This essay contains spoilers.

The 2023 Netflix limited series Who Were We Running From? follows a mother and daughter who move from hotel to hotel, living as affluent but nameless fugitives. Adapted from a novel by the Turkish writer Perihan Mağden, the series was directed by Umut Aral and Gökçen Usta and stars Melisa Sözen as the Mother and Eylül Tumbar as her daughter, Bambi. By placing two women and their traumatic experiences at the centre of the narrative, it offers a striking exploration of gender, motherhood, and authority.

Two questions organize the series: What are these women really running from, and can they ever escape it?

Nameless Women

The characters are known simply as Mother and Bambi. Their lack of conventional names is more than a stylistic choice. It allows them to operate as figures for experiences that exceed the lives of two particular people. Within patriarchal cultures, women continually find themselves fleeing expectations, judgments, and forms of control. The series turns this general condition into a literal life on the run.

The Mother grew up in a wealthy household, apparently in Antalya on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. She was rejected by her parents, confined to a room, and subjected to abuse. She became pregnant after a relationship with the chauffeur’s son and gave birth without the support of her family. At one point she considered abandoning the baby, a thought she later confesses to Bambi. After her own mother died in a car crash, relatives suspected that she had sabotaged the brakes. An inheritance appears to have made possible the nomadic life she subsequently built with her daughter, travelling through Turkey and abroad while avoiding her family and the police.

Her flight is therefore rooted in childhood trauma and parental violence. Yet the series does not present escape as a clean break. The very form of authority she resists reappears within her relationship with Bambi.

Adultism and the Reproduction of Authority

The concept of adultism describes the dominance adults exercise over children and younger people. It is related to ageism but names a more specific hierarchy: adults assume that their age automatically grants them the right to define children’s needs, restrict their choices, and shape their personalities. This authority is often expressed through apparently benevolent claims such as “we know what is best for you.”

The series can be read as a portrait of an adultist culture. The Mother was oppressed and excluded by her own parents. She does not reproduce their cruelty in the same form; instead, she transforms the affection she was denied into an extreme form of possession. She never leaves Bambi alone, refuses to tell her why they are running, and constructs an imaginary world in which their constant movement appears luxurious and carefree. As Bambi’s narration suggests, her mother takes her to beautiful hotels where they can stay for as long as they wish. The fantasy conceals the fear, violence, and lack of choice structuring the girl’s life.

The Mother’s crimes are also justified, in her own mind, as acts committed for Bambi. This logic resembles a familiar feature of adultism: parents act “for” children while disregarding what children might want for themselves. The Mother practises adult domination in a different emotional register from her parents, but she does not escape its structure. She reproduces the authority from which she is running.

Adultism in the series is not confined to the family. At a hotel in Cappadocia, another woman criticizes the Mother for failing to care properly for Bambi. The encounter recalls a common experience of parenthood: strangers feel entitled to instruct parents about whether a child is cold, dressed correctly, behaving safely, or being sufficiently supervised. Such interventions show how adult authority is socially distributed. Adults monitor not only children but also one another, enforcing accepted ideas about proper parenting and ensuring the continuity of the hierarchy.

Against the Myth of Sacred Motherhood

The series also challenges the patriarchal idealization of motherhood. Feminist scholarship has long shown how motherhood is mystified through statements such as “motherhood is sacred.” This ideal makes it difficult for women to speak about exhaustion, ambivalence, fear, vulnerability, or regret. Mothers are expected to appear naturally selfless and emotionally complete; failure to embody that ideal may be treated as a failure of womanhood itself.

The Mother exposes what might be called the darker side of motherhood, but the darkness is not simply evidence that she is a “bad mother.” She is a contradictory human being. She once considered abandoning her baby and later chose to protect her. She laughs and celebrates with her daughter, but also deceives and controls her. She is capable of intimacy and joy, yet she is prepared to kill anyone who humiliates or threatens Bambi.

What we see is not the stable image of motherhood produced by patriarchal culture but a volatile mixture of care, trauma, possessiveness, sacrifice, and violence. The series makes it impossible to reduce motherhood either to sacred devotion or to individual pathology.

The relationship’s most powerful dimension is the possibility of solidarity between the two women. Once Bambi understands that her mother has killed for her, she ceases to be only a child protected from the truth and becomes an active participant in their alliance. By the end of the series, the Mother transfers the material means of continuing the struggle to her daughter and sacrifices herself so that Bambi might survive.

Class, Respectability, and Everyday Enemies

The Mother is fleeing her father and the parental authority he represents, but her journey also brings her into conflict with a series of smaller enemies. A hotel manager bullies and insults Bambi. A condescending bank manager abuses the authority attached to his position. A wealthy hotel guest mocks the Mother for supposedly neglecting her daughter.

These characters occupy socially respectable positions and speak from above. The Mother’s violence is directed repeatedly at people who use class privilege and institutional status to humiliate her or Bambi. Her adult life therefore restages the struggle of her childhood: once again, she confronts people positioned above her within a social hierarchy.

This does not make her murders politically emancipatory or ethically defensible. It does, however, locate them within a world where domination is exercised through family wealth, professional authority, class contempt, and respectable ideas about motherhood. The series turns apparently minor encounters into reminders that patriarchal power is not concentrated in a single villain. It is reproduced across institutions and everyday interactions.

Can Escape End?

The Mother’s journey concludes when a police officer obsessed with capturing her shoots and kills her without due process. Her death opens the narrative to a critique of patriarchal state power and police violence. The authority she has fled through the family, the hotel, and the bank finally reappears in its most direct institutional form.

Death is not liberation, and an ending structured by death cannot be described as hopeful without qualification. The Mother does not escape. What she achieves is more limited: she passes the possibility of continued resistance to Bambi.

The conclusion therefore refuses closure. The act of running is not over, because the social conditions that made it necessary remain intact. Women’s flight from patriarchal authority continues across spaces and generations. Yet the series also suggests that resistance can be transmitted from mother to daughter. What Bambi inherits is not freedom itself, but the means, knowledge, and determination to keep searching for it.