The Poison Woman

The Poison Woman
The seed of the apothecary, an heir to aided ends
She loves the sound they make as they expel
A breath, the soul from their chest
She laughs a little, but never makes a sound

She swears she’s offerin’ you something savory (What lies she tells)
So take a drink, her product’s number one (Right down the hatch)
And now, it seems, a smooth intoxication, well
Just one drop is more than enough

She never dwells on penitence, advancing in a haze
A million men have reached an end
A side effect of incompetence
She laughs a little, but never smiles

She swears she’s offerin’ you something savory (What lies she tells)
So take a drink, her product’s number one (Right down the hatch)
And now, it seems, a smooth intoxication, well
Just one drop is more than enough

She has her superstitions, they’ve got their rationale on call
(They never saw it coming, they never stood a chance)
She’s got a new tradition, involving ethylene glycol
(They never saw it coming, they never stood a chance)
She has no apprehension, habit sustains her wickedness
(They never saw it coming, they never stood a chance)

With the weight of the world on her shoulders
She don’t want none of the sins
As they unfurl in her palms, in her palms
With the weight of the world on her shoulders
She don’t want none of the sins
As they unfurl in her palms, in her palms
Take this bottle, take this bottle, take this bottle…
Take this bottle, take this bottle, take this bottle…

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Having escaped the Tank, Hunter joins another group of soldiers who take respite in a roadside tavern. However, the proprietress is the Poison Woman, who laces the drinks she sells with fatal poisons. The other soldiers heedlessly drink her offerings and die, but Hunter refrains as he doesn’t trust her. When only she and him are left, she gives him a bottle of poison and Hunter continues on his way.

What’s in a name?
‘The Poison Woman’ — our second horror. She represents Death, which there’s certainly a lot of in war. She’s a much more subtle and complex figure than the Tank, certainly wicked for what she does, but almost like a beleaguered force of nature that has stopped seeing worth in her actions, yet continues anyway. There’s something extremely grim about her being the figure the soldiers come to when seeking joy or respite, as if they should know better of what they’re going to receive, yet somehow, she sneaks up on them and they still don’t.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>The seed of the apothecary, an heir to aided ends
Straight into the lyrics on this one, but let’s pause a second to talk about the music here. The vibe of the Poison Woman is not just a mysterious one — it’s a mystical one, as though she is a fortune teller or oracle (note, not an Oracle). With her knowledge of poisons and medicines, she seems to be in tune with ancient natural secrets (reinforced with these images of apothecary herbs, superstitions, traditions), which others will always find inscrutable. It’s like you’re entering this room all smoky with incense and crystals before revealing the actual setting of the bar, which still carries that seedy cabaret vibe.

Anyway, the lyrics. The Poison Woman is the daughter of an apothecary who specialised in euthanasia. She has taken her father’s teachings (we can figure she paid close attention) and applied them not to aid those wishing to die, but to murder those ignorant that they shall die. Then again, in the context of war, of all the deaths you’d possibly choose, one so pleasant and smooth you don’t even notice it is perhaps the most attractive… while also being the most cruel. You can question whether she still has some sense of her dad’s ethic in her, or if she’s just twisted after being exposed to death so young (and taught by a loved one how to properly inflict it as a positive thing — definitely some wires crossed there).

>She loves the sound they make as they expel / A breath, the soul from their chest
The poison woman’s motives are stated: she likes watching people die. We could call her a pure sadist, but she moreso seems to have a fascination with the spiritual side of death and the process of the soul dying. She likes that moment of transition when someone who was living and active becomes a corpse, and the gravity of a soul wisping into the air as everything else is still.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s still rotten and still sadistic, but given that she rewards Hunter for seeing through her, the tenor is like she’s teaching these people who don’t respect death to respect it.

>She laughs a little, but never makes a sound
Indicating several things here.

One: She’s subtle. She can’t be taken at face value, because she’s the type of person who can lie while saying nothing untrue. In this way she’s able to leave people unsuspecting of her even when she’s telegraphing what she’s about to do — not that she brags, or goes out of the way to bring great attention to it.
Two: She has fun tricking people, but is smart enough to stay quiet about it.
Three: For how she enjoys what she does, it doesn’t fulfil her. There is some element missing in the Poison Woman that she can’t seem to compensate for and leaves her empty.
Four: Hunter catches signals of her untrustworthiness that makes him doubt her off the bat. The emptiness in how she laughs while chatting with the patrons rubs him as awry.

>She swears she’s offerin’ you something savory (What lies she tells) / So take a drink, her product’s number one (Right down the hatch)
‘Something savory’ -> We can figure that what she’s offering is beer (or some other hearty alcohol) and from that, that she operates some business like a bar or tavern where alcohol is common. Hunter observes how she peddles drinks to the other soldiers, who, wheedled in by her sales pitch, don’t hesitate to drink up. Hunter, not trusting her at all, refrains, watching events as they unfold.

