Tear Jerker / Anne with an E

Season 1

Episode 1 - Your Will Shall Decide Your Destiny

• Any of Anne's flashbacks to life at the orphanage, or her being beaten and used as a servant by the Hammonds.
• Anne's heartbreak after Marilla says the adoption was a mistake, as they specifically asked for a boy to help Matthew with the farm work. Anne's reaction is absolutely devastating, as her hopes are completely dashed within seconds of arriving at her new home.
  • After Anne goes to bed, she sobs into the night. Marilla can hear the sobs from downstairs as she sits by the fire.
    Anne: (sobbing) How can you call it a good night when you know this must be the worst night I ever had?
• When Marilla can't find her brooch, she threatens Anne with being returned to the orphanage if she doesn't admit to stealing it. Terrified of going back, Anne lies that she lost it, convincing Marilla to send her away. The next day, just after Anne leaves, Marilla finds the missing brooch. For the first time, the woman's stoicism truly drops and we see her thinking, "My God, What Have I Done?"
  • When Anne leaves, Matthew watches the wagon take her away. Then, at breakfast, Matthew and Marilla stare off into the distance, unable to speak. Matthew face is forlorn, and Marilla looks as if she is heavily questioning the decision.

Episode 2 - I Am No Bird and No Net Ensnares Me

• Matthew choking back tears when speaking to the ticket seller.
• Anne alone at the bow of the ship, the thoughts of Marilla's words echoing in her head as her lip quivers.
• Marilla getting restless with worry when Matthew leaves to track down Anne.

Episode 3 - But What Is So Headstrong as Youth?

• Anne getting shunned by all of her classmates save for Diana and Gilbert. Even the children's parents turn against Anne.
• Prissy dejectedly sitting at the back of the classroom thanks to the humiliating rumour Anne started.

Episode 4 - An Inward Treasure is Born

• Any scene showing Anne slipping into her fantasies to cope with her loneliness.
• Ruby crying after her house catches fire.

Episode 6 - Remorse Is the Poison of Life

• The death of Gilbert's father, John.
  • Gilbert looks absolutely devastated. Having seen how close he and his father were, and that this makes him the Sole Survivor of his now dead family, this is understandable
  • During the funeral, Matthew can sense Marilla's anguish. He reaches out to her, and they hold hands for a moment of sibling comfort. It is clear they have both been reminded of their brother's untimely passing.
  • Furthermore, it is revealed John had been courting Marilla in their youth. Despite the relationship appearing to have ended long ago, Marilla's flashback serves to show how happy the two were together, and emphasize Marilla's look of regret once she snaps out of it.
• Marilla reading letters she saved from her courtship with John. Her sobbing as she reads one makes the scene even more sad to watch.
• After Anne asks Marilla if she ever wanted to marry, Marilla admits she believed she was going to, but after the death of her and Matthew's brother Michael, she had to help her ailing mother instead.
  • This turns out to be why Marilla's and John's courtship ended. As recollected to Gilbert, John asked Marilla to join him in his travels. But then Michael died, so Marilla decided to stay and help her family.
• Gilbert revealing to Marilla how, despite the once big family he had, he is the last survivor.

Season 2

Episode 2 - Signs are Small Measurable Things, but Interpretations are Illimitable

• Cole Mackenzie is a target for bullying for being In Touch with His Feminine Side, and Mr. Phillips is as unsympathetic as he is with Anne.
• In Trinidad, Bash invites Gilbert to meet his mother and have her make them lunch, but he is caught by the plantation owner's son, and Bash's mother has to pretend her son is a beggar and shoo him away to save face.

Episode 4 - The Painful Eagerness of Unfed Hope

• Anne crying bitterly when she thinks her well-intentioned but unwanted attempt to set Matthew up with his childhood friend has angered him into not loving her anymore.
• The Barry family's descent into The Chain of Harm. Mrs. Barry feels unappreciated by her husband and takes it out on her daughters, and Diana's stress at the idea that her childhood is already over drives her to verbally abuse Minnie May for wetting the bed until the little girl is flat out sobbing.
  Minnie May: How come no one loves each other anymore?

Episode 7 - Memory Has as Many Moods as The Temper

• When Marilla becomes bedridden, she and Matthew relive how their mother mentally shut down after Michael's death. Marilla was forced to assume her maternal role and tend to her basic needs like a child while Mathew tended to the farm. While Marilla is forgiving of their mother's Sanity Slippage in the wake of Michael's death, Mathew is bitter because their mother's inability to cope with her grief meant they had to sacrifice their futures (including potential lives with a romantic partner) in order to care for her. Understandably, he's quite bitter that her unintended selfishness essentially took away their own lives and Fond Memories That Could Have Been for both of them.
  Marilla: She had lost a child!
  Matthew: She had other children!

Episode 9 - What We Have Been Makes Us What We Are

• Billy and his gang destroying Anne's clubhouse and Cole's sculptures. Not because of who they belong to, but simply because they can. The loss all but shatters Cole and leaves the girls (who grew to love the hang out) in actual tears.

