knowledge of himself and has no idea what to do next. It feels even more terrible when he feels he is alone and has no idea whether there is someone looking for him. This is when Probationary Constable Helen Chambers enters the picture. She becomes his only friend in the whole wide world, and her text at the end of Season 1 proves that she is here to stay.
Helen’s Burrito Text Becomes the Lifeline Elliot Needed
It is hard losing all your memories and not remembering anything about who you used to be, but it’s even more difficult to find out that you used to be a terrible person. In a matter of days, Elliot finds himself completely transformed, first by getting a clean slate in the memory department following the crash and then discovering the things he did before that.
In the beginning, Elliot works on the assumption that he is a good guy. As far as he knows, he was simply in a car crash, and that was the worst of it. But then, slowly, he starts to peel away the layers of the story and realizes that he was connected to some very bad people, and it is this that landed him the crash in the first place. Still, he hopes that he must have been a good guy because why else would the bad guys be after her?
By the end, Elliot discovers that he is just as bad as Kosta, the drug kingpin he worked for in his past life. Not only did he act as Kosta’s accountant, but he also made people like Lena Pascal ingest packets full of drugs and turn them into drug mules. His actions cost two people their lives when the packets broke down inside their bodies and caused them to meet a painful end. While Lena Pascal survived, she had to go through surgery to have the packets removed from her body, not because Elliot didn’t want her to die but because he didn’t want the drugs to go to waste if the packet was torn away inside her stomach.
Finding out about his actions throws Elliot into a pit of guilt. He wants to be punished for his sins, but when he tries to surrender, the cops refuse to arrest him. He tells them everything about his past life, but because Lena refuses to corroborate, Elliot has to live with the fact that he was a bad guy and he inflicted unimaginable pain on people. When the cops turn him away, Elliot tries to erase his memories again by recreating the car crash, but the trick doesn’t work. Moreover, he also loses Helen when he discovers that she believes the things he tried to tell the cops and now hates him for it.
With nothing left to live for, Elliot tries to kill himself, but just after he has downed a bunch of pills with alcohol, he gets Helen’s text. She sent him a burrito, which is a call back to a conversation they had when they were staying in a motel and playing a game where Helen said one word, and Elliot had to do something that he related to the word. When she said “happiness,” he said, “burrito.” Even he was surprised by his choice of words, but then, the night before, he’d had a grand time with Helen, eating Mexican food and rediscovering his love for burritos.
Helen jokingly says that if the burrito is connected to his happiness, then all she’ll need to do is send him a burrito whenever he feels down. They both laughed it off at that point, but in the final scene, when Elliot is in the worst state of mind, a burrito from Helen is the only thing that gives him a reason to be happy. It is also a sign of her forgiveness, giving him another chance, another fresh start, something to live for.
Read More: The Tourist: Is Burnt Ridge a Real Town in Australia?