A note on Hunter being so wary — obviously he’s had his experience with Ms Leading to burn him a bit about trusting women (you can see in the WIMTBA music video that Hunter briefly sees the Poison Woman as Ms Terri, a font of comfort, similar to how he fell for Ms Leading, but quickly snaps out of it and shakes off her charm), but it’s moreso from his recent experiences in Cauda, WIMTBA, and the Tank. He’s coming off the tail of an encounter where he watched people throw themselves into certain death, so Hunter is finally in a position where he’s less naive than someone else. Soldiers who are still operating by their training, and are still willing to do ludicrous things like fight tanks, aren’t prescient enough to the danger they’re in every second they’re involved in this war. He is judging that the soldiers entertaining the Poison Woman are of this type, and combined with the signals he picked up from her, takes their willingness to listen to her as a warning that he probably shouldn’t.

>And now, it seems, a smooth intoxication, well / Just one drop is more than enough
‘Smooth intoxication’ -> pointing again to the presence of alcohol, but also to the manner in which people are wheedled in by the Poison Woman. She’s still a liar and a manipulator, but compared to say, TP&P, who is far more aggressive and controlling in his attitude, the Poison Woman eases you in by noting you that you wanted her drink in the first place. You come to her — not her to you. But what is she selling? Well, beer, but also death. I wouldn’t wager that these soldiers are suicidal, so much as they’re seeking comfort in the middle of war, and for those who won’t keep on their toes, death swoops upon them and obliges. The realisation that death isn’t a comfort, or that the comfort wasn’t worth it, only strikes once it’s too late. Really grim stuff.

Another thing on the TP&P comparison — TP&P keeps leverage on everyone around him to force them into serving him, while the Poison Woman just wants to see whether you’ll drink it or not. She is actually fine with people refusing her and if anything is impressed, or even a weird kind of happy, when Hunter does. He’s probably the first one to do that, too.

‘Just one drop is more than enough’ -> Self-explanatory, she’s extremely good at what she does and her poisons are so effective that one drop is enough to kill a man. The soldiers drink and get drunker, but they’re already doomed from the first mouthful. To take it as a metaphor, it’s like ‘you’re already dead the second you’ve dropped your guard to indulge’.

>She never dwells on penitence, advancing in a haze
The Poison Woman doesn’t care to think about how what she’s doing is wrong, (she rather seems reluctant to), she just keeps doing it anyway. This life of killing has become so fundamental to her that it seems she’s unable to do, or focus on anything else — as if she’s possessed, or going through the motions.

>A million men have reached an end
Showing the gravity of the Poison Woman’s warpath — also sounds like an accusation?

>A side effect of incompetence
But the Poison Woman brushes it off, dismissing those who fall for her tricks as incompetent. Though this is fundamentally her justifying her actions, it doesn’t quite sound like that, in the sense that she doesn’t see the big deal to need justifications for it in the first place. Either way, according to her, it’s her victims’ fault for being so unwary. Again, they’re not respecting how precarious their lives are.

>She laughs a little, but never smiles
Again, she enjoys her routine, but it doesn’t fulfil her. The pleasure she gets from her poisonings doesn’t last and doesn’t leave her satisfied. Outside of her act, she seems to be an extremely grim, or empty person. Which I guess, conversely, says that this little high is the only thing that gives her joy.

I would wager that she doesn’t even like her routine, honestly. She just does it because it’s what she does. Her fascination with death is still there, but surely going through the same song and dance of poisoning unsuspecting rubes gets passe after a while… and it probably sucks that you can only kill someone once, then it’s done.

>She has her superstitions, they’ve got their rationale on call
The soldiers have died by this point and Hunter is now accusing her for what she’s done. Having the opportunity to talk, she explains herself. It’s unclear what ‘superstitions’ she has exactly, whether that’s to be taken literally hearkening back to her family’s ethos (or some other significant element of death she adores), or if it’s just her appealing to vague philosophies on life and death for why her actions are permissible. She’s thought enough about these things to have the excuses on-hand to stave off this pressure, but principally she prefers not to focus on examining them.

To make a total guess though, I’d figure an easy rationalisation would be, “They’re soldiers and it’s better than getting blown up by a tank. You saw how unprepared they were, too, didn’t you?”

>She’s got a new tradition, involving ethylene glycol
Ethylene glycol is a colourless, scentless, sweet toxic chemical found in antifreeze — hard to distinguish when mixed as a poison. Her new tradition is of course that she’s taken her father’s lessons of euthanasia and turned them into murder, and has done this so consistently and for so long that she can say ‘well, it’s just my thing.’ Also notes that she’s not using herbs for this anymore so much as processed chemicals, breaking convention again. How innovative!

