Being a “simple Buffalo gal,” Simone DeWitt always aspired to make it to the top so she could lead the luxurious life she’d always dreamt of. When she met Michaela for the first time, she was awestruck by her radiant beauty, her elegance, and, more specifically, her sheer affluence. To this young girl, Michaela was a goddess reclining inside a lavish mansion. The Cliff House itself could be seen as a Greek temple, the likes of which humans used to build for their Olympian gods. And it only encouraged Simone’s desires when she heard that, just like her, even Michaela wasn’t born with a silver spoon. She had crawled her way up the hierarchy, which inspired Simone to follow in Michaela’s, or Kiki’s, footsteps and marry a rich man. Cut to the present, it was revealed that Simone, Kiki’s personal assistant, had secretly been dating Ethan Corbin, Peter’s best friend who lived next to the Kells’ mansion. All his life, Ethan had been the most eligible bachelor, but with Simone, he was finally ready to settle down. At first, Simone wanted the same, though she wasn’t sure how she would be able to break the news to her mentor, Kiki.
Kiki was quite taken aback when she found out about Ethan and Simone’s secret affair through the CCTV footage. However, she wasn’t really mad at Simone, mostly because Kiki knew Simone better than anyone else. Kiki had a pretty good idea that Simone wasn’t truly in love with Ethan, but with the life he would be able to provide her with his trust fund. And therefore, to stop Simone from making the same mistake she did with Peter, Kiki offered Simone a new job chairing her foundation in New York. You see, through this promotion, Kiki wanted Simone to become self-dependent. Have her own place and her own profession in life so she didn’t have to live at the mercy of her husband. If things hadn’t gone south, Simone might have finally been able to escape Peter’s island, which was no less than a living hell for Kiki. With a new job in hand, Simone didn’t need Ethan anymore. She had decided to deliver him the bad news, but when Ethan brought Simone’s father to the island without so much as consulting her, it gave Simone all the more reason to break up with Ethan and never see his face again.
In her childhood, Simone and Devon’s father, Bruce, became a drunk and an addict after their mother’s suicide, and neglected his duties as a father, because of which Simone ended up in a foster care, where she was sexually abused. For years Simone blamed her father for the horrors she had faced and ended up leaving the house to never come back again, but Ethan, in his enthusiasm to marry Simone and show how much he cared for her, brought all those painful memories back. So, at this point, Simone had two strong reasons to break up with Ethan, but the privileged lad wasn’t ready to let her go. All these years, it was Ethan, the eligible bachelor, who dumped the prettiest girls and later boasted about it. It literally crushed his ego to be dumped by a simple “assistant,” and therefore Ethan was willing to do everything in his power to get her back.
On that tragic night, Ethan got drunk as a lord and started calling Simone a monster for breaking his heart. In an inebriated state, he limped towards the cliff and asked Simone not to follow him. Well, to anyone sane, it pretty much looked like Ethan was going to plummet from the cliff’s edge and hurt himself, which was the reason why Simone ran towards him to stop him from falling down. When Ethan woke up in the hospital bed, with multiple broken bones, he blamed Simone for pushing him off the cliff and trying to kill him. The thing is, Simone didn’t really have any reason to kill or harm Ethan. She was going to leave him anyway, and it was Ethan whose ego was bruised, so it’s quite possible that Ethan made it all up to paint Simone as a monster for leaving him, something he had done with numerous girls in the past. I guess you can say this was the first time Ethan got a taste of his own medicine. Through this incident, the show wants to point out the fact that men always want to brand women as the real monsters in the relationship. It was the same thing Peter did with Kiki, while in reality, it was Peter who was at fault from the very beginning.
But no matter how you see the story, the last interaction between Simone and Ethan does bring forth some interesting details centered around Simone’s character. Through its various Greek mythological references, Netflix’s Sirens had been constantly trying to imply that Simone and Devon were mythical creatures known as “sirens,” who are fabled to be part woman and part bird. In the hospital, Ethan, while trying to remember the horrible incident, told Peter that Simone has wings. As per mythology, sirens were once the human handmaidens of Greek goddess Persephone, who were given wings by Persephone’s mother, Demeter, after her daughter was carried off by the king of the underworld, Hades. This suggests that Simone might actually be a siren who tried to lure rich men with her enchanting song and discarded them when she found a better prospect. But that’s just the popular belief that we have been taught about the sirens. The whole point of this show is to comment on the fact that “sirens” aren’t really the monsters here. It was not Simone who proposed to Ethan or Peter, but it was these men who wanted to take a pretty wife, clip her wings, and take them their prisoner forever, and that’s what Michaela had been trying to warn Simone of since the very beginning, but she didn’t listen to her warnings. Maybe Simone will learn this lesson the hard way once she realizes that being Mrs. Kell has robbed her of her own identity and turned her into a mere trophy wife with no voice of her own. She’ll be singing the mournful songs of the siren standing on the cliff, but unfortunately, no one will come to her rescue, as she has already pushed all her well-wishers away in her pursuit of rising up the status quo.