Episode 10 - The Growing Good of the World

• The state Anne finds Cole in after he ran away from the schoolhouse. He's standing next to a cliff, and sounds dangerously close to suicidal.
  Cole: I don't think there's a place for me here. I don't think there's any place for me in this world.

Season 3

Episode 2 - There is Something at Work in My Soul Which I Do Not Understand

• Anne and Cole's visit to the Orphanage. Every moment of it.
  • They witness two young siblings being dropped off by their widowed father. When the matron asks the father whether to tell the little ones if he's coming back or he died, the father requests the "died" option, while his children can hear him. The boy literally hangs onto his father's leg, begging not to be left there. The father simply shakes him off and leaves without looking back at his heartbroken children.
  • The lack of records about her parents causes Anne to have a breakdown, wondering if her parents just dumped her and she imagined they died to make herself feel better.
  • Anne sees that one of her old bullies has become a maid. The girl makes rude remarks to Anne which outrages Cole, but the compassionate Anne simply says how sorry she genuinely is that she's still trapped there. As Anne and Cole leave, the girl tries to insist she isn't trapped as she's now making wages, but her escaping sobs prove otherwise. In seconds, she soon breaks down into tears to herself.
• Mary's son Elijah getting drunk and taking out his feelings of being a leftover from her old life on her and Bash. Bitterness is the only thing stopping him from joining their loving family.

Episode 3 - What Can Stop the Determined Heart

• A cut on Mary's hand has contracted sepsis, and now she is slowly dying as there's no cure for the disease.
  • Bash goes through the Five Stages of Grief over the span of the episode
  • Gilbert tries to find Elijah to bring him to his mother, but Elijah's friends mistake this for the law tracking him down and lie to Gilbert about not knowing where he is.
    • Mary died because she couldn't give up on her son. If she had listened to other's advice to just finally let Elijah go, she'd still be alive.

Episode 4 - A Hope of Meeting You in Another World

• Ka'Kwet's parents send her to a residential school thinking she will receive a good education, when in reality she is being abused and forcibly indoctrinated into European culture. The nuns running the school cut her hair, change her name to "Hannah", and forbid her from speaking her native language. When Ka'Kwet sees Anne walking past the school, she bangs on the window begging Anne to take her away, but tragically Anne doesn't see or hear her.
• Bash's grief for Mary throughout the episode. He goes to Elijah and invites him to Mary funeral, but Elijah brushes him off. Enraged by Elijah's lack of respect, Bash attacks him.
• Marilla is out of sorts for the most of the episode out of fear that if Anne finds her biological family, she'll no longer consider Marilla and Matthew family.
• Mary's funeral. Followed by a scene of Elijah on his own and broken down in tears, having finally read her letter where she tells him how much she loved him - a little too late.
  • The fact that Mary had to write that letter at all: she only resorted to it when Gilbert was unable to track down Elijah and bring him home as she wished. At least she got all she wished to say on paper, but still. She never got to know before her death that her firstborn son knew how much she loved him.

Episode 7 - A Strong Effort of the Spirit of Good

• Anne and Diana get into a serious argument, which ends with them both in floods of tears and Diana tearing off her matching friendship locket.
• Anne tries to do good things and ends up: humiliating Josie Pye, gets sacked from the paper, makes everyone in her class loathe her existence, ruins Diana and Jerry's relationship and her friendship with Diana and, due to her inability to do as she's told, will be inadvertently responsible for the burning down of the Avonlea School.
• Josie's situation. Billy has spread lies about her and slutshamed her, even though Billy was the one who forcibly touched Josie. Not only that, Josie's parents seem to be angry at her rather than Billy for the incident and her own mother even blames her for "putting herself in a situation"
• The students' reactions when they find the burned school the next day is hard to watch.

Episode 9 - A Dense and Frightful Darkness

• Ka'Kwet shouting at her brother for not speaking English and calling him stupid. Clearly, the abuse she suffered is not so easily shaken off.
• Ka'Kwet's mother's desperate plea for help getting her daughter back when thugs from the residential school steal her back.
  Oqwatnuk: (In Mi'kmaq) Please help us. My children are my whole world. My heart. You have your baby. She's safe. [clasps Anne and Marilla's hands together] Where is my child? Without her, how can I live? How can she live? Please.
  Aluk: She says-
  Marilla: I... I believe I understood.
• After spending the whole episode determined to get his daughter back, Aluk finally breaks down in tears after realizing that they're not going to be allowed to take Ka'Kwet home, and if they continue to try, the priest is going to hurt her.
• Ka'Kwet looking out the window at the bleary shape of her parents camped out, waiting for her, on the hill next to the residential school. They're so close to each other, but you know there's no chance of a reunion
  • It's also the last scene we see her in, implying that she never made it out of that school. This makes all the happy scenes with Anne and the girls going off to Queens college and Anne and Gilbert agreeing to be pen pals even more heartbreaking to watch, as Ka'Kwet will never get to experience any of that.

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