>She has no apprehension, habit sustains her wickedness
She does not fear being caught and does not feel any hesitation niggling at her to stop. This routine of poisoning her patrons is so ingrained in her that it’s on the same level as brushing or hair or getting dressed — she just does it because it’s what she does. She obviously doesn’t get as much joy out of it as she originally did, and by all metrics has reason to stop, but just doesn’t. She almost sounds to barely care, or to be overly confident, if she’s being so open with Hunter and admitting, ‘oh, no, the authorities aren’t a problem’.

Over these three lines, Hunter has put together his impression of her: she has excuses, but fundamentally doesn’t know why she does this.

>(They never saw it coming, they never stood a chance)
Hunter sympathises with the dead soldiers, transitioning into another accusation. However the Poison Woman justifies herself and dismisses their deaths as their own fault, she knew these people would drink.

>2:38 – 3:02 Instrumental
Unsure. Kind of a quiet moment with only the Poison Woman and Hunter present. Maybe the Poison Woman considering Hunter’s argument, and accepting it as right.

>With the weight of the world on her shoulders / She don’t want none of the sins / As they unfurl in her palms, in her palms
Innnteresting lines. Hard to read too

‘With the weight of the world on her shoulders’ -> The Poison Woman feels immense pressure.
‘She don’t want none of the sins / as they unfurl in her palms’ -> She does not want to be held accountable for wrongdoings.

There’s a really big, I mean really big, temptation to read these lines with her as a figure of death and be done with it. That kind of premise though starts making leaps, but at the same time you kinda need to make them…

I think one way to take it is: she’s incredibly talented at inflicting death. Simultaneously, from her father and perhaps other sources, she has dealt with extreme pressure or expectations to continue using this talent as her lifestyle. But, she does not like the moral ramifications of choosing who’s going to live or who dies, as if she has to justify why one life should live more than another. This is especially stressful in a warground where justifications and rationalisations are flying everywhere for why one side ought win and one side ought lose.

Rather than follow that train of thought to the conclusion of ‘I won’t kill anyone, then’, she went the other direction into ‘if we’re all equal, I’ll just kill anyone’. You transcend the whole issue of ‘well I killed him because he was hurting’ or ‘I killed him because he was an enemy’ or ‘I killed him because he wanted it’ and questioning if that’s acceptable when you go ‘listen, I’ll give anybody the cup, I just don’t force them to drink it.’ A death as the great equaliser kind of idea where she’s letting those who could die sort out the responsibility of whether they will or will not by themselves, while enjoying the trickery high alongside a mystical fetishisation of death.

If this is the vibe she’s going for though, Hunter has defeated her argument by underlining how she is deceiving people — if they knew upfront what she was offering, as Hunter was seasoned enough to know, they wouldn’t take it. She seems to break down at the correctness of this statement, or at the very least it works as impetus for her to reveal her inner thoughts to Hunter.

You can also take a more literal read of these lines: Hunter threatens the Poison Woman for her murders, and she takes the threat seriously enough to curry to him or voice repentance by surrendering her weapon (the ‘unfurling’ being the undoing of her whole scheme).

>Take this bottle, take this bottle, take this bottle…
In any case, the Poison Woman no longer wants to be responsible for the deaths she’s caused or will cause, instead passing that sin off to Hunter by giving him her bottle of poison. Now that he has it, he can decide what to do with it… and if he holds onto it, who he feels justified to kill without accountability. If a bolt of lightning could fall on one person, who do you think that should be, Hunter?

Inflection on this line is so hard to place, it’s like hopeful and desperate and crazed and dreadful at the same time. She obviously sees him as fit to be holding the bottle, though, given that he was competent enough to understand death. If he doesn’t use it, it exonerates her, if he does use it, that’s her worst critic proving himself no better than her… something like that, maybe.

In the literal reading, this is also her fobbing off her murder weapon to Hunter as a kind of peace offering for catching her.

>3:59 – 4:20 Instrumental
The Poison Woman’s motifs fade out as the squeaking from the end of the Tank appears again — Hunter has left the tavern.

>4:21 – 4:51 Instrumental
Alright what’s going on here… we have static, then bagpipes, then marching boots again, which fade out before the bagpipes end. The marching boots again suggest Hunter comes upon another group of soldiers (enemy?), but they depart before Hunter can catch up with them. The bagpipes are funeral pipes — the soldiers have gathered up bodies for later burial, which is the scene Hunter comes upon, when…

The Tank | Act III | The Thief