During this part of the play Medea shows just how clever and cunning she is by the way she exacts her revenge on Jason. She begs Jason to broker peace and to stop the exile of her sons. Jason agrees and, even though it might seem as though all is well for all the characters in the story, unbeknownst to him he carries out Medea’s plan to kill the bride and king. Using her sons as pawns, Medea manages to poison both the bride and the king; effectively killing them and fulfilling part of her plan. By the end, though she struggled with the idea, she fulfills the last part of the plan and also kills her sons—with the excuse that they would suffer a worst fate due to her own actions. Her revenge complete, she admits to Jason—who catches a glimpse of the dead children before she flies off in a winged-chariot—that she is in pain because of what she has done but that, in a sense, making him suffer was worth it.

I think this half of the story is even more interesting than the first half because we don’t just see Medea planning her revenge but also exacting it. It’s also interesting because the themes of the play, such as revenge and betrayal, are slightly more explored and we are shown how they can only lead to tragedy. For one, by the end of the story we get the sense that Medea will never be happy because she pursued revenge. She had already betrayed her family back in her homeland and now, because of her scheming and plotting, she killed the only family she had left: her children. On another note, the consequences of betrayal also affected Jason; who in the end is left with neither his children, the bride or the possibility of becoming king. In a way, Medea and Jason encompass the themes of revenge and betrayal, respectively, and they were both at fault so the fact that the story ends as it does with neither of them completely happy feels slightly justified.

However, something that really intrigued me about this part of the play was the ending—the last lines of the chorus—which seems to allude that the Gods helped make the events transpire (Medea’s revenge and escape) or maybe even approved of them. In a way, this would be really twisted and weird because, by the end of story, Medea has committed far more horrible acts than Jason. So, had the Gods sided with Medea all along? Some type of divine retribution against Jason?